4 ms·

You are right, I haven't thought of it.

• rtkwe 5y ago
  I think it still works out to a net difficulty increase to any group trying to restart an industrialized civilization because of how much easy energy reserves have been permanently extracted. There’s basically no surface level coal/oil/gas that could be tapped into and finding the remaining reserves from scratch might be prohibitively difficult. Then there’s the question of how much of the steel will still be usable when it’s time to extract it. That’s a variable problem depending on how long the ‘dark age’ is before people are rebuilding I suppose. It could be like Doctorow’s Walkaway where there’s abundant enough discarded resources you can almost achieve post-scarcity (but that world never wen through a hard crash it was more building a parallel society than a whole new one). Or it could be centuries later when a lot of the steel will be rust. Hard to say.