The title is a bit over dramatic but, per the title, if you could contribute with one piece of knowledge to a book that every single individual should learn from in order to kickstart a civilization, what would be yours?
My personal choice would be the process of soap making, from scratch.
how to make good anesthetics. the horrors of medical interventions without anesthesia blows my mind.
maybe something about dentistry too.
Resist the urge to fall in line behind a “strong man.” Once a community is beholden to an individual, it’s tainted.
I can periodically dust the book. When I’m not dusting, I can stand somewhere conspicuous, and say “This way to the book” if asked.
Can I give you holiday cover? I’d like this job, like some sort of holy librarian.
Since I mentioned it in a response to another poster:
I would include everything I know (or had access to for the sake of this scenario) about germ theory. Admittedly my own off-hand knowledge is not much, but basic hygiene and sanitation and how to avoid getting sick would save a lot of lives. What germs are, how vaccination works, etc.
But seriously - no religions allowed.
Professional scientist here. I would take a table of logarithms. In a world without computers, the logarithm table and slide rule are the essential tools of how things got built. We built the Golden Gate Bridge and put a man on the moon using nothing more than log tables.
Any one person can remember the gist of the scientific method and write it down on a page. To write down a quality logarithm table you would need 500 pages.
Basic logic gates for the most basic computational math As well as binary, octal, hexadecimal systems
I’m pretty sure you can make logic gates with water so maybe that’ll be of some use
Omg will they have redstone? :3
I can’t help but feel soap making itself wouldn’t be as much use as why/when to use it?
Mixing oil with the ashy water (which is as simple as soap’s gonna get) is reasonably easy to do and so useful that even without a civilisation people would probably be doing it either through discovery or by keeping doing it?
I think things like “how to build a wooden bridge so it will hold a laden cart and not fall down” are more likely to be lost without civilisation while still being incredibly useful (although I can’t say I’d be very good for that)
I might add a section on refrigeration methods like zeers or wind towers/yakhchāls if the civilisation would be somewhere hot and dry, otherwise maybe something on using rivers for powering looms, mills etc.
I think the instructions for how to make soap would be less important to a civilization than why to make soap. Germ theory and basic hygiene practices would save a lot of lives.
The scientific method, we’ll be able to extract most information of the world around with just that and time
What is and how to fight for Democracy.
Considering no one has truly figured out how to make a Democracy survive, I’m impressed this is your contribution. You should probably be writing books before this one, if you have answers.
