One billion dollars, an island, and a hundred people with nothing.
Harvard anthropologists and Cambridge theologians have been arguing for thirty years - is civilization inevitable for human beings to come out on their own, or is it an accident "given" by external forces? In order to end this controversy, they persuaded the United Nations, Musk, Gates and others to invest in buying an uninhabited island from Madagascar, stripping a hundred scientists, soldiers, craftsmen, and doctors of all modern items and throwing them naked on it.
No metal, no plastic, no glass. There were only two sets of linen clothes, a wilderness, and the cold gaze of the Starlink satellite above.
They had to reinvent fire, pottery, paper, metal. They thought they were reenacting the history of civilization. But in the past fifteen years, the first piece of iron they smelted only lasted seven days before breaking; the first electric lamp they built illuminated the battlefield instead of the study; the first code they wrote was an armistice soaked in blood.
They failed. It failed again and again. But in their failure, they forged something harder than iron - love, betrayal, faith, war, and forgiveness. And how a hundred bare-handed people, with nothing, can learn to "be a human being" again.
This is a fable about humanity. Every page asks the same question: If we had it all to do over again, would we do better?
Concept: Is human civilization evolving naturally or transformed by external forces?