Can one person rebuild modern civilization from the ground up? This question has weirdly been on my mind lately, and I’ll attempt to answer it for myself, or at least see how far I can get.

The premise is simple. Pick your favorite apocalyptic scenario, global thermal nuclear war, alien invasion, planetary climate disasters… Whatever it is, the result is the total collapse of human civilization across the earth. Nearly everyone is dead; all man-made structures and objects have been destroyed, including all books/records; the planet itself (along with plants and non-human animals) otherwise remains the same and habitable. A small group of biodiverse people, say 1,000, is left to start over, led by you. You are the only one with the memory and knowledge of the past but only what is in your head right now¹. How well and how fast can you rebuild civilization from this point?

The Basics of Survival

I am going to assume that the survivors have the basic understanding of what we are trying to do, and have agreed to follow my leadership to work towards it. The first thing is to make sure that we can communicate effectively, so I need to teach them a common language, English in my case. I think this is doable fairly quickly, especially since in the beginning, we only need to communicate about simple, concrete things. While the language lessons are happening, we need to take care of sustenance for the group. This might be hard on day zero, when we can’t yet use any spoken language, but it’s not impossible.

Initially I think the group will have to rely on hunting and gathering (hopefully we started in a relatively forgiving region of the planet). From all the anthropology readings I’ve done, I think 1,000 people is too big to sustain as a single hunter-gatherer group. There is a minimum amount of land that is required to feed a single person, which is why hunter-gatherers formed only relatively small groups and are more sparsely distributed from each other. But here I will ignore this issue, and just say that the initial region we occupy is very rich in food.

I’ve watched enough Primitive Technology videos on YouTube to know the gist of making a fire, which will be key as we want to be eating only cooked food. Finding a reliable source of drinkable water is a must, and even though I’d like to drink only boiled water, I don’t think that it’s feasible all 1,000 people, at least in the first days. Building simple dwellings is a bit more complicated and time consuming, I’d imagine we’ll start out with just tents made from branches. But fortunately, assuming a fairly hospitable climate, even such basic accommodations should be okay to get by initially. With food hunted/gathered nearby, fires, water, and tents, we should be able to survive, even against potential nearby predators and bad weather.

Hygiene will be very important at this early stage, as we are absolutely not equipped to deal with any outbreak of diseases, and anything contagious will likely wipe us out. This is why fire and cooking is so critical from the start, as is separating bathrooms and living quarters. If anyone falls sick, I’d like to have them quarantined immediately (which, having experienced 2020, I am fairly familiar with). The prior knowledge of germ theory, even just the high level idea of it, pays off massively in this situation, as it allows us to avoid many common disastrous outcomes.

Agriculture

After stabilizing the group and getting everyone to a passable level of English, we can start to think about expanding the population - we have to rebuild civilization after all, and 1,000 people isn’t going to cut it. To do so, we probably have to get off the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and move to become an agrarian society (honestly it’s starting to feel like the start of a Civ game). This means growing crops and domesticating animals, while slowly growing the population so we don’t end up with too many mouths to feed too quickly.

No seed bank survived, not even Svalbard, so we can’t just walk in somewhere and grab the seeds we need. But if crops from pre-apocalypse farms survived, we can identify them and kick start agriculture in the new world. I will definitely struggle here, as my farming experience is nearly non-existent, but I think I should be able to roughly identify the staples like wheat and corn. I am vaguely aware that: the rough seasons of planting and harvesting; the soil needs to be turned with plows before sowing the seeds; pests and weeds will be problems to look out for; irrigation and fertilization are needed for good growth; soil needs to be rested every few years for sustainable farming. Of course, I don’t know any of the details nor have I ever done the actual work, but with the limited high level knowledge I do have, I think we can probably figure things out over time, through trial and error.

Domesticating animals feels a bit easier, though I have no idea if my sense is accurate. We will likely run into previously domesticated animals, which can just be captured and raised. Things like chicken coops, sheep/pig pens all seem fairly straightforward to construct. Oxen and horses will greatly improve our agricultural productivity, and they should be relatively simple to support provided there is enough grazing land nearby. The logistics around breeding are unfamiliar to me, but I think it involves castrating the males except for a select few used specifically for breeding. Things definitely won’t go smoothly in the beginning, but we’ll learn as we go.

(If I had played some Farming Simulator, I think I’d feel a lot more confident at this stage of development. Some basic knowledge of meteorology would also help immensely here, like knowing how to read cloud patterns to predict rainfall.)

Having some specialized equipment will greatly improve the efficiency of farming. I, like most people, know the basics of many agricultural implements, by which I mean I’ve seen some of them. Shovels, rakes, pitchforks, plows, scythes, and mills (including wind mills) all seem relatively simple to understand. More advanced machineries like combine harvesters are of course much more complex, but at this point in our civilization rebuild, we don’t need to compete with industrialized farming in the 2020s. We’ll have to start with stone and bone-based tools, since we lack the ability to work with metals at this point. But all things considered, I feel pretty confident that we can get these basic farming tools made to boost our output.

General STEM Acceleration

By now, we’ve managed to survive the early days, can communicate adequately with one another, have some crops planted, maybe even a few animals around, and haven’t all died from dysentery. I think it’s finally time to begin some more advanced civilization developments, namely STEM progression. This is probably the area of the greatest acceleration that the information in my brain can provide, as even a typical high school curriculum contains millennia’s worth of humanity’s distilled knowledge.

Concepts in basic logic, arithmetic, geometry, and algebra do not have to be rediscovered, as I can simply teach everyone. The biggest timesavers are probably the direct usage of modern mathematical notations and some common theorems (such as the Pythagorean theorem and the quadratic formula). Arithmetic and simple geometry are probably the most useful practically, so I will prioritize them. After all, farming requires a good amount of counting and computation about area. Many other fields of mathematics, such as calculus and probability theory, can be saved for later as we won’t be able to make use of them now anyway. I’d imagine that even though I only have cursory knowledge in most of these areas, I should still be able to provide very significant speedups to their development.

Very fortunately, our reboot of humanity doesn’t have to go through the Dark Ages. I will simply “Enlighten” everyone on the wonders of rationality and the scientific method. It will lacking in rigor, as I have not extensively read Popper nor formally studied the philosophy of science, but I think I know enough of the basics to set us on a good path. We’ll also be able to take shortcuts with many common scientific knowledge, such as heliocentrism and the periodic nature of elements, though most will not be very useful until we’ve progressed further as a civilization.

Physical engineering is a bit of a mixed bag. Some things are extremely basic and tremendously useful: the wheel, pulleys, levers, and gears. Others, particularly in material engineering, can be much more difficult to develop at an accelerated pace. We need to progress past the literal stone age, but vague high level knowledge about metals does not really help much with practical metallurgy. Sure, I know somewhat about the basics of casting and forging, but I have no clue how to extract metal from ores, or even how to recognize ores in the wild. I am aware of how to make charcoal (from this popular Primitive Technology video), which should be just enough to begin some basic iron working. I suppose we’ll just throw some ore-looking rocks onto a charcoal fire and see what happens. If this isn’t too far from how things could actually work, we should soon have some sweet metal tools.

Biology & Medicine

I had left these out in the previous section on STEM, because I think they are important enough to be called out separately. To be honest, I think the most likely way that our little tribe can be wiped out will be medically related. My knowledge of biology is much more limited compared to the physical sciences, and my medical knowledge is even worse. First aid and trauma surgery are probably the most useful skills to have, followed by midwifery (once we start growing the population). Antibiotics will go a long way to help us survive, but sadly all I know is that penicillin was originally discovered in some mold.

Germ theory is the MVP here. Even without the detailed explanations, just knowing that diseases aren’t caused by miasma will likely save us from many deaths. In fact, this is probably the most useful type of thing I can contribute in the domains of biology and medicine, avoiding the debunked theories which definitely don’t work. Bloodletting and trepanation come to mind, but I’m sure there are more crazy practices that I’m not aware of, but will know to steer clear from nonetheless.

Culture & History Restoration

Unfortunately most of this is going to be difficult if not downright impossible.

Almost all languages in the world will be lost, apart from the ones I know. Even English, the language I know best, will be incomplete, since I am far from being a walking dictionary. We will have to invent new words for vocabulary that I lack. Most of the cultures and norms of the previous world will be gone as well. The ones that I am aware of won’t be very relevant either, for our much smaller society. We likely need a unique set of values, since rebuilding a civilization from 1,000 people is a rather special situation.

As all religious texts from the pre-apocalypse world would have been destroyed, no religion would have survived either. Of course, I have some knowledge of the major religions, but that is hardly enough to “reboot” any of them in an appreciable form. History would remain as a hollow skeleton of its former self, with only information on the major time periods persisting. Because of my own educational background, we would have a biased, Euro-centric chronology, with a much stronger emphasis on 20th century history. Important lessons can still be learned, at least I hope.

Literature and art will not fair much better, and will be mostly be lost. “Classy woman in dress sitting in a chair” is not in any shape or form a substitute for the Mona Lisa. I can retell the stories from famous works of literature and film, but their impact will be severely discounted, not to mention inevitably altered. With my music training, I will be able to preserve some important knowledge here, such as the modern staff notation, as well as the basic theories of chords and harmony. But most actual works of music will be lost.

The difficulty in the restoration of art is in large part due to my personal background and interests, which skew away from the fine arts. But that’s not all. I think that in some sense, cultural, historic, and artistic information is just inherently more difficult to compress than STEM knowledge. For a mathematical theorem or a scientific result, even though the process - the derivation, the experimental procedures - represents a significant portion of the value we gain, so does the conclusion at the end. But this seems not to be the case for much of the humanities. The formula for the area of a circle is extremely useful in and of itself, but for literature and art, the journey and the historic context around the works constitute the bulk of the value.

Road To A Computer

This entire stream of thought around rebuilding civilization actually began in my head as another hypothetical question: can I build a computer from scratch, with only knowledge in my head currently? So can our group of human survivors do it? I think the answer is a weak “maybe”, even with a very low bar for what a “computer” is.

Through the accelerated progress in the STEM fields from my prior knowledge, we have been able to develop some crude metallurgy. A bit more refinement here over time should see us able to produce iron and copper, which can conceivably be made into thin wires. I know the basics of electromagnetic induction, and that when a coil of conductor moves through a changing magnetic field, electricity is produced. Producing the magnetic fields will be tricky, as they require permanent magnets. There are naturally ferromagnetic rocks in the world, and even though their field is weak, we should still be able to use them. With the combination of wires, magnetic minerals, and my knowledge of gears, we can probably create a crude (but usable) hand crank generator.

Having electricity is an important first step. Next we will need to create a device that can be used to form logic gates. The simplest such device would be the diode, and though far from being efficient, we can make the basic gates out of only diodes. From there we can create a simple electronic adder, which for this discussion I’ll consider to be a computer. So can we make a diode? I am not very confident.

Transistors are probably too difficult for us to create. Besides producing high-purity silicon (which I at least know how to do theoretically), making the dopant needed to create semiconductors requires chemical engineering knowledge that is way beyond me. Then what about vacuum tubes? They require, well, literally tubes of vacuum made from glass. Glass in theory should be straightforward to make, as all you need is sand. The problem is that sand has a higher melting point than iron which (I think) is beyond what charcoal or even coal can reach. Even if we somehow managed to make glass tubes, we still have to fill them with anodes and cathodes, and seal them with a vacuum inside², none of which I know exactly how to do. We can probably figure out how to do this through trial and error, especially when I know the high level working principles of vacuum tubes. But since I can’t formulate a clear path to it, and making a computer really hinges on creating diodes, I cannot say for sure that we can do it.

Coordination & Governance

Back to the bigger picture. Even though the initial size of 1,000 people is already above Dunbar’s number (i.e. the maximum number of people one can maintain stable social relationships with, which is estimated to be around 150), it is still somewhat manageable for me as a single leader. But as our group becomes larger, coordination will get more and more difficult, eventually requiring delegation. Fortunately we do have some time to get things into place, since the additional people will start out as newborns and thus not needing much social relationship management.

Interpersonal conflicts are inevitable, so we’ll need some form of a dispute resolution system, a proto-court so to speak. In the beginning I can act as the Supreme Justice, but later I’ll need to appoint more justices to take on the workload. Common law is probably my preferred framework to use here, since we won’t have a set of comprehensive laws written out, and perceived fairness in the rulings is a lot more important in the short term.

As our population expands, we will definitely have to divide into sub-groups, each with some degree of autonomy (and reducing my direct involvement). I will have to pick out and train some in the initial group to become leaders of the sub-groups. Perhaps we can divide people into groups by function, so we can get some specialization going. There can be a group that does all the farming, and another all the dwelling construction/maintenance. These sub-groups will eventually have to split again as they become too big to manage, and the need for some global governance structure will become more pronounced. I think we can start with a council of all the top-level group leaders, and see where things go from there. There is a non-trivial chance that we’ll collapse into conflict due to poor governance, but in the earlier days when we are all still struggling to survive, it’s probably unlikely.

Final Thoughts

Surely there are plenty of problems that I have failed to consider here, the “unknown unknowns”. I also hand-waved away things with “we should be able to figure it out”, many of which are probably much more difficult than I can imagine. Overall the chance of a successful civilization reboot for the band of humans under my leadership is slim.

Going through this mental exercise has also made me appreciate just how much about our modern society that I know nothing about. I knew this before of course, at the intellectual level, but never really had a visceral sense of it until I actively put thought into trying to rebuild civilization. Many things that I use and rely on every day might as well have been conjured up by magic, and I don’t just mean obviously complex things like computer chips. I don’t really know how to make clothes for example, if all you gave me is some cotton plants in the field or sheep. Even though I know how knitting and weaving work, I’m still missing a large portion of the total knowledge required to make clothes from scratch.