4 ms·

If we go back to 19th/20th century tech it'll be a problem because all the resources which are easy to extract have already been got. Much of the resource extra

• Retric 4y ago
  Economies adapt to their resource constraints. A huge drop in global population means stuff like iron becomes less valuable as there is so much to extract from the remnants of our civilization. People talk about the lack of fuel, but Hydro power was initially built in September 30, 1882. It further scales to plenty of energy to bootstrap a civilization to modern extraction techniques. 15.8% of total global electricity comes from hydropower there is a vast amount of it even if oil and coal where somehow unavailable. It’s likely they would end up with a strange mix of technology in the short term and a different mix of infrastructure long term. Stuff like steel sailboats with small wood fired steam engines for radios.
  • lin83 4y ago
  • kortex 4y ago
    Don't forget the billions of solar cells that would be literally all over the place, ready to be scavenged. Biofuel can provide most of the roles of coal and oil. The rest could be obtained from cracking the gigatons of plastic trash. We could be doing all this now, it's just not economical.
    • oneoff786 4y ago
      Biofuel is not really sustainable and requires fuel to harvest. Pretty much all major infrastructure equipment runs on fuel. The difficulty of shifting off of fuel is incredibly large.