This past week I’ve been listening to Ryan North’s audiobook, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, which seeks to provide instructions for how to invent every major technology required for a thriving civilization. The idea being, if you were to travel back in time tens of thousands of years and wanted to majorly short-cut how long it took humanity to progress from our hunter-gatherer, living-in-caves days to thriving civilizations with cars and electricity and computers, you could do that.

It’s a charming book filled with a lot of nerdy fun.


One technology that North covers that blew my mind was antibiotics, and I’ve not been able to stop thinking about them since.


First off, I was shocked to learn just how recently antibiotics began to be produced and made widely available.


Alexander Fleming’s infamous moldy bread incident, which lead him to discover and isolate penicillin for the first time, happened in 1928.

Then, it wasn’t until 1940 that penicillin started being mass produced, meaning that people finally, for the first time in history, had a viable tool to fight against infection.



For the vast, VAST majority of human history, a simple cut or scrape, if it got infected, could kill you.

And there was basically nothing that could be done to combat that.


In contrast, today I take for granted the fact that, if I get an infection, I’ll probably be fine. I can go to basically any doctor, almost anywhere in the world, and I can get a drug that will cure me of almost any infection in a ridiculously short amount of time.

But that possibility has been around for less than 100 years.

Every one of my grandparents were born into a world without antibiotics.


Yet, since 1940 when antibiotics were made generally available, they have likely saved hundreds of millions of lives.

That’s crazy to me!


The thing about antibiotics that I found even more shocking, however, was how much longer we COULD have had them, had history played out just a bit different.

North explains that it was known as early as 3000 BC that some molds (but not all) could be used to help treat wounds and prevent the spread of infection.


But, the work of isolating those specific infection-fighting molds, cultivating them, and scaling that cultivation to benefit all of civilization didn’t happen for thousands of years after that was first known, even though it could have been done relatively easily in the 3000s BC with the right techniques.

(North explains step-by-step the process of isolating, refining, and scaling production of antibiotics in his book. It’s surprisingly simple, and could have been done in most ancient civilizations without much problem.)


Which means, we’ve had the puzzle pieces we needed for around 5000 years to create a drug that saves millions of lives every year… but it wasn’t until only 85 years ago that someone actually shipped that drug at scale so that people everywhere could benefit from it.


That is shocking to me… and sad.


It’s hard to imagine the number of people who died from infections between 3000 BC and today. How many sons and daughters lost before their time. How many mothers and fathers…

Maybe billions. Quite possibly, as many as tens of billions.



This convicts me of a simple fact:

Ideas on their own are useless.

Knowledge on its own is useless.


It’s what we do with those ideas and that knowledge that’s important.


Humanity wasn’t changed much by the knowledge that some molds could fight infection.

We were changed when people took that knowledge, and put in the work for it to be scaled to billions of people.


The knowledge didn’t count until they shipped it.

But when they finally did ship it, it changed the world.