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Serious question, what's left after that? The technology involved in food production, medicine, and weapons are very diverse and complex, if you need to keep a

• blagie 4y ago
  You don't need to keep all the supporting industries. If global supply chains collapse tomorrow, farms will continue to operate even if they can't buy new robotic combines, so long as the old ones haven't broken down. We need enough parts to maintain those for long enough to adapt (probably by going back to simpler technologies). If, tomorrow, the US depended on manually picking crops, the US wouldn't collapse if Silicon Valley suddenly switched from building software to harvesting crops by hand. Same thing for most services -- lawyers, therapists, professors, teachers, etc. Some of those would be *painful*, and the economy might be set back by a half-century, but we'd be alive, and we'd eventually recover. To globalize: * Pre-SaaS software. If the US had disappeared in a nuclear war with Russia, Windows 95 wouldn't get any upgrades, but it would keep working for the installed base worldwide. * Entertainment and education. * Luxury goods. * Cars, building materials, and similar, so long as we maintain the basic capacity to keep supply chains going and provide basic shelter. * Digital cameras, trash cans, furniture, kitchen appliances, and 90% of the other stuff we buy