Preparing for disaster

 A bunch of friends and I have been looking at the gloomiest possible future: idiots letting pandemic take down our entire civilisation. If we talk about it, then probably it won't happen, and if it does, we may be part-way ready.

This thought came from reading Walter M. Miller’s science fiction novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz when I was much younger. Miller describes a monk, in a future Dark Age, laboriously illuminating a printed circuit diagram. Over the years, that image has stayed with me and it has led me to pose the following question a number of times: now, perhaps, it is more urgent to consider it.

Suppose you realise that a new Dark Ages is about to descend, and you want to write down a small set of key scientific ideas to preserve, ready for discovery at the end of the Dark Ages, to get science going again. You can engrave 1000 words on a special sheet of indestructible material. What facts, what ideas and what principles would you place on the sheet?

Later, I posed the question like this: you wish to engrave key information on indestructible plaques, the idea being to assist later people of wit to pass through their Renaissance faster by giving them the working tools of science. You only have a thousand plaques, each good for 160 characters: what would you say are the most important ideas to pass on?

Most lay respondents answer in terms of explaining how to make steam engines or how to harness nuclear energy, both hard to do in thirty words or less. The plaques may be separated, so it would not be safe to write "to be continued" on plaque 278 and to proceed with more detail on plaque 279. The bigger issue is that any technology, if sufficiently advanced will, as Arthur C. Clarke explained to us, seem like magic. That is why I set the size limit, because it helps us to zero in on the basics, the things which are easily grasped, but hard to find unless you know where to look.

Then I asked some fellow science buffs, and their suggestions took the form of a content heading rather than actual text, things like a recipe for soap starting with how to extract tallow and make lye, the recipe for gunpowder, principles of radio, how to generate and convey electricity, how to make transformers and AC motors, basic hydrodynamics, the periodic table, how to make steel, a map of the world, the scientific method, trigonometry and a later one how to set out a house square, or a basic primer on statics and dynamics. Others included principles like Mendelian inheritance, the second law of thermodynamics, and principles like evolution, the activity series of metals and the law of superposition in sediments.

Other more satisfying replies took the form of draft texts:

To see tiny animals: carefully grind two clear glass discs into convex shape. Polish these very finely. Look through these together at various distances. Fix in tube.

To copy writing. Carve wooden blocks into letter shape. Arrange into words. Apply ink. Apply paper. Metal can be cast into letter shapes — placed on drum which rolls on paper.

This was the form that I have always preferred, because it constrains you to think each idea through, to hone it to perfection. Each time, I have concluded that I would probably start with:

Wash your hands, boil your water. Many types of illness are caused by small living things, too small to see, that get into wounds and our digestive systems.

So why do I choose microbes for my first plaque? An awareness of this idea would save a great deal of suffering, because looking back, finding out about microbes has not been easy, and knowing what to do after we did find out about microbes was just as hard, but we knew where to look.