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I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Is the

I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Is there any object permanence in our creations? I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey squares with faded little pictures on them. What are they? What were they used for? Perhaps they know something about electronics. They have opened a few of these mysterious squares. There is that tell-tale green circuit board inside. But how does one turn it on and use it? What does it do? The people of medieval Britain could see the ruins of Roman architecture dotting their landscape. They hadn't seen those people in a long while and had no means to repair the aqueducts or high ways. Yet they built on them and around them none the less. A building is a building and a wall is a wall. But computers? And the hardware we use to build these artifacts of the mind? Vastly more complicated and difficult to reproduce from first principles.

Ensorceled 3y ago
> I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Fundamentally, if there is a collapse, future societies have a VERY tough row to hoe ... we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons and moved the bulk of our science and technology to storage that requires that level of science and technology to access. And encrypted most of it. They'll be trying to climb the technology ladder without coal, oil or natural gas and without any technology documentation from about 2000 onwards.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  I would really like to read a novel about future archeologists who rediscover brute force password lists and rainbow tables as they investigate a ruin. Oh, maybe they could be specifically looking for LLM models, LLMs being no longer possible to train due to energy costs.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    Only to discover (too late of course) that it was the LLMs that caused the collapse.... (See: AFUtD).
    - lacrimacida 3y ago
      LLMs and even weapons and nuclear bombs are harmless by themselves. It’s about who ends up in control of something that has the potential to do more harm than good then I could imagine it’s downhill from there.
- stevezsa8 3y ago
  23 years or so of lost knowledge can be regained in the grand scheme of things. But yes, the lack of easy access to coal and oil would be a problem. Maybe the next civilization will be more careful. That's why I think we should all be trying to help keep society going. I try to do my bit. I just wish the preppers, survivalists, deniers would get involved in their community and try to save it too.
  - Ensorceled 3y ago
    I guess I'm kind of thinking of it from the point of view that of all the technologies that we are inventing to allow civilization to survive without coal and oil are the most likely to be lost.
- politician 3y ago
  This is why I think that we should resolve the climate change crisis by reducing excess atmospheric carbon by seeding the oceans with iron. Oceanic iron seeding results in plankton blooms that consume atmospheric carbon. When the plankton dies, it accumulates on the seafloor. Over geologic time scales, the accumulated plankton will turn into hydrocarbons, renewing the supply of cheap fuels for a post-human civilization millions of years in the future.
  - andrepd 3y ago
    We can't even switch to renewables because that would make some capital owners slightly less money and you're thinking of civilisations millions of years in the future...
    - throwaway96952 3y ago
      Where I live, it's because the taxpayers would have to pay too much and would be exposed to a lot of outside risk (it's usually not that sunny here, and we don't have space for wind turbines nor where to landfill the replaced blades). Here it's the capital owners pushing renewables because it's one of the easiest, cheapest, least objectionable (in case of solar) and least risky energy projects you can build on almost any useless piece of land (everywhere is near the grid in this country), but they just can't fulfill the demands of the state-owned energy company with their solar arrays and wind turbines. Hydro is out of the question, the water-environmentalists hate that - for good reasons I have to say. There is a nearby country that "did" (legislated) the switch... In result, they are the most polluting ones in every metric (per capita, per kWh, per km^2) while having the most expensive electricity on the continent; all metrics are getting worse every year there. Not a good look for the switch, certainly doesn't make most voters in my country motivated to even try - and you'd need to convince half the country. Right now the support is around 5-10%. In conclusion, given that both our worlds coexist at the same time - I think it's not that simple to switch and wouldn't be looking for the reason in either capitalists or states. Perhaps the technology is just not ready for a full-scale switch yet.
  - rurp 3y ago
    If modern society collapses, starting back over with the same approach isn't the best plan. Cheap hydrocarbons are sort of like VC funding. They have allowed society to advance extremely rapidly, in a totally unsustainable way. We have yet to find out if we can stick the landing on transitioning to a sustainable lifestyle. It's possible that humans just aren't wired in a way to responsibly manage the risks introduced by sufficiently advanced technology, at least not at the current rate of change. In a post-apocalyptic world, survivors should really be rethinking the approach that brought that about. Avoiding the cheap hydrocarbon consumption phase might result in a much longer lasting civilazation next time around.
- me_me_me 3y ago
  What a coincidence, I had that discussion with my friends yesterday. We came to conclusions that the scenarios of rebuilding society back up are based on the type of collapse. The greater drop (destruction events) and greater time gap before rebuilding can start anew the harder it would get. A dark age collapse - worst case scenario - where people slowly loose knowledge over generations - due to lack of institutions to protect the knowledge, sounds like a game over scenario. Small clusters of agrarian people would not have resources to support an engineering department tasked with preserving knowledge that is useless for time being. Slowly the tech that could have been re-used or restarted would deteriorate beyond usability, and then beyond repeatability. Its a scary scenario, probably good basis for a book series... there is probably plenty of novels written with that scenario already ;)
  - daemonologist 3y ago
    A Canticle for Leibowitz comes to mind, though while the preservation of knowledge after collapse is a central premise it is not what the novel is about, exactly. Worth reading in any case.
    - me_me_me 3y ago
      Sounds like my next book then :)
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    I think slow collapse would be the best case. It would give time for technologies like blacksmithing to flourish. It would also mean that advanced technology could be used if couldn’t be produced. It would also mean civilization that could have reason to save books. Finally, there is an advantage to knowledge, technology, and science. We forget that pre-industrial technology can be produced on small scale, and that musket and steel armor is a huge advantage. In a hard collapse, all of that would be lost trying to survive. Books would be burned for heat, electronics forgotten, and blacksmiths killed accidentally.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  On the other hand, they get some high-concentrated storages of refined materials, and we will leave lots of those rune-engraved panels that emit an unnatural power when exposed to light. Anyway, unless we are talking about some really unprecedentedly disaster, we'll leave plenty of paper books to help them understand those things and bootstrap their society.
  - delusional 3y ago
    Unless we inexplicably decide to burn all of our accurate books because of some culture war.
    - dingnuts 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Has any book-burning movement in history actually succeeded in getting ride of the books? Because I don't know of any, they manage to destroy a text here or there, but there were always some compatible texts that survived. AFAIK, we really didn't lose useful knowledge to them. (And let's not forget that today we made life much harder for the book burners.) What really does destroy knowledge is it becoming useless for a long period of time. As in losing all of CS because nobody can make a computer yet. But we have an instinct to preserve knowledge, even when it's absolutely useless. This has already saved a lot of technology, and it's hard to imagine how some disaster would stop it. Personally, I have a hard time imagining something that would throw us at the stone (or bronze, or iron) age, but still fail to destroy all the life on Earth.
      - chris37879 3y ago
        Book-burning specifically, no, but the Nazis destroyed a lot of research from a German institute that studied gender issues. Knowledge of the place and some of its research still exists, but a lot of the research was simply gone once the Nazis rose to power. That seems like way less of a liability these days with the internet, but even that is prone to government meddling, and when the people that agree with book burnings run the government, well, there's a very famous prescient book on the topic.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons And basically every accessible ore deposits as well… You can't reach bronze age if there's no available copper nor tin, you just end up stuck in the stone age forever.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  And yet there seems to be shockingly little effort towards making sure that doesn't happen. Why isn't there an underground bombproof chip fab somewhere? It's like as if people don't really care about technological society, they just do what they always do, expand and try to do stuff that is hard and impressive, and if the computers went away... they'd be just as happy as a blacksmith or something... Or maybe even happier.
  - lolc 3y ago
    A modern chip fab needs a supply chain the size of humanity. And you can't bury a reserve humanity in case the regular one goes bust. A buried chip fab would be scrapped for steel.
- Tade0 3y ago
  Unless it's a complete wipeout, there will be plenty of bicycles, solar panels and IKEA knives left - that's a significant leg up in rebuilding civilisation. Before coal there was wood, before oil there was whaling - when the global population is under 1bln, energy isn't much of an issue. The wars over it though - that would be the tough part.
- Loughla 3y ago
  Ever read ringworld? Society without access to minerals and fuel resources. Untold technology that the natives have zero capacity to understand or harness. That thought was very engaging for me. Until all the rishing. Then it spiraled.
- userbinator 3y ago
  we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons ...and put much of it back into the earth in highly processed form, i.e. plastics in landfill.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  There is still a lot of surface coal deposits left. Big open pit mines in Wyoming and Germany. It isn’t the best coal, and is far from areas with ores. We will never mine it since would cause catastrophic warming.
stevezsa8 3y ago
That's an interesting question. I'd be inclined to think The Wonderer has no use for a computer. Their life is mostly about survival, food, shelter... But when society is again ready to automate calculations... it's only a hundred years before computing is back.
- agentultra 3y ago
  Right, I imagine they wouldn't be seeking out the little grey squares. Humans are curious however and the Wonderer is no different. They might only collect them as they come across them and ponder their meaning and reason for existence in those rare hours they have a little leisure time.
rml 3y ago
Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the science fiction book 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller (perhaps you already have :-}) It's set at a monastery in the desert post nuclear apocalypse, where scribes copy wiring diagrams and store artifacts like partially destroyed circuit boards without understanding what they are / how they work. And it builds from there.
- agentultra 3y ago
  Oh heck yes. Also a big influence on the video game, Caves of Qud [0] which I also particularly enjoy. [0] https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Barathrum https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Barathrum
- pilchard123 3y ago
  It also made me think of 'By the Waters of Babylon' by Stephen Vincent Benét. Wikipedia tells me it was also (indeed, originally) published as 'The Place of the Gods'.
- benji-york 3y ago
  Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the 1632 series[0], which is sort of 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' in reverse. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series
bentcorner 3y ago
> There is that tell-tale green circuit board inside. But how does one turn it on and use it? What does it do? They'll probably think it's some sort of coming-of-age fertility totem, and our datacenters will be structures built to pay homage to the gods.
- 3-cheese-sundae 3y ago
  And how exactly are they not?
glitchc 3y ago
The answer to this lies in our history. Given that we know so little about past civilizations, especially older than 6000 years ago, and new discoveries sometimes startlingly reveal how advanced they were, the answer would be no.
fennecbutt 3y ago
To be fair, I've thought about this sometimes too. Like, I contribute to technology myself, but in a very minimal way. And most people don't at all, they consume. But there are a golden few in the world who are doing _everything_. For example how many people in the world actually know how to build an EUV machine like ASML's one? How many people understand the absolute forefront of integrated circuit design? Maybe like, 1-2 dozen people at most? It's a pretty crazy thought. And I bet none of those guys are making as much bank as the suited executives above them.
- agentultra 3y ago
  Exactly. A few people have attempted fabricating simple 8-bit CPUs in their garage but the yields are low without a clean room and it still requires an incredible amount of technology to get started. A good amount of how to set up a garage fabrication lab is probably available through bits of print media, if we're lucky... but recreating a garage from scratch by finding all of that information would be quite the feat.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
twic 3y ago
> Yet they built on them and around them none the less. A building is a building and a wall is a wall. A copper dodecahedron with knobs on the corners is, er ...

Ensorceled 3y ago

> I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Fundamentally, if there is a collapse, future societies have a VERY tough row to hoe ... we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons and moved the bulk of our science and technology to storage that requires that level of science and technology to access. And encrypted most of it. They'll be trying to climb the technology ladder without coal, oil or natural gas and without any technology documentation from about 2000 onwards.

plagiarist 3y ago
I would really like to read a novel about future archeologists who rediscover brute force password lists and rainbow tables as they investigate a ruin. Oh, maybe they could be specifically looking for LLM models, LLMs being no longer possible to train due to energy costs.
- arethuza 3y ago
  Only to discover (too late of course) that it was the LLMs that caused the collapse.... (See: AFUtD).
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    LLMs and even weapons and nuclear bombs are harmless by themselves. It’s about who ends up in control of something that has the potential to do more harm than good then I could imagine it’s downhill from there.
stevezsa8 3y ago
23 years or so of lost knowledge can be regained in the grand scheme of things. But yes, the lack of easy access to coal and oil would be a problem. Maybe the next civilization will be more careful. That's why I think we should all be trying to help keep society going. I try to do my bit. I just wish the preppers, survivalists, deniers would get involved in their community and try to save it too.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  I guess I'm kind of thinking of it from the point of view that of all the technologies that we are inventing to allow civilization to survive without coal and oil are the most likely to be lost.
politician 3y ago
This is why I think that we should resolve the climate change crisis by reducing excess atmospheric carbon by seeding the oceans with iron. Oceanic iron seeding results in plankton blooms that consume atmospheric carbon. When the plankton dies, it accumulates on the seafloor. Over geologic time scales, the accumulated plankton will turn into hydrocarbons, renewing the supply of cheap fuels for a post-human civilization millions of years in the future.
- andrepd 3y ago
  We can't even switch to renewables because that would make some capital owners slightly less money and you're thinking of civilisations millions of years in the future...
  - throwaway96952 3y ago
    Where I live, it's because the taxpayers would have to pay too much and would be exposed to a lot of outside risk (it's usually not that sunny here, and we don't have space for wind turbines nor where to landfill the replaced blades). Here it's the capital owners pushing renewables because it's one of the easiest, cheapest, least objectionable (in case of solar) and least risky energy projects you can build on almost any useless piece of land (everywhere is near the grid in this country), but they just can't fulfill the demands of the state-owned energy company with their solar arrays and wind turbines. Hydro is out of the question, the water-environmentalists hate that - for good reasons I have to say. There is a nearby country that "did" (legislated) the switch... In result, they are the most polluting ones in every metric (per capita, per kWh, per km^2) while having the most expensive electricity on the continent; all metrics are getting worse every year there. Not a good look for the switch, certainly doesn't make most voters in my country motivated to even try - and you'd need to convince half the country. Right now the support is around 5-10%. In conclusion, given that both our worlds coexist at the same time - I think it's not that simple to switch and wouldn't be looking for the reason in either capitalists or states. Perhaps the technology is just not ready for a full-scale switch yet.
- rurp 3y ago
  If modern society collapses, starting back over with the same approach isn't the best plan. Cheap hydrocarbons are sort of like VC funding. They have allowed society to advance extremely rapidly, in a totally unsustainable way. We have yet to find out if we can stick the landing on transitioning to a sustainable lifestyle. It's possible that humans just aren't wired in a way to responsibly manage the risks introduced by sufficiently advanced technology, at least not at the current rate of change. In a post-apocalyptic world, survivors should really be rethinking the approach that brought that about. Avoiding the cheap hydrocarbon consumption phase might result in a much longer lasting civilazation next time around.
me_me_me 3y ago
What a coincidence, I had that discussion with my friends yesterday. We came to conclusions that the scenarios of rebuilding society back up are based on the type of collapse. The greater drop (destruction events) and greater time gap before rebuilding can start anew the harder it would get. A dark age collapse - worst case scenario - where people slowly loose knowledge over generations - due to lack of institutions to protect the knowledge, sounds like a game over scenario. Small clusters of agrarian people would not have resources to support an engineering department tasked with preserving knowledge that is useless for time being. Slowly the tech that could have been re-used or restarted would deteriorate beyond usability, and then beyond repeatability. Its a scary scenario, probably good basis for a book series... there is probably plenty of novels written with that scenario already ;)
- daemonologist 3y ago
  A Canticle for Leibowitz comes to mind, though while the preservation of knowledge after collapse is a central premise it is not what the novel is about, exactly. Worth reading in any case.
  - me_me_me 3y ago
    Sounds like my next book then :)
- ianburrell 3y ago
  I think slow collapse would be the best case. It would give time for technologies like blacksmithing to flourish. It would also mean that advanced technology could be used if couldn’t be produced. It would also mean civilization that could have reason to save books. Finally, there is an advantage to knowledge, technology, and science. We forget that pre-industrial technology can be produced on small scale, and that musket and steel armor is a huge advantage. In a hard collapse, all of that would be lost trying to survive. Books would be burned for heat, electronics forgotten, and blacksmiths killed accidentally.
marcosdumay 3y ago
On the other hand, they get some high-concentrated storages of refined materials, and we will leave lots of those rune-engraved panels that emit an unnatural power when exposed to light. Anyway, unless we are talking about some really unprecedentedly disaster, we'll leave plenty of paper books to help them understand those things and bootstrap their society.
- delusional 3y ago
  Unless we inexplicably decide to burn all of our accurate books because of some culture war.
  - dingnuts 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Has any book-burning movement in history actually succeeded in getting ride of the books? Because I don't know of any, they manage to destroy a text here or there, but there were always some compatible texts that survived. AFAIK, we really didn't lose useful knowledge to them. (And let's not forget that today we made life much harder for the book burners.) What really does destroy knowledge is it becoming useless for a long period of time. As in losing all of CS because nobody can make a computer yet. But we have an instinct to preserve knowledge, even when it's absolutely useless. This has already saved a lot of technology, and it's hard to imagine how some disaster would stop it. Personally, I have a hard time imagining something that would throw us at the stone (or bronze, or iron) age, but still fail to destroy all the life on Earth.
    - chris37879 3y ago
      Book-burning specifically, no, but the Nazis destroyed a lot of research from a German institute that studied gender issues. Knowledge of the place and some of its research still exists, but a lot of the research was simply gone once the Nazis rose to power. That seems like way less of a liability these days with the internet, but even that is prone to government meddling, and when the people that agree with book burnings run the government, well, there's a very famous prescient book on the topic.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
littlestymaar 3y ago
> we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons And basically every accessible ore deposits as well… You can't reach bronze age if there's no available copper nor tin, you just end up stuck in the stone age forever.
eternityforest 3y ago
And yet there seems to be shockingly little effort towards making sure that doesn't happen. Why isn't there an underground bombproof chip fab somewhere? It's like as if people don't really care about technological society, they just do what they always do, expand and try to do stuff that is hard and impressive, and if the computers went away... they'd be just as happy as a blacksmith or something... Or maybe even happier.
- lolc 3y ago
  A modern chip fab needs a supply chain the size of humanity. And you can't bury a reserve humanity in case the regular one goes bust. A buried chip fab would be scrapped for steel.
Tade0 3y ago
Unless it's a complete wipeout, there will be plenty of bicycles, solar panels and IKEA knives left - that's a significant leg up in rebuilding civilisation. Before coal there was wood, before oil there was whaling - when the global population is under 1bln, energy isn't much of an issue. The wars over it though - that would be the tough part.
Loughla 3y ago
Ever read ringworld? Society without access to minerals and fuel resources. Untold technology that the natives have zero capacity to understand or harness. That thought was very engaging for me. Until all the rishing. Then it spiraled.
userbinator 3y ago
we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons ...and put much of it back into the earth in highly processed form, i.e. plastics in landfill.
ianburrell 3y ago
There is still a lot of surface coal deposits left. Big open pit mines in Wyoming and Germany. It isn’t the best coal, and is far from areas with ores. We will never mine it since would cause catastrophic warming.

stevezsa8 3y ago

That's an interesting question. I'd be inclined to think The Wonderer has no use for a computer. Their life is mostly about survival, food, shelter... But when society is again ready to automate calculations... it's only a hundred years before computing is back.

agentultra 3y ago
Right, I imagine they wouldn't be seeking out the little grey squares. Humans are curious however and the Wonderer is no different. They might only collect them as they come across them and ponder their meaning and reason for existence in those rare hours they have a little leisure time.

rml 3y ago

Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the science fiction book 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller (perhaps you already have :-}) It's set at a monastery in the desert post nuclear apocalypse, where scribes copy wiring diagrams and store artifacts like partially destroyed circuit boards without understanding what they are / how they work. And it builds from there.

agentultra 3y ago
Oh heck yes. Also a big influence on the video game, Caves of Qud [0] which I also particularly enjoy. [0] https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Barathrum https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Barathrum
pilchard123 3y ago
It also made me think of 'By the Waters of Babylon' by Stephen Vincent Benét. Wikipedia tells me it was also (indeed, originally) published as 'The Place of the Gods'.
benji-york 3y ago
Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the 1632 series[0], which is sort of 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' in reverse. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series

bentcorner 3y ago

> There is that tell-tale green circuit board inside. But how does one turn it on and use it? What does it do? They'll probably think it's some sort of coming-of-age fertility totem, and our datacenters will be structures built to pay homage to the gods.

3-cheese-sundae 3y ago
And how exactly are they not?

glitchc 3y ago

The answer to this lies in our history. Given that we know so little about past civilizations, especially older than 6000 years ago, and new discoveries sometimes startlingly reveal how advanced they were, the answer would be no.

fennecbutt 3y ago

To be fair, I've thought about this sometimes too. Like, I contribute to technology myself, but in a very minimal way. And most people don't at all, they consume. But there are a golden few in the world who are doing _everything_. For example how many people in the world actually know how to build an EUV machine like ASML's one? How many people understand the absolute forefront of integrated circuit design? Maybe like, 1-2 dozen people at most? It's a pretty crazy thought. And I bet none of those guys are making as much bank as the suited executives above them.

agentultra 3y ago
Exactly. A few people have attempted fabricating simple 8-bit CPUs in their garage but the yields are low without a clean room and it still requires an incredible amount of technology to get started. A good amount of how to set up a garage fabrication lab is probably available through bits of print media, if we're lucky... but recreating a garage from scratch by finding all of that information would be quite the feat.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

twic 3y ago

> Yet they built on them and around them none the less. A building is a building and a wall is a wall. A copper dodecahedron with knobs on the corners is, er ...