One of the important realisations about this topic for me was that humans didn't really evolve a lot during recorded history and a lot of our progress that actu

One of the important realisations about this topic for me was that humans didn't really evolve a lot during recorded history and a lot of our progress that actually made a difference is based on knowledge and hands-on experience that doesn't get recorded in written form. Ancient philosophers already had many profound ideas about the world, experts in ancient egypt fixed teeth with tools comparable to those of a today's dentist, engineers had enough experience and insight to build bridges that endured longer than many nations. It took one ship to block an important canal, one power outage in Texas to take out multiple factories for months, one pandemic(which was not unforeseeable) to completely shift the rules on how many things are done. I don't think it would even take a loss of electricity to see a lot of systems implode. We joked about the toilet paper shortage last year, but it was only funny because it was a relatively unimportant, long-lasting and easy to produce product. It could have been a lot worse.