VIDEO: Can We Avoid Collapse?

This video is a good summary of Joseph Tainter's work on civilizational collapse, which I've mentioned or discussed many times, as well as Tainter's thoughts on how civilizations have avoided collapse. In the latter regard, the video examines the case of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire which not only carried on after the collapse of the Western half of the Empire, but actually thrived a number of centuries. The video attributes this to the Byzantine Empire actually rolling back the build up of complexity. I would add that it is this--the rolling back of complexity in the form of massive cuts to the size of government and the amount of government regulation--that Trump has promised and which the bureaucratic state opposes. The other way to avoid collapse mentioned in the video is a massive influx of "energy" that can support the existing complexity, such as happened after the discovery of the New World or came with the industrial revolution.

 VIDEO: "Is Collapse Inevitable?"
Dig. (11 min.)

E-Book Resources: Rebuilding Civilization

So when I discussed some of the more general sources of info and put together my E-Book Resource page, I generally listed some major repositories with the warning that you would need to explore those repositories to find the books and information that might interest you. But I thought I would periodically post more specific links to a collection, library, or specific titles that would be of interest to the prepper/survivalist.

    Having grown up during the Cold War with constant reminders of the potential for a nuclear war in which thousands of warheads would be detonated across the world, reading post-apocalypse fiction, playing post-apocalypse RPGs, and getting acquainted with some of the early survivalist books such as Bruce D. Clayton's classic Life After Doomsday (PDF), I've given some thought to what it would take to rebuild civilization. No matter the disaster, there should be plenty of items to scavenge. The main issue is having the requisite knowledge base. This is where books--and not just any books, but the right books--make a difference.

    Of course, if you wanted or needed to rebuild a technological civilization, you might want a road-map of the steps needed to do so (as well as what steps can be skipped). Lewis Dartnell did just this in his book The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World From Scratch,  which I was able to find as a download at PDF Drive in PDF, EPUB, and Mobi formats.

    If you've ever read Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, a post-apocalypse novel of a survival after a comet strikes the Earth, one of the books mentioned in the novel as important to rebuilding civilization was The Way Things Work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Knowledge (Volume 1) (Volume 2). Although dated now, it would still be invaluable.

    A similar resource, but more recent (2007) is the Encyclopedia Of Science & Technology published by McGraw-Hill. It comes in 19 volumes, all of which you can download from the Internet Archive here.

    There is also the set How Products Are Made: An Illustrated Guide To Product Manufacturing (Volume 1) (Volume 2) (Volume 3) (Volume 4) (Volume 5) (Volume 6) (Volume 7). 

Disclaimer: I'm not the author of any of the documents or things linked above and cannot vouch for their accuracy or completeness--use them at your own risk. I am not responsible for the posting or offering of any of the documents or things in the collections and/or libraries and have no control over whether they are posted or taken down.