“Baba yetu, yetu uliye
Mbinguni yetu, yetu, amina
Baba yetu, yetu, uliye
Jina lako litukuzwe”
This book is fun as hell, but also incredibly eerie: You are a time traveler stuck in the past, and you must try to survive and rebuild all of Civilization. That’s the conceit and it’s a good one- the basis of a really enjoyable Ask Reddit thread. It gave Ryan North the chance to learn more than he needs to know about obscure technological feats and it gives us the chance to learn about humanity’s technological development over time up until a little bit after the Second Industrial Revolution.
The problem? In a book full of footnotes and callouts, there are two callouts that North returns to again and again and again: this invention was discovered by accident, and to truly perfect it you need to enlist hundreds or thousands of people to do it.
The first problem is not unheard of to anybody who reads a lot of technological history: humans spent hundreds of years bumbling around with technology. Thine Chinese had gunpowder, the printing press, and strong bureaucracies centuries before the Europeans knew the world wasn’t flat (I’m joking but also...). Technologies for math, language, and measurement- which don’t require any major supplemental technologies other than “Time to sit down and think hard” took millenniums of building up on each other.
We stand on the shoulders of giants, but the giants the giants stand are so shrouded in rainy mist and opaque fog that we forget that a thousand generations live inside us now.*
A bigger problem arises for the stranded time traveler that will almost certainly doom them to subsistence: there are not enough people. Every time North describes the essence and functioning of a new technology, he notes, “You should probably have somebody doing this full time.” He even brings up early on that you need a caloric surplus in order to allow people to specialize, but I think this hides the point: alone, you will die.
If you’re blessed to live in a modern capitalistic country, everything around you was mostly made by the complex machinations of the incentives of millions of people. And I don’t mean, “a few thousand people sitting in board rooms designing things”, I mean a few dozen millions of people at minimum.
The conceit of a time traveler building a civilization is an exploration of minimum autarky. What is the minimum number of people you need to produce the maximum number of things [you need to live an ok life]?
The answer is startling high. Put a human being back before the birth of other humans, and you will have an experience very much like in The Martian: that human will die long before he would in an otherwise human-populated world. Alone, we are all Mark Watney: barely enlightened apes who die on Earth just a little bit slower than we might die on Mars.
But together? The smallest most industrially advanced country is probably South Korea, and it has about 50 million people. I feel reasonable saying, “If everybody stopped trading with South Korea, they would be able to maintain an industrial civilization with computers, food, and energy” (but they would be significantly poorer). But that is 50 million people. 50 million.
We know for a fact that isolated countries- North Korea (25MM), Iran (70MM), Cuba (11MM)- do not do well. These countries in general have the things you would expect for economic strength- resources, large land areas, etc- but they lack a connection to the broader human noosphere and economy that each and every one of us in developed countries plug into thoughtlessly everyday.
The lessons of “How to Invent Everything” is you fucking don’t. You are a single cell playing a part in a vast temporal, spatial eusocial organism. Every part of your mind has been impacted by the discoveries and profound, accidental realizations of barely literate chimps. Every day you rely on not just your family, not just your community, but on an entire planet of those same barely literate chimps.
How do you invent everything? With other people.
Other people:
“The people are the heroes now
Behemoth pulls the peasant’s plow
When we look up, the fields are white
The fields are white!
With harvest in the morning light
And mountain ranges one by one
Rise red beneath the harvest moon”
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