How long would smartphones be able to preserve knowledge? When you can no longer get clean power to charge them, they will cease to function. When they break,

How long would smartphones be able to preserve knowledge? When you can no longer get clean power to charge them, they will cease to function. When they break, there will be no means to repair them. And most critical knowledge isn't even contained on the phone, it's on other machines which are likely inaccessible given the number of failure points in our global networks. If a catastrophe occurs, this high technology will be the first class to break. And no one person or group can recreate them; they depend upon global supply chains and expertise and manufacturing techniques siloed in hundreds of companies. And if a collapse did occur, we might have more pressing needs than recreating such technological marvels, like feeding and clothing ourselves. The value of such technology would vanish overnight if the supporting infrastructure collapsed. To preserve knowledge you need it to be usable and accessible as the high edifice of our technological society crumbles. That would mean quality paper, vellum or some other durable material. We know it can last for hundreds to thousands of years if properly cared for. And I suspect that with the essentials of our knowledge base preserved and disseminated in such a way, we could quickly re-master the missing advanced stuff in a handful of decades. But if we relied on smartphones to save us, we'd quickly become savage and starving cavemen! One of the more dangerous tendencies of modern times is that precision manufacturing techniques are often undocumented and are learned skills which require passing on from masters to trainees. There's plenty of technology from WW2 and earlier which we already can't recreate even though we know exactly what they look like. The people who knew retired and died. The drawings and documentation are useless without full training--we'd have to rediscover and refine the processes from scratch. Just last week I was reading about the restoration of a German WW2 fighter plane. They had to replace the entire engine because they couldn't manufacture a replacement part for the (repairable) original, because the machines to make the parts no longer exist and the expertise was lost. We'd have to make the machines to make the machines that make the part. Our technology base is built upon a house of cards. It's not a new phenomenon, but what is new is our utter reliance upon technology we have little control over to feed us and run our lives, making its loss quite disastrous.