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

If you find yourself somewhere in time with absolutely nothing, then wouldn’t it be great if you had the wits and wherewithal to make something? Or everything? Maybe you’ve time-traveled to the earliest era of anatomically modern humans. Or maybe you find yourself in a post-apocalyptic no-man’s-land. Or maybe you are just stuck out in the woods, or on a sofa with too much time on your hands. Then this book is probably going to be a big help. It not only has (admittedly minimal) instructions on how to build lots of useful stuff, but it also informs you as to why you might want or need that stuff and, more important, what stuff you might need to build in order to be able to build this stuff. That’s good stuff.

Although this is a show more silly book that is mostly just fun, it may get you thinking about a couple of things. For example, it got me thinking that it would actually be a really good idea if we, collectively, stored our knowledge about stuff in places and on media that will be accessible if everything goes south. Just in case. It also makes you think about how so many things are connected to other things. And how inventing one thing may or may not impact the potential development of other things. And the potential ramifications of that on a society. This is not something Ryan North is particularly interested in. He’s mostly just about the funny. But what does it say about his view of the world when he presents technologies as developing in tree diagrams, where one thing leads to another, practically inevitably? Is he implying that our present technological and social state is inevitable? Wouldn’t that be an odd discovery? Doesn’t it sound more like what you’d expect from a, somewhat limited, computer game?

Yes, well…

Despite its drawbacks this book does what it sets out to do — it’s moderately fun for geeky guys who don’t really know stuff but wish they did (i.e. probably not so interesting for engineers). And it might accidentally provoke some more serious thought about our species’ interaction and dependence on technology. And that might be more useful for the stranded time traveler than the rest of what is contained herein.

Gently recommended. show less

The conceit behind this humorous guide to some of humanity's most important technologies and ideas is that it is an artifact of an alternate future, dug up from the fossil record, containing instructions for how to build your own advanced civilization if you get stuck in the past. Apparently it comes as standard equipment with your rental time machine.

It seems like a fun way to learn a lot about technology and history, and based on other things of his that I've read, I very much like Ryan North's sense of humor. So I was expecting this to be really interesting and really funny. And, well... It was mildly interesting and mildly funny, So, worth a look, but not quite as engaging as I was hoping for.

And how useful it actually might be if show more you were stranded in the past varies a lot. A few of the simpler ideas here I'm sure I could put into use, but for most of them, well, it might be a good overview of the basic ideas, but I'm quite sure that if I tried to put them into practice I'd quickly find the devil is in the details, and I'm really bad at details when it comes to doing anything practical. I can't quite figure out how to replace a storm door on my house. There is no way I'm inventing a steam engine from scratch with three pages of instructions. show less

If you ever need to rebuild civilization from the ground up, make sure you have Ryan North with you. If kidnapping is not your thing, then at least make sure you have this book. I wouldn't recommend taking the audio though, because if the power to your portable (music) listening device dies before you get around to "inventing" electricity and/or batteries, you're still screwed.

Filled with really useful information (and some eye-rollingly bad puns) and delivered in a charming, accessible manner. There is nothing dry or academic here, in spite of the numerous charts and graphs and footnotes and the information is presented in such a way that even a lazy, clumsy person such as myself could probably utilize it to become a Goddess. Or at show more least the only person in the cave who has fire.

This one gets five stars because it is funny and may save your life in the event of the collapse of civilization (or if you get stranded in the past in a time travel accident). And, also because the author has a weird fascination with Salt-N-Pepa's Shoop, which I can respect. show less

time travel group March 2024... but I wonder who voted for it, as it's not TT... notes from discussion are pasted below in lieu of a proper review....
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Ok, wow, this is dense with information. And a lot of it is presented in charts, tables, appendices, etc., which I have difficulty reading at any speed. And tbh it does seem more like a history of the world, or at least a history of civilization, at least so far.

But here on p. 13 I'm already learning things! For example, I had never come across the fact that even deaf babies babble. Hm. Do any of you know more about that?
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Yes, it's not really about time travel. That's just a catchy title. Although his 'theory of TT' is that you're creating a new timeline, so nothing in your original show more is changed.

Nonetheless, I'm enjoying it! Mostly it's stuff I kinda already knew. And it's presented as if everything you try will work well enough & soon enough so you'll be able to keep going and do more & more advanced stuff. But I do have notes:

"Specialization unlocks doctors who can devote their entire lives to curing disease, librarians who can devote their entire lives to ensuring the accumulated knowledge of humanity remains safe and accessible, and writers who, fresh out of school, take the first job they find and devote the most productive years of their lives to writing corporate repair manuals...."

"Potatoes are one of the two plants that contain all the nutrition humans need! You can live entirely off potatoes." (I looked this up; apparently they even have protein!)

I need to look up the bonobo Kanzi who can cook.

"'My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition there.'" Indira Gandhi

I also learned that the 'canary in the coal mine' wasn't developed until 1913! Apparently it was inspired by a disaster in 1896. (I think there are tour guides who tell the history wrong to tourists.)
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So, I'm finally approaching the section on Logic. This is important, depending on how the author explores it.

Coming up is philosophy, art, medicine, and music. Strikes me as very weird to organize them this way. First aid much earlier, at least, I would think.

Also, what about diplomacy and persuasive speech? How is the stranded time traveler going to be able to invent all this stuff if he's been killed or locked up as crazy or as a practitioner of black magic?
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Done. I didn't read every word, esp. electromagnetism, chemistry, and the charts that are in even finer small print. I can't actually imagine using much of this beyond first principles as a stranded time traveler, or in a post-apocalyptic setting, but maybe someone more technically minded could? Still, there's so much that is so fascinating. I do recommend everyone take a bit of a look at it, at least!

"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."

I need to investigate the gamma garden, from which experiment in radiation-induced mutations they developed the red grapefruit.

"The association of the upper classes of Europe and North America with gout around the 1800s CE has been traced to them drinking out of their fancy lead glasses."

"'You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: "she wanted storms."'" Anna Akhmatova

Implication in footnote is that Vitruvian Man isn't accurate, or forces proportions, or something; I need to investigate.

"'There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.'" Ursula K. Le Guin

Good words for Scrabble and other word games, also, the parts that make the 'hinge' apparatus for a boat's rudder: pintle, gudgeon.

Ok, that's it, I think, all that I marked. I'd definitely be interested in what other readers mark! show less

Disclaimer: I received this book from GoodReads as part of the First Reads program.

This book is a total delight to read. That's all you need to know, but I'll go into some more detail.

The book is a work of history, a work of science, a work of technology and a work of humor, all wrapped up in a veneer of science fiction. In an introductory note to the readers, the author claims to have found this book embedded in rock, made of an unknown indestructible material. It is allegedly a manual to be used by persons who have rented the FC3000 time machine, and had the machine malfunction, leaving them in some ancient period in the past.

It begins by explaining to you how to determine what time period you're stuck in. It then proceeds to give show more you instructions on how to survive by inventing such necessities as language, farming, fishing, animal husbandry, make buildings, the beginnings of medicine, art, music, and so on. It actually gives you instruction in how these things and more came to be, how long it took for humanity to learn about them as well as shortcuts to help you shorten the path to various technologies.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and would recommend it to anyone interested in learning how civilization, and various items we take for granted, came to be. show less

Highly amusing and informative! However, it's not really a book you'd want to sit down and read straight through; you're really probably better off picking it up from time to time and skipping around.

Like Randall Munroe says on the cover - this is such a cool book. A manual to reinvent much of the basics of civilization and science from scratch is a very fundamentally interesting concept for me, and this book gave me an understanding of things around me that I didn't know before. (It was news to me, for instance, that soap was made from animal fat! I knew it contained lye, but didn't know the general makeup of it, nor the process to go about creating it in the first place.) But as much as I enjoyed the book, it often felt like it was trying too hard to be funny - this is no fault of the creator, but just a mismatch with my personal preferences when it comes to humour, but it does keep How to Invent Everything off the shelf of my show more favourite books. Still, it's one I'll recommend to anyone interested in a pretty easily digestible science book, even though it won't reach my personal upper echelon. Four stars. show less