11–20 of 250 posts
I bought The Knowledge several years ago. It's a fantastic book, with just the right amount of detail. One thing I particularly liked was the focus on how to get certain materials in a likely post-apocolyptic world - for example, instead of just telling you how to mine iron, the book explains that there is likely cast iron all over the place in things like cookware and even if it's heavily rusted, it can be cleaned a…
I bought The Knowledge several years ago. It's a fantastic book, with just the right amount of detail. One thing I particularly liked was the focus on how to get certain materials in a likely post-apocolyptic world - for example, instead of just telling you how to mine iron, the book explains that there is likely cast iron all over the place in things like cookware and even if it's heavily rusted, it can be cleaned a…
We probably can't "do the same again", so much of the Industrial Revolution (from my reading at least) was started with the huge amounts of wood, then easily accessible coal, then "spending" coal to get access to deeper coal.
If you started from scratch, there isn't really any easily accessible coal left.
I've read his book The Knowledge years ago and it was an eye-opener. I wasn't aware how complex our agricultural and technical societies are and how much they depend on shipping and crude oil. Without oil and shipping, no chemical industry, and without chemical industry no advanced technology and no mass food production. People in supply chain management know that too well but I was simply not aware of how fragile ou…
You can straight up synthesize an oil analog from biological sources, and even if you couldn't the oil necessary for non-energy purposes is far far less than that used just to burn.
Solar is what is going to replace fossil fuels mostly, it's already cheaper than coal.
Like it or not, most of the motivation for change will be economic. With the price of energy in the current times of war and inflation, solar is looking quite good.
Industrial chemistry always has alternatives. Ammonia based fertilizers can always be produced with air and water instead of air and natural gas, it's just somewhat more expensive.
i think things like this should be part of the curriculum
I'm always impressed by 80k hours to surface answers to the most existential problems! They had another good one about spinning up the global food supply post-apocalypse. Dartnell seems to be thinking longer term than immediate (first 2 weeks). Are there any guides for the first two weeks? I wonder if the US military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) guides are the most comprehensive resources? While int…
Eh, preppers overdo it because it's fun for some people. I have a case of water bottles in the trunk of my car, a bit of camping gear in the closet, and enough dry pantry goods on hand to last a good long while. None of this is to "prepare" for anything besides the water in case of some incident that strands me in my car. Not that much special is required to survive for a couple of weeks. Maybe if you want to practic…
An emergency action guide of some sort...
I'm always impressed by 80k hours to surface answers to the most existential problems! They had another good one about spinning up the global food supply post-apocalypse. Dartnell seems to be thinking longer term than immediate (first 2 weeks). Are there any guides for the first two weeks? I wonder if the US military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) guides are the most comprehensive resources? While int…
a) Lots of books have covered this already (SAS Survival Handbook, etc)
b) the first 2 weeks is going to be largely luck whether you survive or not, so he's going to jump ahead to cover the lucky ones
It's not all about gadgets and electricity.
I bought The Knowledge several years ago. It's a fantastic book, with just the right amount of detail. One thing I particularly liked was the focus on how to get certain materials in a likely post-apocolyptic world - for example, instead of just telling you how to mine iron, the book explains that there is likely cast iron all over the place in things like cookware and even if it's heavily rusted, it can be cleaned a…
"The author purports to provide a blueprint to restoring a technological economy after a TEOTWAWKI event, but some his listed sources are from the realm of science fiction. Not an encouraging start.
He goes on to pretend that he knows more than he actually does. It's as if he skimmed a few sources but only superficially understood them. How else can he suggest that a collapsed society go direct to building blast furnaces, ignoring the bloomery method of reducing iron ore that provided mankind with workable metal for two millennia as a cottage industry? Then he goes on to suggest that we build Bessemer converters to decarbonize the pig iron. Does he not know that the Bessemer converter is all but obsolete? Did he miss the chapter about the (chemically) basic refining furnace, which is a lot easier to build?
He quotes a lot of interesting chemistry, then throws up a real laugher when he gets the simple and universally known formula for black powder exactly backwards!
While the book skims quite a potpourri of technologies we use today, he omits almost entirely the tools needed to implement them. Knowing how an electrical generator or motor is assembled is all well and good, but where will the impoverished builder get copper wire? Or the special steel sheet necessary for laminating magnet cores? Or the tooling for punching out the laminations?
He never even began to address the fundamentals of machine tools, on which about 99% of our modern technology rests, and without which you cannot build even an 18th century economy. .
As a high school science project, this would rate a solid C for effort, and something less for the end result."
I bought The Knowledge several years ago. It's a fantastic book, with just the right amount of detail. One thing I particularly liked was the focus on how to get certain materials in a likely post-apocolyptic world - for example, instead of just telling you how to mine iron, the book explains that there is likely cast iron all over the place in things like cookware and even if it's heavily rusted, it can be cleaned a…
The book has scathing reviews on Goodreads.
I'm always impressed by 80k hours to surface answers to the most existential problems! They had another good one about spinning up the global food supply post-apocalypse. Dartnell seems to be thinking longer term than immediate (first 2 weeks). Are there any guides for the first two weeks? I wonder if the US military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) guides are the most comprehensive resources? While int…
E.g. Living through the first winter will require a huge effort in stockpiling, which gets better the second year. Scavenging for the first 5 years turns to agriculture and animal husbandry and smelting.