The Frontier

Lewis Dartnell uses The Knowledge to ask how survivors could rebuild technology and society after a catastrophe. He argues that curiosity and the desire for comfort would drive people to recreate tools that reduce labor and secure food, warmth, and shelter.

Dartnell says survivors should leave cities for rural areas with soil, fresh water, and nearby woodland; cities depend on utilities and would become dangerous. He compares a good starting point to ancient Mesopotamian settlements beside rivers and fertile land.

Dartnell calculated that an average supermarket could feed one person for 55 years, or 63 years including canned pet food. That preserved food would give survivors time to learn farming before they had to produce their own supplies.

Dartnell uses a community of roughly 10,000 survivors as a workable starting point: too few people might lack the skills to rebuild beyond subsistence living. He expects violence during lawlessness, followed by cooperation and the return of authority and social order.

Engineers, medical workers, carpenters, and metalworkers would help keep machinery and infrastructure running while communities relearn production. Dartnell argues that modern specialization makes society efficient but brittle; after the Black Death, everyday practical skills helped communities recover.

Dartnell proposes preserving practical manuals, tools, and an interactive AI knowledge base, with information delivered as communities are ready to use it. He says technical knowledge can be restored faster than political systems, education, or shared moral norms.

Dartnell would preserve a precise screw thread because it lets a lathe reproduce the parts needed to build more machine tools. He draws on Dave Gingery’s instructions for making workshop machinery from basic materials, with one accurate thread enabling a chain of replication.

Dartnell calls money a useful way to compare labor and goods without repeated bargaining, especially as trade grows beyond a small community. He argues that incentives help drive invention, while noting that he has not deeply studied whether communism is inherently unstable.

Dartnell built a wood gasifier that burns gases released as wood turns to charcoal, and says the process can power cars and machinery. He cites more than a million gasifier-powered vehicles in Europe during World War II, when oil supplies were disrupted.

Dartnell says glass enables scientific instruments because it is strong, chemically stable, and transparent. He made glass from sand, soda ash, and lime, and notes that Romans observed magnification through glass but did not develop lenses into microscopes or telescopes.

Dartnell argues that soap and microscopes could accelerate public health after a collapse: soap can be made from animal fat and soda ash, and handwashing limits disease transmission. He also describes Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin as an example of serendipity shaping scientific progress.

Dartnell reproduced early photography and printing to show how knowledge can be recorded and copied from scratch. A slow-reacting silver process required about a 15-second exposure, while his printing project used homemade paper, ink, and a press to reproduce instructions.

Dartnell built a solar-powered Kindle containing 10,000 books, including The Knowledge, as a compact archive for a power-grid failure. He says survivors could use the device’s instructions to build a printing press and restore paper libraries if the electronics eventually failed.

Dartnell studies whether Mars once supported microbial life and how humans could build a self-sustaining settlement there. He points to underground ice, local materials for water and building, and cyanobacteria as possible ways to improve Martian soil for crops and useful compounds.

Dartnell says Mars lacks Earth’s protective atmosphere and magnetic field, so habitats may need roughly 1 to 2 metres of Martian soil overhead to shield occupants from cosmic radiation. He describes terraforming proposals involving polar carbon dioxide ice, but says building a breathable atmosphere would take centuries.

Dartnell says cyanobacteria produced oxygen through photosynthesis, transforming Earth’s atmosphere and leaving iron deposits that later supported human technology. He distinguishes the broad conditions that may support microbial life from the more Earth-like conditions likely needed for complex, technological life; his next book, Ingenious, explores clever solutions to problems.