Instant Genius - How to invent everything - Ryan North

Episode Date: September 19, 2018

How helpful would you be if you were stranded in the past? Ryan North imagined telling people how cool computers are, but if they asked him how to make one, he’d be stumped. So he did some research, and in his hilarious new book he’s teaching us how to invent everything.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. The basic compass is just you take your magnetic rock and you tie it to a string. And the string lets a rock rotate freely, the rock points where it's magnetic north. That's your compass. And tying a rock to a string, because over a thousand, years to figure out, which is just embarrassing for humanity. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team.

With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Focus magazine. If your time machine broke down, leaving you stranded in the past, would you be able to fix it? It's probably not a question many of us had asked ourselves, but it's something author Ryan North is always worried about. He can explain how cool computers are, but if someone in the Middle Ages asked him how to make one, it'd be stumped.

He decided to remedy this by finding out how to recreate modern civilization from scratch. He's explained it all in his new book, How to Invent Everything, A Survival, guide for the stranded time traveller. From written and spoken language through to agriculture, the printing press and modern birth control, it's a practical guide on how to rebuild civilization. We're chatting to him about where to start and why it took us so long the first time around. Here's Helen Glennie, editorial assistant of BBC Focus magazine, talking to Ryan North. So Ryan, this book has got a really fun premise, so can you just set it up for us? Under what conditions would someone be using this book?

Sure, thank you. So the premise is it is a repair guide for a time machine. And on the first couple pages, it says, look, time machines are actually the most complicated machines humans have ever made ever. So there's no user serviceable parts inside. If you're stuck in the past and your time machine's broken, you're not going to fix a time machine. But we can help you bring the future back to you by explaining how to, it's easier to explain how to reinvent civilization from scratch in any time period. So that does that for the rest of the book. And then it's up to you to rebuild society.

So reinventing civilization from scratch, this is everything from where does it start? Where does it finish? What does this encompass? Oh, gosh. It starts with very basic. You need language, numbers, the scientific method, and finishes with instructions to build a working computer. So it runs the gamut. There's farming in the middle there, agriculture, a birth.

control all sorts of technologies you need for a industrial civilization. So let's say we time traveled and we got stranded somewhere between 200,000 BCE and 50,000 BCE, which is a time that you talk about as being very significant. Can you explain why that's so significant? Yeah, for sure. So that's around 200,000 BCE is when we start seeing anatomically modern humans, which are humans whose bodies look like ours. They're a match for us.

and then around 50,000 BCE, you get behaviorally modern humans, which are humans who start behaving like us. They're bearing their dead. They're creating art. They're wearing jewelry, stuff like that. And there's this huge gap of time where we're not really sure what changed to make us behaviorally modern. And one of the theories is that we finally invented language for ourselves.

We started talking to each other. And it sounds like a minor thing, but language is actually really hard to invent. We've only done it a couple times in history. And one of the challenges is that it's a technology that only makes sense when someone else also has it, right? Like you need for a language to be useful, I have to speak to someone else. So to invent it, you have to invent the language and then also be a teacher who can teach it to someone else before it does any use. And so this idea of language being a technology, I think is really cool because it is something that you don't get for free. Like we invented it for ourselves to use.

And it's such a powerful technology because it's what allows ideas. is to survive outside the host lets you send information that can last longer than the human body lasts. And it's something we take so for granted, but it's so fundamental to everything we do. So if you're in that time period, just teaching the humans their language,

you can be the most influential person in human history. So go do that. Give every civilization on earth a 100,000-year head start. So how would you go about inventing language? presumably this time traveler already knows a language, has a language that they can speak. How do you start teaching it to people? Well, there's interesting results that we've got that show that we're really good at learning language before puberty.

And if you haven't been exposed to language after that point, it becomes really, really hard to learn it from scratch. So if you did find yourself in the past and wanted to start communicating with people, one of the easiest way to do it on the longer term is to teach children. befriend local humans and start talking to their children and you'll be able to communicate with them a lot faster than you will with the adult humans. And I say language, you can still communicate, right? Like we can communicate with dogs. There's body language. There's emotions you can convey, but complicated thought, concrete thought, you only really get with the precision of language.

And so for that, you may want to start with the children and build up from there. Okay, so you talk about five fundamental technologies. that our civilization has founded on, and that spoken language is one of them. Can you just explain the other four? Yeah, written language is the next, and they're related, obviously, but they're also very different. Written language, when you look at it objectively, this is the technology that lets you ship information, you know, around the world for no more expense than it costs to ship grain.

Like it turns ideas into solid objects like books. You can just send to people, which is really incredible. So you've got written language. You've got, I call them non-sucky numbers, a numerical system that is intuitive and makes sense. And took us a long time to figure that out too. And then it's the scientific method, which is the way to produce future knowledge. Is that five? What am I missing? The last one's calorie surplus. Oh yes, of course. Calgary surplus. The author of the book definitely knows what he wrote. calorie surplus is basically producing more food than you eat, which is the foundation of any civilization that has more than one person in it, which allows you to specialize. If you have someone else taking care of food production, then you're not worrying where your next meal comes from and you can freeze you up to worry about other stuff like, why do apples

fall from trees or why do the stars move in the sky? All these questions that when you answer them lead to more questions, but also lead to an industrial society, get unlocked by having reliable food, not having to worry where your next meal comes from. And it's, again, super fundamental. If you have all these things, the written language, spoken language, good sense of numbers, calorie surplus and scientific method, you're on a good foundation to produce more knowledge, more civilization. So calorie surplus sounds like a really enjoyable one. How do we go about doing that? Well, there's a short term and long term.

The short term is you stop hunting and gathering and you start farming. The problem with hunting and gathering, I mean, the feature of hunting gathering is it's generally pretty easy. You just walk around and find food and farming is a lot of work. You're building fences. You're taking care of animals. You're plowing fields. Like it's absolutely more work to farm than it is to hunt and gather.

That said, once you have hunting, once you have farming, you have these other advantages. Like you're no longer moving around. You can start building infrastructure. last. You can start storing food and not having to carry it with you. So it's a it's a big change for that. But one of the things you get kind of for free when you start farming is domestication, where plants and animals start changing to become more useful plants and animals to human, which is kind of crazy. But it's it happens almost by accident. Like if you're farming and you find, oh, you know, this grain has better larger seeds than this other grain. I'm going to plant the

the seeds from this grain that is more useful to me, you're selectively breeding grain that has larger seeds. Just by being a normal, greedy, kind of lazy human, you're producing this new type of food. And we've done that throughout history so often. The wheat we use now can't reproduce without human involvement because we've changed it so much. It only reproduced itself when farmed, which is amazing. We have dogs that we just domesticated wolves. the more convenient and cuter to us by selectively breeding. There's this really cool experiment in Russia, I believe, where they're taking foxes. They took random foxes 50 years ago and started selectively breeding them to see how quickly it'd

take to produce a dog-like fox. And 20 generations in, they went in two directions. They made the most docile foxes and the most angry foxes. So you have these really dog-like foxes that you can sell as pets. In the other cases, you have these furious, like they hate humans, aggressive anti-dogs. these mean foxes just by selective breeding, just by picking the angriest ones and the most docile ones, the ones who will consent to be touched,

and the ones that hate being touched and having them breed. It's incredible how fast you can do this sometimes. Yeah, and 20 generations for a fox, I presume they reproduce, you know, relatively early on in their life, only what, a few years or something like that? These are about three years, yeah. Yeah, so you'd get through 20 generations pretty quickly. Yeah, if you were stuck in time with,

dog or with wolves, you could probably get a decent dog within your lifetime, which is one the most inspiring time travel facts I know. You can make a dog if you put the work in. Did you come across any other things like that that really stood out to you as like, wow, I can achieve something so important so quickly? Oh, there's tons. One of the things that really struck me was throughout history, you know, we tend to think. of ourselves as a pretty savvy bunch of pretty savvy species who knows a bunch of stuff but if you look at when we could have invented something when we actually did there's usually a huge gap of time it's just it blows on mind one of the ones I was looking at yesterday was we all know the idea of the canary and the

coal mine right you have a when you're mining you take a bird down with you and birds have a higher metabolism they breathe faster and so if there's low in ox if there's none of oxygen in the mine the canary will faint before humans do so you can get out and escape and it saves lives we discovered that in the 20th century. We'd already invented television the time we realized we could bring canaries down to coal mines. We've been mining for thousands of years without this literal canary in the coal mine to tell us when it was dangerous. And it's just the idea that we could have mentioned this by taking a bird down into the mine with us. And we didn't for thousands and thousands of years.

Makes you wonder, you know, if you come to the future, what else are we missing? What are the other technologies that we're just not seeing, even though we have all the parts here in front of us? The book takes us all the way through from those five fundamental technologies, domesticating animals, inventing the printing press, all the way through to music, philosophy, and computers. Yes. What part of that do you think would be the hardest to invent? Where are we going to struggle the most? Well, it's funny you mention the music one because I wanted it to be just, you know, if you're writing a book about how to

reinvent society from scratch, civilization from scratch, you start to think, well, what's important in civilization? And, you know, philosophy and the arts are fundamental, I believe, to any good society you need to have music, need of arts. And for music, one thing to surprise me was you can teach someone how to make instruments, and that's pretty easy. And you can teach them how to read music, and that's pretty easy too. But knowing what a note sounds like is pretty hard, because I can have notes on piece of paper. You don't know like, what does the C sound like, a middle C? What's the frequency for that?

And the answer is, well, you can give the actual frequency and you can produce that frequency. But it turns out all of music relies on being able to produce a certain frequency at any point in history. And so it all comes down to this. Basically, you take a piece of wood or piece of paper, whatever you can produce, and you stick it in a wheel with spokes. So when you turn the wheel,

the card gets hit that makes a noise. If you turn the wheel fast enough, you can start producing a known frequency. And then you've got your music. So all of music relying on a card in a wheel that you produce at any point in history was, I thought, kind of crazy and kind of fun. Yeah, and also simpler than I would have expected.

Yeah, a lot of stuff is simpler than you would expect, I think. I mean, the world is complicated, for sure. but the basics of everything usually aren't super complicated. That's what I loved about the book and loved about writing the book is I started writing it because I was afraid since I was a kid. I think about going back in time and arriving in the past and saying, guys, I'm from the future. And the future is great.

We have computers. And they would say, how do they work? And I'd say, I don't know, but they're great. Figure them out, they're going to be awesome. But just learning the basis of how everything works is the reason I wanted to write this book. And the reason I think it's so fun is that you get to be this more competent member of society who understands how things work, how the stuff we take for granted around us is constructed. I think that's what's so fun is that if I were sent back in time, I would be a really competent

time traveler. So of all of the technologies that you talk about in the book, if you were sent back in time, which one would you be most excited about inventing? Oh, gosh. I honestly think it would be dogs because I love dogs so much. It's such a satisfaction of like working for 30 years to produce a dog and finally making one would just be incredible. Plus they're useful animals. They're great for hunting.

They're the only animals that follow our gaze. So if I'm hunting with a dog, I can glance somewhere in the dog and see where I'm glancing, which is, I mean, I shouldn't just spend this whole time talking about how great dogs are. I'm thinking that's technology. they're a really great technology. Another really basic one is just like distillation is not that hard once you've worked out the principles behind it. You're just boiling water and capturing the steam. But it lets you purify liquids in a way that you couldn't before.

You can produce alcohol. You can purify alcohol with that. Brewing beer, I think. It seems like, oh, yeah, what a fun thing to have for traveling the fast. instructions for making beer, but it's a really good drink for calories. If you can make it out of water that isn't safe to drink, it can become safe to drink, just the active brewing with it. So it's a fascinating drink that sort of defined a lot of civilizations in a way that we don't really think when I was like, oh yeah, beer, that's a fun drink in a hot day. But it's like,

this is a drink that can be the foundation of a civilization. I mean, you're brewing it then not for the alcohol, but for the calories inside. But it's so fascinating the stuff around the world that we don't even look at, I don't even think about, but how much of it impacted it had on our own history. Now, you managed to condense all of these inventions down into about a 400-page book. Why didn't it take us 50,000 years? You know, you talk about 50,000 BCA, well, more than 50,000 years. You talk about 50,000 BCE as being when we started behaving like modern humans,

and then it took us that long to get to this point. Why? Why did it take us so long? A lot of it is having the parts and not putting them together in the right order. One of my favorite examples of that is you have the ancient Greek civilization had lodestone, so like natural magnets that they saw that some rocks stuck together. And they said, oh, that's weird. We'll use that for fortune telling whatever.

And then you have thousands of years later in Chinese civilization, they invent the compass. And that unlocks navigating the entire world. And that is all you need to invent the compass is a piece of magnet, a magnetic rock. Because the earliest compasses aren't like the compasses we're familiar with. We have that tiny slivered metal balanced on a pin in a plastic case. Like it's all very fancy. But the earliest compass, the basic compass is just you take your. magnetic rock and you tie it to a string and the string lets a rock rotate freely the rock points

towards magnetic north that's your compass and tying a rock to a string because over a thousand years to figure out which is just embarrassing humanity that it we can have the parts that we need and we won't figure out the right way to put them in for thousands of years and that's a repeated story throughout our history so I think I mean I'm clearly on team human. I think humans are pretty cool, but there's definitely room to improve our timeline to improve our history by knowing what to do when you can do it. And that goes for language, that goes for compasses, that goes for stethoscopes, all sorts of technologies. We had the parts, and we didn't put them together until it was much, much later. So that's the way. We took our

time. Yeah. So you talk about the Greeks having one thing and the Chinese having something else. And now that we can communicate so freely using the internet and those sorts of things, do you think the pace of innovation is speeding up because of that? Do you think we're getting better at this process? Oh, yeah. I mean, the two greatest resources we have are human brains and communication. And so the more that we can communicate, the more you can get the free exchange of ideas, the more you can have someone, you know, in Australia thinking, oh, what if we did it this way?

And, I mean, that's a lot of modern science is international, right, which is terrific. But the main resource we have are these human brains walking around in human bodies. So I think it's really important for any civilization that you let these human brains live to their full potential. So you make sure everyone's fed and clothed and comfortable and has health care. The basics of keeping these brains around and happy is what unlocks everything else. I mean, the book is about building society on your own in the past. But you can't have a society with just one person. and that's just a person with a lot of cool stuff.

You need more than one person to have a civilization. It's important to take care of these other people. And throughout writing the book, did you identify any other ways that we could get better at this, ways that we could do it faster, aside from just communication and keeping ourselves healthy? It's communication, it's keeping yourself healthy, and it's a willingness to try new stuff.

Like the first person that tie rock to a string isn't necessarily expecting to invent the compass, but they do when they figure it out. And there's this great quote. I forget who said it, but it was making the point that in science, you less often say eureka, I found it, and more often you say, oh, that's weird.

I wasn't expecting that. It's just willingness to sort of explore why something is different. I mean, you look at penicillin famously, you have banding invest, you have this, mold on their window sill that isn't growing. And it's because Penicill is killing the mold. And they're like, oh, what, I'm going to discover what, what's happening here. But that observation had been made before then several times when people just saw that,

noted it, and threw it out because they didn't see what you could, what could come from it. And this idea of us coming so close to betting something and then swerving away the last minute because we didn't ask the right questions is, it's kind of heartbreak, but it happens repeatedly throughout history. Yeah, and so if we take this out of the time travel example and we just sort of see it as this book that tells us to invent a whole bunch of things, that's pretty tempting to go outside and start, you know,

tying rocks to strings and inventing a little water distiller and those sorts of things. Did you, have you tried a lot of these things out? I've tried some of them. Some of them, it's like building a kiln, there's a lot of steps involved and you need to collect the clay, but I have collected the clay and sort of started purifying clay, which is this fun process where you can find, you can find clay anywhere that anywhere in earth that humans can live, you can find clays, which is great. And so you basically just take these rock, this clay from the ground, and you start cleaning it.

So you put it in water and you mix it up and then you let it precipitate out and you take the pure stuff that settles and do it again a couple of times. We don't see that process anymore because you just buy clay from, I guess, the clay store. I don't even know where you buy clay these days, but I imagine potters know. But this idea of being able to, you know, walk anywhere in the world and produce clay is kind of empowering. Like, anything else goes wrong. At least I can build a kiln. And with a kiln, I can make glass and all this stuff spins out from that.

So this idea of being, having that confidence, I think, is fun, even if you don't get sent back in time. That was Ryan North talking about how to rebuild civilization from scratch. His book, How to Invent Everything, is available from Virgin Books Now. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. The October issue of BBC Focus magazine is out this week. In it, we discover how we could leave Earth for good and build a new civilization in space.

We also speak to a panel of leading female scientists about why there are so few women in science. Discover why Curry is so good for you and explore whether machine learning could help shed new light on the problem of male suicide. Find out more at sciencefocus.com. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com. in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

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