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I wondered if this was part of the great extraterrestrial life filter: that there were so many "only in this window" chances that a civilization gets. E.g. how
by ethbro 7y ago
I wondered if this was part of the great extraterrestrial life filter: that there were so many "only in this window" chances that a civilization gets.
E.g. how easy would it be for us to bootstrap back to space capabilities after a catastrophic war wiped out a large portion of world economic capability?
- TeMPOraL 7y agoMany, many thousands of years, I believe. If something pulled the plug on our economy, all the technology we have today would disappear in few years to decades. Devices wearing out with no way of repairing them or producing new ones. We'd regress to medieval times, because that would be the most advanced things available energy sources would support. The industrial revolution happened because we had easy access to high-density energy source in the form of coal. Maybe, given enough time, some survivors would figure out how to do a new industrial revolution without it, though I'm not having high hopes. So whatever is left of humanity would have to wait until the Earth recycles enough living matter to create new deposits of high-energy something.