Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Lifestyle

How to survive after the inevitable Armageddon

So the apocalypse arrived and the world as we know it has come to an end. What to do next?

Assuming you’re one of a handful of survivors, do you have what it takes to make it more than a couple of winters and maybe even sow the seeds for the rebirth of humanity? You will if you have a copy of “The Knowledge,” a handy guide to rebooting the world in the event of, say, a plague that wipes out 99.9% of humanity.

Many books from literary hotshots boast that they’re “important.” How many of them would actually be of much use amid mass destruction and the stench of masses of bloated corpses?

Author Lewis Dartnell, a 32-year-old British astrobiologist and polymath, isn’t writing with tongue in cheek. Though the book is brief and points out in a daunting introduction exactly what you’re up against — the world is so complex that no single person starting from scratch could even make a pencil, much less a motor — “The Knowledge” is an actual starter guide that proposes quick-and-dirty solutions to the most elementary issues.

It’s also a stimulating read, a grand thought experiment on re-engineering the food, housing, clothing, heat, clean water and every other building block of civilization.

In 25 breezy pages, for instance, Dartnell gives a rundown of the history of agriculture. Once all the canned food you find in abandoned supermarkets is gone, could you grow your own crops? You could if you had a few implements such as a manual hoe, plow, seed drill, scythe and thresher taken from museums.

It’s comforting to know that vast stores of millions of different seed varieties — the vegetarian Noah’s Ark — are currently being preserved in hundreds of seed banks around the world in case of apocalypse. The most durable of these is a little inaccessible, though: It’s built into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle (where the permafrost will keep the material fresh in the event that the electrical grid gets knocked out).

Lewis Dartnell is the author of “The Knowledge
How to Rebuild Our
World from Scratch” (Penguin Press).

 

Dartnell touches on the really important questions such as: Should I use my own poo for fertilizing seeds? Answer: No. Use of man-manure will lead to serious disease unless you pasteurize it first, and of course he tells how to do that.

Disinfecting water? Too easy. Find plastic bottles imprinted with the recycling symbol and the numeral 1 (other kinds of plastic will block out useful UV rays), tear off the paper labels, fill them with water and lay them out in the sun to kill bacteria. In bright sunlight, a bottle of 2 liters or less (don’t use anything larger) takes only six hours or so to disinfect.

Curing meat so it’ll stay edible sans refrigeration? Dig a fire pit, cover it with a metal lid and add a shallow trench to the side for the smoke. Above the smoke trench place a fridge with a hole cut in it and the shelves covered with meat, fish and/or cheese. Smoke for several hours.

Electricity? Building a windmill is a trifle, so Dartnell hurries on to how to turn the energy into electricity (a car alternator makes for a handy generator) and then into the question of how to store it (take the batteries out of golf carts because a car battery isn’t good for providing a sustained, steady supply of voltage).

Then again: what the hell is an alternator? What does it look like? How does it work? You have me there. My trade is “film critic,” my scheduled role in the post-apocalypse “meat source.”

There are moments in “The Knowledge” that call to mind the Monty Python sketch “How to Do It.” How to play the flute: “You blow in one end and move your fingers up and down on the outside.”

Still, when the world ends there will be plenty of time to catch up on your reading now that you don’t have any Candy Crush Saga to distract you or e-mail to get through.

At the back of the book, Dartnell provides a helpful 14-page bibliography with further guidance. So if you’re reading this off a piece of newsprint that just blew by in the ashy wind as you warm yourself by a burning tire in a tent set up under the New Jersey turnpike, good luck outsmarting any zombies that may be lurking at the public library.