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

by Ryan North

mathematics is actually built on a foundation of things we can’t prove but assume are true. We call them “axioms,” and we think they’re safe assumptions, but at the end of the day, they remain beliefs we cannot prove. Axioms include ideas like “2 + 1 gives the same result as 1 + 2” and “if a equals b, and if b equals c, then a equals c.” These assumptions are useful because they match up with reality—and building math on a foundation that matches up with reality has proven reasonably practical—but there is nothing stopping you from building different mathematical systems.

Scientists are often seen as turbonerds, but the philosophical foundations of science are actually those of pure punk-rock anarchy: never respect authority, never take anyone’s word on anything, and test all the things you think you know to confirm or deny them for yourself.

A rock tied to a string that can swing freely is called a pendulum, and it turns out that one second is the time it takes any pendulum on Earth—regardless of weight—to swing from one end to the other, as long as the pendulum is 99.4cm long.

Potatoes are one of the few plants that contain almost all the nutrition humans need! You can live entirely off potatoes (but shouldn’t, because then you’re extremely vulnerable to crop failure, and to vitamin A, B12, and E deficiencies).

Avoid introducing tobacco to your civilization, and you will save yourself billions of dollars and millions of lives and prevent the invention of vaping.

very few people wake up in the morning and decide that today they want to invent civilization from scratch. Historically, most people wake up in the morning, discover that they’re hungry or thirsty or bored or horny, and while trying to solve those problems for themselves only end up inventing civilization by accident, if at all.

humans spent four millennia on three continents trying to get alchemy to work in what can only be described as “a staggering waste of human ingenuity, life, and effort from which almost* nothing useful was gained

Congratulations! You have used the labor of microscope beasties to produce a more pleasant bread, then killed them the instant they were no longer useful. Millions of their corpses are baked into every slice of bread you eat.

(science don’t owe nobody nothin’),

If you think of electricity like water, then your wires are pipes, current is the amount of water moving through those pipes, and voltage is the pressure driving the water along.

Since 2800 BCE, buttons were used as “nice shells that we put on our clothes to look good” and it was only around 1200 CE in Germany when someone finally realized they also had a practical purpose. That’s multiple millennia in which humans walked around with buttons sewn on their shirts, thinking they all looked pretty sharp, when actually they looked like big idiots who didn’t even know how a button works.

BEFORE THEY WERE INVENTED Humans were unable to expand to anywhere they couldn’t walk, crawl, or swim, which left everything from tiny islands to entire continents completely uncolonized. Instead, folks just stared out at the sea and sighed

BEFORE IT WAS INVENTED You were born on the ground, and you died on the ground, and you told yourself this was fine and you were silly to ever dream of anything greater

for every high-five, there is a corresponding anti-high-five that is both down low and, sadly, too slow.

people used to think spleens controlled emotions but people used to think a lot of things, most of them wrong

Even today, cello, harp, and violin players will still choose to use strings made from the intestines of sheep! It’s weird! Everyone acts like it’s normal, but it’s actually really weird!