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This have been bothering me for a while. What would happen if for any reasons the biggest fabs are destroyed? It would take years to get more than half of a cen

This have been bothering me for a while. What would happen if for any reasons the biggest fabs are destroyed? It would take years to get more than half of a century of accumulated knowledge just from patents, and that's not even counting industrial secrets and all the economical machine needed to support such an industry. There have been projects focused on securing Humanity's technological knowledge in case of a worldwide calamity like GitHub storing all its source code in microfilms, but I can't think of any project entirely focused on building from scratch and kick-starting the industrial motor of modern civilization.

sigstoat 6y ago
> What would happen if for any reasons the biggest fabs are destroyed? it "just" takes some years and heaping piles of money to replace them. though probably more if you're trying to replace them all at once, as there aren't a lot of folks who make the equipment to rebuild the fabs. > It would take years to get more than half of a century of accumulated knowledge just from patents, and that's not even counting industrial secrets and all the economical machine needed to support such an industry. sounds like you're more concerned about loss of the personnel and records, rather than the buildings. > I can't think of any project entirely focused on building from scratch and kick-starting the industrial motor of modern civilization. i mean, "world peace" is generally concerned with preventing it from being destroyed in the first place. conventional wisdom is that taiwan bases a chunk of their national security on nobody wanting to see TSMC ruined.
- riversflow 6y ago
  World peace will only go so far if a huge solar storm hits us and we are not adequately prepared.
- TeeMassive 6y ago
  > it "just" takes some years and heaping piles of money to replace them. though probably more if you're trying to replace them all at once, as there aren't a lot of folks who make the equipment to rebuild the fabs. You can't buy an economy. You'll need a petrochemical industry for example for all the insulators and other substances that go into the making of chips and you'll need mines for precious metals or recycle them from scratch and of course an energy industry. Just those few examples are their own are giant economical pyramids on their own rights, and would be very hard to replace even if most relevant university graduates made it alive to this point. > sounds like you're more concerned about loss of the personnel and records, rather than the buildings. I don't know you say this, I was more focused on the process as a whole on a macro scale. > i mean, "world peace" is generally concerned with preventing it from being destroyed in the first place. I never mentioned war in particular. Could be a solar flare, an asteroid, a plague (and look how we were prepared for this one).
yourapostasy 6y ago
> ...I can't think of any project entirely focused on building from scratch and kick-starting the industrial motor of modern civilization. That's a national defense-scale ambition, and it is akin to asking, "what are the minimal constraints to reproduce X tech tree with Y years steady state sustainability?" You're basically asking what it takes to establish an independent human colony without support from home. The Long Now project is addressing a small sliver of the question by looking into what it takes to long-term sustainably perform some acts of information storage and dissemination. Folks into preparedness kick the can on the problem, assuming some certain level of infrastructure remains to pick over the remains of to rebuild/restart. The ones who can hold out for 10-20 years independently before rebooting over the remains of civilization are considered extremely well-funded and hardcore, but their generations-spanning outlook is pretty dim. Even the primitive skills-oriented teams have no good solution to how to pass those skills onto future generations, other than bigger communities to spread the information loss risk, and these teams are typically too small (a couple dozen at most) to look into that direction for a solution. But no one to my knowledge is working on the overall tech tree problem. Our entire civilization runs as a proprietary binary blob, with no reproducibility in the event of a DR incident. Even if you "just" "settle" for "only" a 1940-era tech base, we're probably looking at a minimum 45.3M people to participate. The 1939 "Census of Manufactures" identified 453 separate industry classifications. Guesstimate 100,000 absolute minimum number of people per classification, and that's going to be a lowball number of active participants. Toss in dependents and families, plus ancillary support and we're probably around 60M minimum? US 1939 population was 130.9M, so I'm guesstimating we can't get away with less than 50% to create a sustainable "reaction", 66M in round numbers. I'd probably peg it around 75-80% for robustness, and take all the information encoding technology we have today to increase the density of knowledge and know-how per worker to increase the robustness and recovery speed simultaneously instead of decreasing the number of people in the enterprise. Even with the benefit of perfect 20/20 hindsight of what worked and what did not in the past 80 years, it will likely still be a long slog. To give you a concrete glimpse into what "from scratch" entails, just look at the Gingery book series of what it takes to go from charcoal and scrap metal to a basic machine shop. Getting charcoal from bio-matter is a pretty straightforward task, if you've practiced it before. If you want to extend "scratch" to pulling ore and refining it, now the effort level gets to pretty large scales. Then coming up with refractory-grade clay. Don't forget how to feed yourself in the meantime. The complexity scale just to get beyond subsistence level from scratch is quite harrowing. Civilization is the most complex artifact the human species has created to date. Re-creating it from scratch would be a pretty tall order that no one has yet to offer even a proof of concept upon. I do welcome discussion on how to solve this with alternatives.

sigstoat 6y ago

> What would happen if for any reasons the biggest fabs are destroyed? it "just" takes some years and heaping piles of money to replace them. though probably more if you're trying to replace them all at once, as there aren't a lot of folks who make the equipment to rebuild the fabs. > It would take years to get more than half of a century of accumulated knowledge just from patents, and that's not even counting industrial secrets and all the economical machine needed to support such an industry. sounds like you're more concerned about loss of the personnel and records, rather than the buildings. > I can't think of any project entirely focused on building from scratch and kick-starting the industrial motor of modern civilization. i mean, "world peace" is generally concerned with preventing it from being destroyed in the first place. conventional wisdom is that taiwan bases a chunk of their national security on nobody wanting to see TSMC ruined.

riversflow 6y ago
World peace will only go so far if a huge solar storm hits us and we are not adequately prepared.
TeeMassive 6y ago
> it "just" takes some years and heaping piles of money to replace them. though probably more if you're trying to replace them all at once, as there aren't a lot of folks who make the equipment to rebuild the fabs. You can't buy an economy. You'll need a petrochemical industry for example for all the insulators and other substances that go into the making of chips and you'll need mines for precious metals or recycle them from scratch and of course an energy industry. Just those few examples are their own are giant economical pyramids on their own rights, and would be very hard to replace even if most relevant university graduates made it alive to this point. > sounds like you're more concerned about loss of the personnel and records, rather than the buildings. I don't know you say this, I was more focused on the process as a whole on a macro scale. > i mean, "world peace" is generally concerned with preventing it from being destroyed in the first place. I never mentioned war in particular. Could be a solar flare, an asteroid, a plague (and look how we were prepared for this one).

yourapostasy 6y ago

> ...I can't think of any project entirely focused on building from scratch and kick-starting the industrial motor of modern civilization. That's a national defense-scale ambition, and it is akin to asking, "what are the minimal constraints to reproduce X tech tree with Y years steady state sustainability?" You're basically asking what it takes to establish an independent human colony without support from home. The Long Now project is addressing a small sliver of the question by looking into what it takes to long-term sustainably perform some acts of information storage and dissemination. Folks into preparedness kick the can on the problem, assuming some certain level of infrastructure remains to pick over the remains of to rebuild/restart. The ones who can hold out for 10-20 years independently before rebooting over the remains of civilization are considered extremely well-funded and hardcore, but their generations-spanning outlook is pretty dim. Even the primitive skills-oriented teams have no good solution to how to pass those skills onto future generations, other than bigger communities to spread the information loss risk, and these teams are typically too small (a couple dozen at most) to look into that direction for a solution. But no one to my knowledge is working on the overall tech tree problem. Our entire civilization runs as a proprietary binary blob, with no reproducibility in the event of a DR incident. Even if you "just" "settle" for "only" a 1940-era tech base, we're probably looking at a minimum 45.3M people to participate. The 1939 "Census of Manufactures" identified 453 separate industry classifications. Guesstimate 100,000 absolute minimum number of people per classification, and that's going to be a lowball number of active participants. Toss in dependents and families, plus ancillary support and we're probably around 60M minimum? US 1939 population was 130.9M, so I'm guesstimating we can't get away with less than 50% to create a sustainable "reaction", 66M in round numbers. I'd probably peg it around 75-80% for robustness, and take all the information encoding technology we have today to increase the density of knowledge and know-how per worker to increase the robustness and recovery speed simultaneously instead of decreasing the number of people in the enterprise. Even with the benefit of perfect 20/20 hindsight of what worked and what did not in the past 80 years, it will likely still be a long slog. To give you a concrete glimpse into what "from scratch" entails, just look at the Gingery book series of what it takes to go from charcoal and scrap metal to a basic machine shop. Getting charcoal from bio-matter is a pretty straightforward task, if you've practiced it before. If you want to extend "scratch" to pulling ore and refining it, now the effort level gets to pretty large scales. Then coming up with refractory-grade clay. Don't forget how to feed yourself in the meantime. The complexity scale just to get beyond subsistence level from scratch is quite harrowing. Civilization is the most complex artifact the human species has created to date. Re-creating it from scratch would be a pretty tall order that no one has yet to offer even a proof of concept upon. I do welcome discussion on how to solve this with alternatives.