How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

by Ryan North

CIVILIZATION PRO TIP: Language is the technology from which all others spread, and you’ve already got it for free.

CIVILIZATION PRO TIP: Babies begin to focus on the noises used in language around them after about six months of age, so if you’re inventing a language from scratch, you’ll likely have more success incorporating whatever sounds the baby is already hearing from its parents.

Technology First invented When we could’ve invented it Years spent not having this technology when we easily could have This same time period, now expressed as how many colossal 500-year Roman Empires could’ve both risen and fallen in the huge expanse of time humanity spent sitting around not inventing this technology Spoken language 50,000 BCE 200,000 BCE 150,000 years 300 Written language 3200 BCE 200,000 BCE 196,800 years 393 Non-sucky numbers 650 CE 200,000 BCE 200,650 years 401 The scientific method 1637 CE 200,000 BCE 201,637 years 403 Calorie surplus 10,500 BCE 200,000 BCE 189,500 years 379 Table 1: A table any human should be embarrassed to even be in the same room with.

Universal property Description of this property Example phrases using this property A grim vision into a dystopian world where this property does not exist Pronouns exist in all natural languages. Pronouns are words that let us refer to something without repeating the name of that thing. I rented the FC3000™ time machine. It is as reliable as it is well designed, and I am happy to recommend it to everyone without reservation. I rented the FC3000™ time machine. The FC3000™ time machine is as reliable as the FC3000™ time machine is well designed, and I am happy to recommend the FC3000™ time machine to everyone without reservation. No “thbbbth” sounds. Spoken languages are built from the noises our bodies can make, but no natural language uses the “blow a raspberry” tongue-out-of-the-mouth thbbbth sound. To be, or not to be: that is the question. To thbbbth, or not to thbbbth: that is the questhbbbbbbbttbbbbth. If the language has a word for “feet,” it also has a word for “hands,” and if it has a word for “toes,” it also has a word for “fingers.” Hands are generally more useful to most humans than feet, so if we’ve reached a point where we’re naming body parts and gotten around to naming our feet, we’ve definitely already named our hands too. I have ten toes and ten fingers. Yes, Chad, I know technically I only have eight fingers. Chad, yes, I know thumbs aren’t fingers. Everyone knows, I was just . . . Chad. Chad. Chad, listen to me. See, Chad, this is why we don’t hang out ...

Hindu/Arabic numerals: these are the numbers you’re familiar with: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. You can make up different shapes to represent these numbers if you want; they’re completely arbitrary. Also, as it is now you and not the Hindu and Arabic cultures that are inventing these numerals, you can call them “[Your Name Here] numerals.” In a positional value system: this is where a number’s value is communicated by the position of each digit in the number. For example, 4,023 means “4 thousands, no hundreds, 2 tens, and 3 ones.” This probably sounds pretty familiar, and that’s because positional numbers are the ones you’ve known since you were a kid! Everyone uses them because they rule, and are an extremely efficient and flexible way to represent numbers.* Based on the number 10: our positional system is based on 10, which means each digit in a number is 10 times different than the one beside it. When you move from left to right, each column is 10 times smaller, and when you move from right to left, each column is 10 times bigger. Here’s 4,023 again: 1000s (i.e., 100 × 10) 100s (i.e., 10 × 10) 10s (i.e., 1 × 10) 1s 4 0 2 3 Table 3: There are 4,023 good reasons to study this chart. No, we’re kidding, there aren’t that many. But you will probably still want to briefly glance at it so you can know what a number is.

In fact, science is merely: provisional, contingent, and our best effort so far.

Extremely Garbage Features of Farming: When wild food is abundant, farming is way more work than hunting and gathering. What farming offers, though, is the promise of a more reliable food source and, through domestication, more convenient food sources too. Farming also requires technologies for food storage, because its whole point is to produce more food than you can eat at once. This again is more work, but thanks to Section 10.2.4: Preserved Foods, you at least have the advantage of knowing exactly what to do. Farming creates the first income inequality, because not everyone can be farmers or share equally in the land required for it. Farmers have the most food and (initially) the most to trade, and everyone who doesn’t want to become a skeleton needs to continue eating food. You have just created rich and poor people, or at the very least the potential for them. Farming requires infrastructure (fences, etc.), which means you are no longer mobile. Your civilization has just become a giant and stationary target. While this text does not include explicit instructions for weaponry, we’re certain that, should the need arise, you can probably adapt several of the technologies included here to that purpose. Animals carry diseases and can transmit them to humans. Worse, some of our deadliest diseases don’t bother animals at all. Over 60 percent of all human diseases originate from close contact with animals, including such all-time champion diseases as anthrax, Ebola, plague, ...

CIVILIZATION PRO TIP: There are downsides to building the foundations of modern science and measurement around the mass of an old hunk of metal in a jar in France.

power of selective breeding alone:10 Fruit or vegetable First domesticated Modern variety you used to enjoy like it wasn’t even a big deal Incredibly disappointing ancient ancestor Corn 7000 BCE 190mm long peels easily sweet and juicy 800 soft kernels 19mm (10 times smaller, 1,000 times less volume) peels by being smashed into pieces tastes like a dry, raw potato 5–10 very hard kernels Peach 5500 BCE 100mm long 9:1 flesh-to-stone ratio soft and edible skin sweet and juicy 25mm long (4 times smaller, 64 times less volume) 3:2 flesh-to-stone ratio waxy skin tastes earthy, sour, and slightly salty Watermelon 3000 BCE 500mm long available in seedless varieties easily opened, you can just punch your way in almost fat- and starch-free delicious taste, sweet smell 5mm long (100 times smaller, almost 1,000,000 times less volume) 18 bitter, nutty seeds requires hammer or smashing to open high in starches and fats bitter taste, unpleasant smell Table 7: Food used to suck. And these were all bred before we knew

three-field crop rotation. It works like this: Field 1 Field 2 Field 3 Year 1 Lie fallow, animals poop here. FALL: plant wheat and rye (human food). SPRING: plant oats and barley (animal food), plus legumes. Year 2 SPRING: plant oats and barley (animal food), plus legumes. Lie fallow, animals poop here. FALL: plant wheat and rye (human food). Year 3 FALL: plant wheat and rye (human food). SPRING: plant oats and barley (animal food), plus legumes. Lie fallow, animals poop here. Table 9: The three-field crop-rotation system. Now you’re planting twice a year and working twice as hard! What a world!

The answer lies in the legumes you were planting. Legumes are dry fruit contained within a shell or pod, and they include plants like chickpeas, regular peas, soybeans, regular beans, alfalfa, clover, lentils, and peanuts.

legumes are one of the few plants that can host certain bacteria (called “rhizobia,” though of course you can call them whatever you want) in their roots, and these bacteria do something extremely valuable, something that no plant on Earth can do on its own. They add nitrogen back into soil.

The legumes—or rather, the bacteria that infect them—are the glue that holds this whole “three-field crop rotation” thing together.

Field 1 Field 2 Field 3 Field 4 Year 1 Wheat Turnips Barley Clover Year 2 Turnips Barley Clover Wheat Year 3 Barley Clover Wheat Turnips Year 4 Clover Wheat Turnips Barley Table 10: Finally, a way to farm that doesn’t require anyone to take any time off ever. Progress!

Great news: you can eat anything once!

780,000 BCE: figs, olives, and pears are being eaten. This predates even the evolution of anatomically modern humans. 40,000 BCE: dates, legumes, and barley are being enjoyed. 30,000 BCE: apples, oranges, and wild berries are being consumed. 10,500 BCE: farming is invented, and selective breeding of plants and animals.

CIVILIZATION PRO TIP: Even the plants in Australia want to kill you.

Sidebar: The Universal Edibility Test Test each part of a potential food separately (seeds, stem, leaves, buds, fruit, etc.), and in the same state you intend to eat it in (raw or cooked). Cooked is always safer. Don’t eat for eight hours before each test, and remember that testing just a single part of a single potential food will take the better part of an entire day. To save yourself from wasting time eating poisons, remember that bright colors are usually (but not always) used in nature to mean “I’m easily seen, which means I’m not worried about predators, which means if you eat me you’re probably going to have a bad time.”* Smell the food: a strong, unpleasant smell is usually a bad sign. Don’t eat it if it smells rotten—because it probably is—and if your food smells like almonds but is not, in fact, almonds, it might contain cyanide. The skin inside your elbow or wrist is sensitive: gently rub a piece of the food there and wait 15 minutes. If your skin burns, itches, goes numb, or reacts in any way, don’t eat it. If nothing bad happens, briefly touch the food to the corner of your mouth, then wait 15 minutes. If nothing bad happens, briefly touch it to your lip and tongue, and wait another 15 minutes. If nothing bad happens, place a piece on your tongue and wait with it in your mouth for, you guessed it, 15 minutes. If nothing bad happens, chew it once, but don’t swallow. Hold it in your mouth for 15 minutes. If nothing bad happens, swallow the piece you chewed 15 mi...

APPLES ORIGIN Central Asia USES The apple tree was among the first trees cultivated, and its fruit has been improved for thousands of years, so if you’re back before selective breeding was invented, expect some disappointing and tiny sour apples consisting mostly of seeds and a core. Enjoy! Apples picked in fall and stored in a cool place keep well over winter. NOTES Apple cider can be made by leaving out apple juice and allowing natural yeast to ferment it. It might not be delicious, but it will be alcoholic! 7.2: BAMBOO ORIGIN Warm, moist tropical regions USES For a long-lasting writing surface (especially useful before paper), scrape off the outer green skin, split them open on one side, and flatten them. Multiple shoots can be joined together! Great for flutes (also, blow guns), plus the shoots are edible. Can be used to construct arrows, baskets, scaffolding, furniture, walls, flooring, electric light filaments, water pipes, and as a reinforcing agent in concrete if steel is not invented yet, since bamboo has a tensile strength (the ability to withstand heavy loads without snapping or being pulled apart) that’s almost as good as steel. Attracts adorable giant pandas. NOTES Bamboo is an incredibly versatile plant, and if you are stranded in an area of the planet where it grows, you will have a lot of what you need for a civilization from this one plant alone! Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants in the world, and that’s useful if you want plants, like, yesterday...

What animal should you domesticate first? The most important thing your civilization can have is a large, four-legged, easily tamed, easily contained, and easily controlled vegetarian mammal, because such animals are miraculous do-it-all sources of meat, hide, milk, fur, transit, and labor. The best example found across all of human history* are horses:

8.1: BISON (AMERICAN BUFFALO) NATIVE RANGE North America, Europe FIRST EVOLVED 7,500,000 BCE DOMESTICATED Water buffalo were domesticated in 3000 BCE (India) and 2000 BCE (China), but American buffalo have never been domesticated. USES Every part of the buffalo can be used: meat for eating, hides for clothing, sinews for bowstrings, hooves for glue (see Section 8.9: Horses for the recipe), and bones for fertilizer. If you’re throwing out buffalo parts, you’re doing it wrong! NOTES They can get up to speeds of around 55 km/h, so watch out. If you’re in North America after humans show up and there are no horses or camels, you’ll still have buffalo. But they’ll fight you and won’t pull a plow, so maybe just eat them. 8.2: CAMELS NATIVE RANGE The Americas, Africa FIRST EVOLVED 50,000,000 BCE (rabbit-sized camel ancestor in North America) 35,000,000 BCE (goat-sized ancestor) 20,000,000 BCE (camel-sized ancestor) 4,000,000 BCE (modern camels) DOMESTICATED 3000 BCE USES Like cows, camels are a good source of milk, meat, hides, and labor. Plus their dung is dry enough that you can burn it for fuel. You can live on camel milk alone for about a month! We wouldn’t recommend it, but it is an option if things are going that way. Two-hump camels are easy to ride: put the saddle between the humps. But what about one-hump camels? Humans messed around with saddles in front of and behind the hump before realizing around 200 BCE that building a wooden frame around it and putting the saddle o...

DOMESTICATED Please stop asking about domesticating human parasites. Please.

Vitamin Where to get it What can happen if you don’t eat enough A Liver, oranges, milk, carrots, sweet potatoes, and leafy vegetables. Night blindness, which can lead to total blindness. B1 Pork, brown rice, whole grains, nuts, seeds, liver, and eggs. Weight and appetite loss, confusion, muscle weakness, heart problems, and involuntary eye movements. B2 Milk, bananas, green beans, mushrooms (but the few mushrooms that are toxic can be really toxic, so be careful with those), almonds, dark chicken meat, and asparagus. Painful red tongue; sore throat; chapped lips; oily, scaly skin rashes around your genitals; and bloodshot eyes. B3 Meat, fish, eggs, whole grains, and mushrooms. The three D’s: diarrhea, dermatitis, and dementia. And by “dermatitis” we mean “your skin can discolor before peeling off.” Other symptoms include sensitivity to the sun, aggression, confusion, and hair loss. B5 Meat, broccoli, and avocados. A chronic feeling of pins and needles, and/or a chronic feeling of bugs crawling under your skin. B6 Meat, potatoes (with skin), eggs, liver, vegetables, tree nuts (i.e., basically every nut except peanuts, which aren’t even technically nuts in the first place), and bananas. Anemia (your blood can’t carry oxygen as well, which can make you feel confused and pass out), plus nerve damage. B7 (Raw) egg yolks, liver, peanuts, almonds, and leafy green vegetables. Your hair doesn’t grow properly, your skin doesn’t grow properly, plus you can have abdominal pain, crampi...

The slacker way to produce a small amount of less-pure charcoal is to simply dig a hole and start a wood fire inside it. When the wood’s burning steadily, put on some more wood (this’ll be what hopefully turns to charcoal), then add a 20cm-deep layer of leaves, followed by 20cm of soil. The fire will smolder underground, and two days later you can dig up your reward.

charcoal-producing machine. First, gather a bunch of wood logs, stripped of branches and leaves and ideally already well dried in the sun. Use hardwood if you’re looking for fuel charcoal (it burns hotter) and softwood if you want to filter water (it’s more porous, which allows it to absorb more impurities).* Take a 2m-long pole and mount it in the ground—this will be the center of your pile. Using smaller logs—about 10cm in diameter—crisscross them on the ground to make a grid, and extend this grid of logs out until you’ve got a flat and roughly circular area about 4m in diameter around your log. This is your platform. On your platform, place the wood that’s to be turned into charcoal, packed as densely as possible. Longer pieces (up to 2m long) can be placed vertically, leaning against your central pole, with smaller pieces leaning vertically against them. Your goal is to construct a roughly circular mound, rising about 1.5m tall and filled as efficiently as possible with wood, with your 2m-tall post poking out of the middle. Once you’ve got your wood pile, seal it by covering it in a layer of straw or leaves and then adding sand, soil, sod, turf, clay, or other surface materials on top, building a 10-to-20cm layer of this sealant. Don’t forget to leave several air holes at the base of the mound: these are areas you can seal or unseal during burning to control the fire within those particular sections of your pile. When you’re ready to burn, climb up your pile and pull u...

When dry-heating wood, the sticky resin and pitch contained within the wood will separate out, forming tar. Tar’s great! It’s sticky and water-repellant, making it useful as both an adhesive and a sealant, and it’s particularly suited to sealing boats (Section 10.12.5) and roofs against leaks and rotting.

Pine trees work great to make sealant tars, and birch-bark tar was used around 4000 BCE to make chewing gum. Tars also contain antiseptic compounds called “phenols” that make them a convenient sticky bandage for animal hooves and horns.

If you’re in a cold area, you can distill liquids without even needing fire! This process is called “freeze distillation,” and it’s really simple: you just leave your mixture of liquids out in the cold until it begins to freeze. The liquids that freeze first have the highest freezing points, and by removing their ice as it forms, you concentrate everything else in what’s left.* Both regular and freeze distillation will separate saltwater into drinkable fresh water (which is good for staying alive) and salt (which is good for both flavoring and conserving foods: see Section 10.2.6). They’re also useful in distilling alcohols (Section 10.2.5), making them the best way to correct an absence of absinthe.

Figure 14: A free-range horseshoe, and one attached to a horse. Horse hooves never stop growing for as long as the horse lives. In a sense, horseshoes do their job too well, because any horse that wears shoes must have them removed every six weeks or so, so that their nails can be filed back down to an appropriate size before their shoes are reattached.

You can also remove your plow’s moldboard and replace your plowshare with a chisel. This new kind of plow (called a “chisel plow”) won’t flip over your soil, but it will aerate it!

seed drill, and you build one by filling a wheelbarrow with seed and adding a hole at the bottom.* Between the seed and the hole you add paddles that get rotated by the turning of your wheelbarrow’s wheel—or through gears (Appendix H) attached to that wheel,

Both salt and sugar draw moisture out of food, so covering your food in salt and sugar will preserve it while also inhibiting the growth of a bunch of bacteria you don’t want, like Salmonella and botulism.* Many salted meats end up tasting extremely delicious, and if you salt the back and belly meat of a pig, great news: you have just invented bacon.*

If your cans are strong enough, you can even heat your food after you’ve canned it—this technique is called “pressure canning”—which allows the food inside to reach temperatures even higher than its usual boiling point. Botulism spores—which are basically everywhere worldwide but activate only in oxygen-poor environments like inside canned food—are killed by the higher temperatures of pressure canning: 3 minutes at 121°C usually does the trick. Pressure canning is the safest way to store food that isn’t already pickled, but when it goes poorly can result in explosive food, so be careful with it.

Pickling involves fermenting your food in brine (which is just salt and water mixed together). Cut up your food, submerge it in brine, and put a (clean) plate, board, or rock on top of your food pieces so they can’t reach the surface. In the oxygen-free brine your vegetables will ferment: a process in which “good” bacteria feed on sugars in your food, producing vinegars that make them sour but also less vulnerable to “bad” bacteria that cause them to spoil.* After one to four weeks your food will be pickled, and can then be canned for longer storage.

your brine is salty enough for preservation? If you’re starting with fresh water, anywhere from 0.8 to 1.5 times your food’s weight in salt should give you a salty enough brine.

If you have a surplus of vinegar, you can use that to preserve foods directly (see Section 10.2.5). Cheese is really just preserved milk, and you can make it by introducing vinegar (around 120mL of it) to 1L of boiling milk.* The vinegar curdles the milk, causing delicious cheese curds to separate out, leaving a yellowy liquid called “whey” behind. Drain and press your curds (wrapping them in fabric will do the trick there; see Section 10.8.4) and you’ll make a cheese that won’t spoil for weeks. Salt it, or soak it in brine to preserve it, and it’ll last even longer. By introducing specific bacteria to your cheese as it ages, you can control its flavor: the Camembert, Brie, Roquefort, and blue cheeses you remember were all made by introducing different strains of Penicillium mold (Section 10.3.1) to the curds—though the strains used in cheese making in the modern era aren’t the same as the ones used to produce penicillin.

Pasteurization is a very simple application of the “boil-to-sterilize” process: take your liquid food, heat it up to not quite the boiling point, then cool it.

Without pasteurization, milk is one of the most dangerous foods to consume—tuberculosis bacteria in particular just love to grow in it!—but when pasteurized, milk actually becomes one of the safest. The hotter you go, the less time you need to pasteurize your liquids, and 16 seconds at 72°C is all it takes to pasteurize milk.

pasteurization: like anything involving heat, this process actually destroys the vitamin C in foods! The

Yeast are single-celled organisms found all over the world; they’re floating through the air you’re breathing in any period you can survive in, and you’re going to farm some particularly suited to whatever grains you have. Here’s how: First, blend together a mixture of your flour and water, with about twice as much flour as water. Cover it, put it someplace warm, and check it every twelve hours. You’ll be looking for bubbles, which are signs of fermentation: in other words, signs some wild yeast colonized your flour mixture and is now feeding on it. Once you’ve found fermentation, throw away half of your culture and replace what you removed with some fresh 2:1 flour/water mixture. This gives your remaining yeast new food, and provides evolutionary pressure on yeast that can feed off your flour quickly. You, my friend, are selectively breeding yeast that go crazy for whatever type of flour you’ve got on hand. After about a week you should have yeast that reliably generates a bubbly froth—not unlike the head of a beer—after each replenishment. Now you have a yeast farm!* Keep this culture going for as long as you please by feeding it more of your flour-and-water mixture every day (or once a week if you can keep it refrigerated; see Section 10.2.4).

If there isn’t enough oxygen around, yeast will be unable to fully break down the sugars in your grain, and they’ll start producing alcohol as waste. Hey, you’ve invented brewing!

instead of cooking your yeast and grains, you ferment them. Soak your grains in hot water to release their sugars, add your yeasts, and then sit back and relax while they feed. In bread, the yeast have all the oxygen they require, so they can perfectly convert sugars into carbon dioxide. But your fermenting liquid doesn’t have oxygen in it, and under these circumstances, yeast produce two forms of waste instead: carbon dioxide (which makes beer bubbly) and alcohol (which makes beer popular).

There are alternatives to malting to increase the sugar content of your grains. If you get lucky you might isolate a mold called “koji,” first discovered in China around 300 BCE. This mold—which looks like a dark-gray spot on rice—miraculously converts starches to sugars while also imparting a nice flavor, no malting required. It led to the invention of several fermented foods in Asia, including soy sauce (which is fermented soy) and sake (which is beer produced from rice infected, and therefore sweetened, by koji).

To invent butter, just fill up a jar one-third of the way with milk, seal it, and start shaking. This churning will cause your milk to separate into milk solids and buttermilk. Rinse off those milk solids, press and knead them together, add some salt to preserve it, and you’ve got a delicious water-in-oil emulsion of spreadable fat.