Everything we know,
in the order you'd need it.
Suppose you had to start again — after a collapse, a jump backwards in time, or a landing somewhere with nothing. This is the dependency graph of technological civilization: 140 steps from finding drinkable water to fabricating a transistor, each one listing what it needs, what it unlocks, how it fails, and which book to read.
13 subjects
All sectors and tracks →Each subject is a set of tracks that climb the eight levels. The bar under each one shows how far up it is written: filled where there is a step, hatched where one is planned.
- Find and store water
- Make water safe
- Sanitation
- Wild food
- Crops and soil
- Protected growing
- Livestock
- Aquaculture
- Storage and preservation
- Emergency and temporary shelter
- Dwellings
- Storage and farm buildings
- Building materials
- Settlement and planning
- First aid and surgery
- Hygiene and disease
- Nutrition and teeth
- Mother and child
- Medicines
- Fire and fuel
- Mechanical power
- Electricity
- Fibres, textiles and leather
- Ceramics and glass
- Metals
- Binders
- Chemicals
- Hand tools
- Woodworking
- Metalworking
- Production
- On water
- On land
- In the air
- Records and writing
- Teaching
- Science and measurement
- Signals
- Electronics and computing
- Money, credit and capital
- Deciding together
- Land and law
- Public works and administration
- Security
Where civilization stands
K = 0.731 on the Kardashev scale, from humanity's energy use in 2025. Type I is 1.0. The measures behind itThe one thing worth knowing before anything else
Civilization is not a list of inventions. It is a dependency graph gated by six physical constraints — temperature, precision, energy surplus, population, containment and information decay. Almost nothing was ever delayed because nobody had the idea. It was delayed because a furnace could not get hot enough, or a cylinder could not be bored round, or there were not enough people to keep the skill alive.
The eight tiers
Mark steps as you achieve them — stored in this browser onlyStop dying. Nothing else on this site matters until this tier is closed.
Convert from taking calories out of the landscape to putting them in. Stop moving.
Get above 1,100 °C and keep a written record. These two moves open more doors than everything below them combined.
Put something other than muscle to work, and start making machines that make machines.
Burn stored sunlight instead of current sunlight. Break the land-area limit on energy.
Move energy without moving matter, and break the nitrogen limit on food.
Make matter that computes. Stop paying for every copy of a thing you know.
Reach the point you started from — then decide, deliberately, what to do differently.
35 dimensioned builds
"Store grain dry and rodent-proof" is a specification. These are the instructions: drawings, bills of materials, tolerances and the ways each one fails.
The dependency graph
Every step and every prerequisite as one navigable map. Mark what you have and it shows what you can attempt next.
Patterns of progress
Ten regularities in what actually happened over twelve thousand years — why nothing changed for so long, and why every transformative technology pays out a generation late.
Futures
Those patterns extended forward, with confidence marked. Population is about to fall for the first time by choice — just as ideas are getting harder to find.
The better path
17 mistakes the record says not to repeat — lead pipes, leaded petrol, asbestos — and 16 cheap fixes that arrived centuries late, from oral rehydration to handwashing. Each on the step where the choice is made.
What is missing
This site is incomplete, and says where rather than letting you find out: 6 counted gaps still open and 5 tracked pieces of work, with the full table of contents.
This site is meant to be taken offline
A blueprint that needs a network is not a blueprint. Everything here works from a cold cache, prints as a clean field document, and points at archives you should mirror to physical media before you need them.