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.
It’s hard to choose “one piece” of knowledge, so I would try to persuade whoever is writing the book to include the time traveler’s cheat sheet. https://i.imgur.com/O6vSrvq.jpg
I didn’t make it, but includes a lot of information that didn’t have an intuitive path to discovery, but a lot of practical benefits for humanity. If I were to add to it I would try to include at least descriptions of a few other things:
- batteries
- engines
- simple computers (although this may be more involved than the earlier parts combined, so perhaps just simple logic gate diagrams)
- genes
- a guttenberg press
- lenscrafting
- a world map
- calculus
- special and general relativity (also complicated certainly, but could be useful later)
- and basically as many physics equations as I can think of
I would write an overview of extended mind theory, an introduction to human cumulative culture, knowledge engineering and TRIZ.
The history of human civilization is riddled with challenging problems, solving which takes more than multiple human lifespans worth of effort. Having a good learning resource about the most advanced methods and tools for navigating these problems would be a huge help, I think.
“We took all the easy to reach resources. Better get used to being primitive, suckers!”
Building basic flying machines.
Fire safety, fire prevention, fire fighting. Y’all got the rest covered already. These things were and still are learned the hard way. No reason for us to repeat the experiments with more lives.
