There are logistical aspects to rebuilding all of civilization, of course. One person can't build a skyscraper (and why would you, since there would be no one else to live in it?) but what about something small, like a toaster?
When I got The Toaster Project in the mail, I had to chuckle a little. A toaster, to me, is one of the more useless inventions of modern society. I would never notice if they vanished and I have always regarded them as pure capitalism at work. Who toasted bread in 1700? It made no sense; you just got done baking bread and now you are going to cook it over a campfire? Why? But toasters are certainly popular, most kitchens have them, and I have long held that it's only because we had to do something with electricity. I feel the same way about an electric oven, of course, I would never own one, but ovens existed for thousands of years and a toaster is a product of the 20th century that really has no reason to exist. We basically invented some foods to utilize a thing invented to utilize electricity that was invented to propel us into the future.
When I told my wife I was reading a book on how to build a toaster, without any modern technology, she said "That sounds nice" and went back to doing something important to her. She's not dismissive of the awesome power of modern civilization, she might be slightly dismissive of yet another quirky book I want to share with her, but we're all slightly entrenched in our belief that newer is better and therefore we are smarter than ancient man.
There's certainly an argument for newer being better - in niches. Usain Bolt runs faster than anyone could one hundred years ago, for example, but he is not more fit to survive. If I remove an Aborigine from the Outback he will be driving a cab in three days and earning a living, whereas I might be dead if I went into the Outback knowing what I know.
Thomas Thwaites had the same thought about whether modern people are really smarter, though the specific toaster idea stuck with him more because of science fiction author Douglas Adams and a quote which goes, "Left to his own devices, he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it."(Mostly Harmless, 1992). I'd never seen it before, like all young men with any brains I had read the earlier Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy but after the third book I had moved on.
He read that and figured, rightly, that while not being able to build a toaster was regarded as an intellectual failing for humor purposes, building a toaster was actually likely to be quite difficult. Thwaites needed an interesting graduate project, and he saw a $6 toaster in a store, and he hit on it; he would make that $6 toaster 'from scratch'.
A $6 toaster is a miracle of capitalism, and he was sure to have known that a lot went into it. Discovering just how much science and technology that entails - in making a piece of bread brown, mind you - is his story. He discovered that the modern toaster is a miracle of capitalism because he spent $1,837.36 of his, nine months of his life and it took him 1,900 miles of travel. Obviously the toaster was for his personal use and if he wanted to bring the cost down he could have made a lot of them and sold them(1). When CD burning became available for a realistic cost a friend of mine got a 1X CD burner for $5,000 because we wanted to sell a learning tool that could teach people sign language better than a book; you typed in a sentence and the person came on and showed you the signs (it was called "VisiTalk" but we'd have to update it to work now because we used VBasic 1.0 libraries - and ten million free programs do what it did so there is no point). Now you can get a CD burner far faster for $10.
During the journey, he discovers the practical aspects of manufacturing and how newer is not always better there any more than it is with people. Like toasters being, maybe, conspiratorially invented as a way to sell electricity, trees were certainly a limiting factor to producing iron and so charcoal was replaced with coke from fossil coal. His initial attempt at making iron thus failed because he tried to use a more modern fuel and it ruined his iron in a way charcoal would not have.
You might think it's a dry topic but it's a surprisingly breezy read - I finished it in a weekend despite playing baseball with my kids, watching it on TV and having a party (Note 1 again) Saturday night. The reaction he gets from elderly miners when he tells them why he wants to explore their abandoned mines that are really just tourist attractions is about what you expect and along the way he explains practical stuff like how plastic for your toaster is made. He had to learn that stuff because modern publications don't cover it (why would they?) and he was going back to books from the 16th century to learn extractive metallurgy.
Since he needed to extract the oil for the plastic himself, his phone call to BP to try and wrangle a helicopter ride to an oil rig is pretty hilarious - yes, yes, he was going to use a helicopter, which certainly was not available a hundred years ago or on a deserted planet we might crash land on, but he is a college student in the UK, so we have to give him a break.
So you'll get a lesson in froth flotation and mining and read a pretty good story and it will get you wondering what you would create and how you would go about it if that Mayan apocalypse comes next December and you're stuck all alone. It's fun and you'll get a little smarter and maybe you'll appreciate our ancestors and their smarts a little more.
Thwaites is scheduled to be on Science 2.0 fave Ira Flatow's "Science Friday" this week so you can listen in there as well.
NOTE:
(1) We had a medieval-themed Murder Mystery Party over the weekend - where you get in costumes and invite all your friends over and then solve the whodunnit mystery when one of them 'turns up dead' - and I was balking at buying another costume for these events when she explained that, since a Renaissance Festival was the following weekend, and I could also use it there, I was basically getting the costume for the murder mystery party at half off. If, during election season, Pres. Obama is having difficulty getting people to believe the unemployment rate would be 20% if he hadn't spent a trillion bucks on a stimulus package, he should hire my wife as a consultant.
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