We Have No Book That Captures the Basic, Most Important Realities of Our World

As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. How many of us, alone in a wilderness, could make a flint knife? Is there anyone now alive who knows even a tenth of everything there is to know in science? How many of those employed in the electricity industry could make any of its components, such as wires or switches? The important difference that separates us from the social insects is that they carry the instructions for nest building in their genes. We have no permanent ubiquitous record of our civilization from which to restore it should it fail. We would have to start again at the beginning.

Organisms that face desiccation often encapsulate their genes in spores so that the information for their renewal is carried through the drought. Could we encapsulate the essential information that is the basis of our civilization to preserve it through a dark age? My wife Sandy and I enjoy walking on Dartmoor, a mountain moorland near our home. On such a landscape it is easy to get lost when it grows dark and the mists come down. Our way to avoid this fate is to make sure that we always know where we are and how we got there. In some ways, our journey into the future is like this. We cannot see the way ahead or the pitfalls, but it would help to know our present position and how we got here, to have a record that is always kept up to date and is written in clear and simple language that any intelligent person could understand.

No such record exists. For most of us, what we know of the Earth comes from books, journal articles, and television programs that present either the single-minded view of a specialist or the persuasive arguments of a talented lobbyist. We live in adversarial, not thoughtful, times and tend to hear only the views of special-interest groups. None of them are willing to admit that they might be mistaken. They all fight for the interests of their own group while claiming to speak for humankind. This may be fine entertainment, but of what use would a book of this kind be to the survivors of a future flood or famine? When they draw it from the debris, they would want to know what went wrong and why. What help would they get from the tract of a Green Party lobbyist, the press release of a multinational power company, or the report of a governmental committee? Even science itself has to lobby for its support. Worse for our survivors, the language of contemporary science would appear to them as an incomprehensible babble. Scientific papers are so arcane that scientists can understand only those of their own specialty. I doubt if there is anyone, apart from the authors and their fellow specialists, who can understand more than a few of the papers published in specialized scientific journals.

If civilization were to collapse, we would have no book by which to rebuild our scientific knowledge and how we came to it.