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> It’s funny when I read the Foundation novels, it seemed silly to me that people could lose track of technology and fall backwards. > Then you read something

> It’s funny when I read the Foundation novels, it seemed silly to me that people could lose track of technology and fall backwards. > Then you read something like this and realize Asimov had a point! And also wildly over-optimistic (as is typical for SF). In the books, I think it took something like 10,000 years to loose the technical knowledge. I bet we could do it in 100.

avidiax 5y ago
20 years. A complicated technology like present aircraft, nuclear energy, petrochemical refining, pharmaceuticals, etc. is resting on the shoulders of a few thousand 40-something-year-olds that have the book learning of the 25-year-olds coupled with the experience and judgement that makes the technology practical, and particularly the knowledge of how to go from zero to one multiplied across many many sub-problems. If something puts a particular technology out of practice for 20 years, many of those now-60-somethings, while still alive, will have forgotten much of what they knew, and not be suitable to put the hard hats back on and get in the field. And this is not accounting for the effects of whatever catastrophe put the technology out of practice to begin with.
bluGill 5y ago
There are two forms of loss, loss of the theory, and loss of the practice. We will lose the practice - all the tribal knowledge that comes from doing it quickly. However so long as we can still read the physics, engineering and math text books we can recreate something similar. It will take a few years and we will make mistakes, but take a bunch of "smart people" and give them time and they could re-create anything from first principals. It only took a few years for the Manhattan project to create nuclear bombs once physics advanced to the point where we realized such a bomb wouldn't need to be the size of an aircraft carrier. Only a few years after that (and a much smaller budget) to make a non-exploding power reactor. There is no reason society couldn't duplicate that if we wanted. Now the tribal knowledge does help a lot, it you still have it you can take a lot of time off. However it isn't needed.
m4rtink 5y ago
Wasnt it rather that it would take 10,000 years to recover to restore the galactic civilization after the crash ?

avidiax 5y ago

20 years. A complicated technology like present aircraft, nuclear energy, petrochemical refining, pharmaceuticals, etc. is resting on the shoulders of a few thousand 40-something-year-olds that have the book learning of the 25-year-olds coupled with the experience and judgement that makes the technology practical, and particularly the knowledge of how to go from zero to one multiplied across many many sub-problems. If something puts a particular technology out of practice for 20 years, many of those now-60-somethings, while still alive, will have forgotten much of what they knew, and not be suitable to put the hard hats back on and get in the field. And this is not accounting for the effects of whatever catastrophe put the technology out of practice to begin with.

bluGill 5y ago

There are two forms of loss, loss of the theory, and loss of the practice. We will lose the practice - all the tribal knowledge that comes from doing it quickly. However so long as we can still read the physics, engineering and math text books we can recreate something similar. It will take a few years and we will make mistakes, but take a bunch of "smart people" and give them time and they could re-create anything from first principals. It only took a few years for the Manhattan project to create nuclear bombs once physics advanced to the point where we realized such a bomb wouldn't need to be the size of an aircraft carrier. Only a few years after that (and a much smaller budget) to make a non-exploding power reactor. There is no reason society couldn't duplicate that if we wanted. Now the tribal knowledge does help a lot, it you still have it you can take a lot of time off. However it isn't needed.

m4rtink 5y ago

Wasnt it rather that it would take 10,000 years to recover to restore the galactic civilization after the crash ?