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The humans that survive such an event will not be the smartphone engineers, but the subsistence farmers.
by vacri 10y ago
The humans that survive such an event will not be the smartphone engineers, but the subsistence farmers.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoYou don't need smartphone engineers just repair techs. We already have billions of smartphones, millions of which will last a century with proper care. There are palm pilots that still work today. But also as the world collapses a thousand motivated people could and would relocate a basic computer fab to a safe location. Guaranteed.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> millions of which will last a century with proper care I strongly doubt that. Electronics are not designed to last that long; components age. Also, planned obsolescence is king these days.
- enraged_camel 10y agoHow are you going to charge those devices reliably and consistently? What knowledge-bases will you be able to connect to with no Internet? Our technology stack is like a house of cards. Smartphones are at the top. There's no way they will be of any use in the event that the foundation and the walls collapse.
- ajmurmann 10y agoThere is a great short story with the unfortunate name "The man who came early". It's about a American GI who is stationed at Keflavik during the cold war and somehow gets thrown back in time to the Icelandic saga age. He wants to give people there so kind of technology that's much simpler than a smart phone and it all fails. Even something simple as gun powder doesn't get off the ground. They don't know how to get Salpeter. Even if the had the powder they would be missing so much technology to make the guns. As the main character says "you haven't the tools to make the tools to make the tools". Also resources.
- paulajohnson 10y agoAlso Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", which has a similar theme.