# Forum > Discussion > Mad Science and Grumpy Technology >  The tech tree of reality

## Bohandas

Some of the discussion in the thread about using time travel to accelerate progress got me thinking about how many technologies are dependent on previous technologies, and those technologies are depemdent on older technologies still

So, do you know if anybody anywhere ever compiled a detailed list of all the steps it would take to build a modern civilization from the ground up, completely from scratch, starting with no tools?

And if not, what would it take to compile such a list?

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## Anymage

This comes to mind as an admittedly entertainment-based source.

In-depth knowledge tends to be long and dry, however.  Even if you just wanted to outline from the stone age to near-modernity, a full guide would be too long and cumbersome for anyone to meaningfully read or follow.  However, a lot of the boring nitty-gritty details are required to make things work.  So the essential skills training to survive if you wound up trapped in the preindustrial past would be a very different set of training than a broad outline of what tech/science would turn out useful.

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## Bohandas

To be honest, even though It was the time travel thread that got me thinking about it again, I'm more interested in if you got trapped on an uncharted island and wanted to do more than merely survive like some caveman. Or if the world's infrastructure was destroyed by some kind of global disaster, how would we miminize the duration of the service interruption in order to prevent society from being plunged into a barbaric pre-industrial state and toxic elements of society taking over.

Although the back in time angle remains of interest too. The hope is that if everything were laid out clearly enough and efficiently enough we might be able to speedrun history fast enough to bypass the formation of social mores and other cultural elements based on those earlier stages of developmemt, and that would prevent them from holding us back now

EDIT:
Also IIRC I actually bought that book based on a similar suggestion from an earlier discussion of this nature, but I never bothered reading it because it quickly became apparent that it didn;t fit the bill even a little bit (except for the title)

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## halfeye

This was more or less the concept behind the british TV show Connections:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connec...h_documentary)

Obviously it probably had gaps, but the idea was there. There was a book, I don't know whether it's still in print.

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