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In my story humans, as of 2020s are faced with a cataclism that will go over the planet for several weeks and then leave it. A group of them, a couple of hundred random NYC habitants, is planning hide in an underground shelter next to the New York Public Library. Their situation is the following:

  • they know that the cataclism will last for several weeks, and perhaps anything that is above the sea level will be destroyed
  • for this reason they are not sure whether any tech equipment will survive
  • their shelter has supplies for several years, so they should not worry about surviving the cataclism and after it, they now only think about how to rebuild once it passes
  • they cannot be sure whether there will by any other survivors, especially close by enough
  • they know that the planet's nature will be in a normal state after several weeks

Before the cataclism hits, they have a couple of days to raid the library and each get several books from there. They want to grab all the books that will help them rebuild as fast as possible, reaching the current state of technologies. Which books/which topics should they be focused on?

SBF
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    Couple of hundred? They will need 10,000 to 100,000 people to sustain Bronze Age-level technology. 100,000 to 1,000,000 people for Hellenistic (= Greco-Roman) technology. 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 people for Renaissance-era or Early Moden technology. 10,000,000 to 100,000,000 for Age of Machines (= Victorian) technology. Late Modern technology needs 100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 people... – AlexP Jul 13 '23 at 11:59
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    look up somthing called the civilization starter kit project, or the book, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, the book breaks down what knowledge you would need, after that just search the library catalog for the right topics. – John Jul 13 '23 at 12:32

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