NYTimes | I’M
an astrobiologist — I study the essential building blocks of life, on
this planet and others. But I don’t know how to fix a dripping tap, or
what to do when the washing machine goes on the blink. I don’t know how
to bake bread, let alone grow wheat. I’m utterly useless with my hands.
My father-in-law used to joke that I had three degrees, but didn’t know
anything about anything, whereas he graduated summa cum laude from the
University of Life.
It’s
not just me. Many purchases today no longer even come with an
instruction manual. If something breaks it’s easier to chuck it and buy a
new model than to reach for the screwdriver. Over the past generation
or two we’ve gone from being producers and tinkerers to consumers. As a
result, I think we feel a sense of disconnect between our modern
existence and the underlying processes that support our lives. Who has
any real understanding of where their last meal came from or how the
objects in their pockets were dug out of the earth and transformed into
useful materials? What would we do if, in some science-fiction scenario,
a global catastrophe collapsed civilization and we were members of a
small society of survivors?
My
research has to do with what factors planets need to support life.
Recently, I’ve been wondering what factors are needed to support our
modern civilization. What key principles of science and technology would
be necessary to rebuild our world from scratch?
The
great physicist Richard Feynman once posed a similar question: “If, in
some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and
only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what
statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I
believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms —
little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each
other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being
squeezed into one another.”
That
certainly does encapsulate a huge amount of understanding, but it also
wouldn’t be particularly useful, in a practical sense. So, allowing
myself to be a little more expansive than a single sentence, I have some
suggestions for what someone scrabbling around the ruins of
civilization would need to know about basic necessities.
