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If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figurin

• whatshisface 7y ago
  For that to happen our current civilization would have to be defined as every civilization on Earth.
  • mannykannot 7y ago
    That's pretty much where we are going, if we are not already there.
  • mcv 7y ago
    Only the civilization that uses the current hard drive standard and related electronic and digital standards. There are no hard lines between civilizations of course, but societies that agree on common standards for a number of things sounds like one of the better definitions I can come up with.
  • cookieswumchorr 7y ago
    there currently is one single civilization earth. All the cultural diffences between countries are far less than it would take to define different civilizations
    • ekianjo 7y ago
      > there currently is one single civilization earth. All the cultural diffences between countries are far less than it would take to define different civilizations What is your definition of a civilization then? As far as i know there is no "global" culture, you can live in many different places and have a totally different everyday life experience.
      • pygy_ 7y ago
        Science and technology (and maybe trade?) are our global culture.
        • ekianjo 7y ago
          I just said there is no such thing as a global culture. It's not because you have Starbucks in every big city that the experience of living in different places is the same.
          • pygy_ 7y ago
            There are local peculiarities, but we share a common core built around science an technology. You can learn to drive a car anywhere on earth. You'll learn the same maths, physics, chemistry and biology. You can use phones everywhere. That is culture, globally shared.
• mc32 7y ago
  A lot more people are literate and we have lots of libraries everywhere. So for that to happen there would have to be a complete directed effort to abandon learning. By all countries. It’s highly unlikely even if we had a catastrophic natural disaster like an asteroid hit taking out or majorly degrading infrastructure. Such an event on the contrary would probably prompt the most able country left to seek to become the leader (technically and politically) by taking the opportunity to best those left in a worse state.
  • cameronbrown 7y ago
    The problem with that theory is theoretically you could wipe out most technical knowledge within a generation. All it takes is for a lot of books to be burned and a lot of engineers/scientists to die.
  • Kaiyou 7y ago
    Looking at what goes around inside schools, there seems to be an ongoing directed effort to abandon learning, already.
• Tepix 7y ago
  We don't have an example of such a complete collapse in the world since the arrival of globalization. It's easy to envision that a lot of knowledge will be conserved somewhere.
  • YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    Yes, in our hard drives.
    • kijin 7y ago
      No, in books and journals. We're still printing them by the billions every year. Software of various kinds might be lost, since we usually don't print them out. But the theory required to re-implement them are all available on paper, sitting in a library somewhere. A book on algorithms and data structures will be far more useful to a future civilization than raw source code for a hardware architecture that won't even exist anymore.
      • YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
        I often have to read articles published in the MLJ, or the proceedings of IJCAI and AAAI in the 1990's. That was the time when machine learning was predominantly preoccupied with modelling the world with logic languages, particularly propositional logic (and, less often, first-order logic). Although I have a background in logic programming and I study logic-based machine learning for my PhD, I find that I often have trouble to understand important terminology - and I mean "important" in the sense that entire papers are based around it, but take it for granted that the reader is very familiar with the terms, what they mean, and how they're used. For example, I recently struggled with the following terms: "finite axiomatization", "explanation-based learning", "constructive induction", "knowledge-level learning", "weakest preconditions", and others. I eventually managed to get on top of those terms, sufficiently to read and understand the papers that used them. I did this by searching online for an explanation ("finite axiomatization" is used in mathematical logic) and by digging in the literature for terms that were defined in previous works. I found all of that material online, of course- and where I couldn't find a copy online, I basically had to "wing it" and hope I grokked it right. Searching for anything published even in a major AI conference or journal before the 1990's is a big pain and even university libraries seem to lack physical or electronic copies. To conclude- yes, there are going to be various works left behind if civilisation collapses. But a lot of them are going to be like maps without the key. The people surviving us will be able to read them, but not able to understand them, because they will miss key knowledge, that is currently spread around hundreds of thousands of sources that only experts in niche sub-fields are even aware of.
• tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  A lot of modern resource extraction relies on easily available energy. The days of oil coming out of the ground or being able to dig for coal on the surface have long gone. My guess is you are right, once lost it won't be coming back.
  • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    There's Methane Hydrates underground too. More of that, than oil. Estimated 6X. So we have 6 more tries at civilization?
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      Oil came shooting out of the ground, and even now generally flows. Methane hydrates largely seem to be frozen in tundra and on the seafloor. Even accessing them tends to precipitate release. Liquids are far more fungible than either solids or gasses, and methane hydrates tend to be the latter transforming wantonly to the former with very little in-between. Sort of the worst of all possible worlds. Also a tremendously worse greenhouse gas, though not quite so long-lived as CO2. Centuries rather than millennia.
      • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Oil that fuels our civilization comes from 2000ft down, and takes sophisticated drilling rigs to capture. The days of 'shooting out of the ground' is a century gone, and never fueled much. Methane Hydrate can be 'harvested' by drilling, then pumping a little warm water down the hole, then piping the gas into the harbor where the city enjoys endless free natural gas.
        • dredmorbius 7y ago
          Note the use of past tense in my comment. And oil still flows, as a liquid, from wells. Sometimes thicker, sometimes more volatile. But liquid. The most productive wells and fields tended to be heavy initial producers. Among the most prolific single wells I'm aware of is the First Oil Well of Bahrain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Oil_Well,_Bahrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Oil_Well,_Bahrain Drilled in 1931, initially flowing at 9,600 bbl/day, peaking at 80,000 bbl/day, and (as best I can make out still producing at 35,000 bbl today, 89 years after first oil. Contrast with stripper and marginal oil wells, producing 10-15 bbl/day, or less. But even a stripper well produces a liquid, which stays a liquid (modulo condensate and NGLs). You can pump liquid from the ground, and store it in loosely-covered tanks. It will flow through nonpressurised or lightly-pressurised pipelines. Methane hydrates are solids which sublime to gas. You can't pump solids. You can't store gas in unenclosed containers. Piping requires pressurisation, cooling, or both. This is done, yes, but gas remains generally more problematic than oil. Whilst not an intractable problem, it's a more technical, constrained, limiting, and expensive prospect. Something tells me that "a little warm water" becomes a more complex prospect at deep-sea depths, pressures, and temperatures.
• rnernento 7y ago
  Why? There's sooooooo much electronic equipment in the world right now. Huge datacenters, landfills filled to the brim with electronics. I think it's a stretch to assume that would all just evaporate. You could load the entirety of Wikipedia onto an e-reader and power it with almost no electricity. Data centers are basically bunkers and there is a tremendous amount of replication occurring. If anything I think we're likely to leave by far the largest accumulation of knowledge in history, regardless of how bad things get.
  • gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
    > Data centers are basically bunkers and there is a tremendous amount of replication occurring. All encrypted at rest. Lose those keys and the data is gone...
    • rnernento 7y ago
      I think there are plenty of unecrypted copies of Wikipedia floating around. Good point though.
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    The supply chain is long and fragile. With interruptions in the provisioning of everything from the electricity required to parts for power management, cooling, air handling, networking, memory, disks, CPU, etc., the half-life of such centres would likely be on the order of a few years, even assuming local power. Talent is probably the biggest factor. Even absent greater civilisational collapse, a multi-billion-dollar-a-year income company such as Google can barely keep the lights on for a given project for 5-8 years, if that. Many startups fail even faster.
    • rnernento 7y ago
      I'm imagining the equivalent of our archaeologists finding their way into one of those data centers and figuring out what to do with a hard drive. I wonder what a datacenter would look like 10,000 years from now if no one did anything to it. obviously it wouldn't be powered but I'm thinking there would be recoverable data.
• ekianjo 7y ago
  > If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive. A collapse is never binary (unless you are talking about planetary collapse where life does not recover at all anytime soon). It's actually very hard to even imagine circumstances where the whole body of knowledge we have would be completely lost. Even with 10% of the knowledge and existing machinery left, we could pretty much rebuild everything in a matter of centuries.
  • baybal2 7y ago
    A fictional universe of battletech illustrates that quite realistically. They have fusion reactors for every housewife, godlike metallurgy and rocket engines, but they can't make advanced computers no matter how hard they try after an interstellar nuclear civil war put an end to interstellar trade and, thus, complex economies and long supply chains. Such things require enormous societal organisations to work, and that requires period of civility, prosperity, and material security to make people with brains to do things like that and not to scramble to work on better bomb shelters. After few generations of people living caring about only basic necessities, the society went into downward spiral because the less scientists and engineers there were, the less were available to teach the next generation of them, and maintain advanced manufacturing equipment. Despite the basic knowledge of science still being there, there were nobody with hands on skills and material capacity to make complex manufacturing equipment even after a period of relative prosperity 300 years later. It's like asking a average random engineering or physics PhD to make AMSL 3500 EUV scanner. He will have a basic idea how the thing works, but it will take him more than a lifetime just to make a single part of it if he were to work alone without societal and material facilities for making something so complex.
    • rleigh 7y ago
      I think there's one key flaw in this, as well as it being fiction. There's a difference between being able to do something once or at very low volumes, and then doing it at scale for production. So long as you understand the basic principles, you could make an integrated circuit using hand-drawn acetate or glass sheets and some really simple optics. Or ignore integrated circuits and make stuff from discrete components which you made yourself. You only need to care about making complex EUV scanners much, much later on. In research labs around the world, we make stuff almost completely from scratch all the time. It's costly in terms of labour, and it's doing low volumes with lower tolerances. But it is making real, working stuff. In thousands of companies, research findings are developed into manufacturable products, with a lot of additional development work, optimising and refining. We already know you can go from most concepts, to research, development and production. We've done it, and will continue to do it, in every field we can think of. I think to assert that we couldn't reinvent every one of the technologies humanity has discovered and developed fails to recognise just how resourceful and ingeneous we can be if we have the drive and opportunity. It might be that some technologies would be harder to reinvent, or would take longer to reinvent, but we're a capable lot and I'd bet we could get up to speed quite quickly given a few hints about what was possible. There are thousands of manufacturing techniques from the last century which we have lost the capability to use. Material quality changes, loss of knowledge and skills through retirement, fires, water damage etc. But we could regain each of them if the need was there. Look at FOGBANK for a recent example of a capability which was lost and regained. It takes time, money and resources, but it's possible. The main thing we have in today's world which a collapse would eliminate is effectively limitless energy, and redeveloping that would be far harder than any individual technology. They would lack the more easily exploitable resources we already exhausted, and it would take time to overcome that hurdle through additional technological advances. But that is not a hard barrier. They would have to develop alternative sources and work out different strategies. This might delay things, but it wouldn't stop them entirely. We had sophisticated civilisation before the discovery of coal and oil, and electricity. Wind, water, solar and wood were widely used for mechanical and heating purposes long before electricity was discovered.
• imtringued 7y ago
  There isn't a lot of essential technology beyond energy, agriculture and mining. The biggest driving factor is actually making a society that rewards technological progress. Give that society half a millenia and it will invent computers again. If you wanted to let a society recover from technological collapse then you would merely need a list of possible inventions ordered by the date of their invention. 3D CAD models with micrometer tolerances are not useful to such a society anyway.
  • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Oh you could shortcut tremendously. Once photography was invented (1830s) we could have had integrated circuits. If we had known they were possible. Which we do now. There's ideas that can survive long after devices turn to dust. The germ theory of disease. The Staff system. Ops planning. Cross-fertilization and hybridization. Optics. With these ideas, the devices can be recreated, and in a better sequence that we accidentally created them the first time.
    • monocasa 7y ago
      On the other end, we might not be able to reinvent nuclear technology. Quite a bit of that was based on the Shinkolobwe mine which had 65% uranium ore deposits. These days finding 1% uranium ore is a lucky find.
      • comicjk 7y ago
        That is a fascinating story. It makes fictional countries based on hidden mines, like Wakanda, seem much more plausible.
  • ergl 7y ago
    Given that we've depleted most easily accessible mines as well as easy coal and oil sites, I very much doubt that any future civilization will be able to reach our technological level ever again.
• pygy_ 7y ago
  Alternatively, assuming the current automation trend holds on, our technology may survive the collapse of humanity...