8 ms·

Ask HN: How do you propose to rebuild industry in a post-apocalypse world?

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43236520 I love the concept of Solarpunk or anything similar. However, I fail to understand how to reboot modern industry in a post-apocalypse world. Scenario: I think a deadly virus outbreak is far more likely and devastating than a thermal nuclear war. Let's assume that such an outbreak took out most of the governments and the population, and only local communities start to show up afterwards. How do you reboot modern industry? I'm sure we can scavenge stores and storehouses for a while, but eventually we need to rebuild a very large portion of modern technologies, if not all of them. For a start, how do we produce steel, aluminum and other common metal from raw materials? How do we actually mine them? How do we product antibiotics, needles and everything we need in a hospital? How do we build roads (I think this is actually not too hard)? How do we build transportation tools -- for sure we don't want to rely on animals? How do we build water processing factories, or at least, build water processing tools and pills? As a SWE I feel I know nothing about modern industries. Modern industries are too complex for any small community to even start to think about them. Someone gotta at least preserve some detailed documents for everything so that our future generations have a chance to rebuild them. Take steel production as an example, assuming mining is not a problem (it is), future generations need to know how such a factory is planned, built and operated. I never worked in such a factory but I bet there are tons of papers for just one of them. Encyclopedias won't cut. They don't teach you the 10,000 checks you need to check for all those pipelines and machines. Only factories and industry associations keep such documents, I think. How do we build such a knowledge preservation project? They gotta be so detailed that even laymen can start learning. How do we store them? If we store them electronically, we need to make sure that future generations have the tools to access them. We also need copies of such a project everywhere in the world, because post-apocalypse communities are small and far from each other. I also think such documentations should include smaller scale projects so that communities can actually start using it. If the community only has 1,000 people, a project that needs 10,000 doesn't make any sense. What do you think? Do you think your country already has it covered?

cratermoon 2y ago
Tom Murphy over at Do The Math[1] argues that we would not be able to reboot modernity after an apocalypse. The short version of his argument is that we long ago mined/drilled/farmed/harvested the easy resources that can be gotten with pre-industrial technology. The raw materials we are extracting today require modern methods and materials. We can't bootstrap ourselves from human and animal muscle power back to industrial capacity because it is inadequate to the task. We might have the theoretical knowledge to do it, but we'd be unable to build out the infrastructure. And no, scavenging won't solve it because the energy and technology required to recover the raw materials again requires industrial processes and materials we won't have the ability to harness. 1 https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
- hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
  He has a point. I thought about including this point into my original post but hesitated because I didn't really know how hard/easy to mine resources nowadays. Optimistically, it might not be a blocking issue, because the much smaller population does not need that much resources. But we need to make some calculations. And I'm sure it's going to be very tough for countries that lack resources.
  - analog31 2y ago
    A population without the Haber-Bosch process would be much smaller.
    - hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
      Yeah there are so many key knowledge that ordinary people just take for granted. But that's how we built up modern industries throughout the centuries. I guess it is not realistic to ask for one generation to rebuild everything, and that's why I think we really need a lot of those "knowledge" and "tools" storage. I know many countries have such storage for wars, but are they accessible to ordinary people in case most of the population is wiped out?
      - analog31 2y ago
        Not just knowledge, but the Haber Process is part of a complex machine that involves mining and transporting the feedstock (methane), distributing and applying the product (ammonia), etc. Economic infrastructure (dollar, euro, etc). Nobody knows how to build a major government money system from scratch. We've turned the Earth into a complex and delicate machine for sustaining human life. We don't know how complex or delicate.
    - smallmancontrov 2y ago
      So the population is smaller for a while and then it gets bigger. What of it? Unthinkable suffering, yes, but that wasn't the claim, the claim was about capability.
tptacek 2y ago
There's a book about this! Lewis Dartnell's "The Knowledge". I'm not saying it's actually a real answer, but it's fun in a sort of mental Dwarf Fortress kind of way.
- jshprentz 2y ago
  A similar book is Ryan North's "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler." It is framed as part of a user manual for a rental time machine that can travel as far back as 12,100,000 BCE and return to the present day. Should the time machine break during a visit to the past, the "Repair Guide" section of the manual helpfully explains: "There are no user serviceable parts inside ... ." The rest of the manual (about 400 pages) "contains all the science, engineering, mathematics, art, music, writing, culture, facts, and figures that are required for one human—without any specialized training—to build a civilization from the ground up."
  - ornornor 2y ago
    I read that book cover to cover when it came out and it was pretty cool. It won’t get us back to advanced semiconductors because there is just too much to reinvent to get there but it would get us back to 1930s type lifestyle with modern niceties on top.
- edanm 2y ago
  The Knowledge was nice, but I found Ryan North's book to be much better, at least as a book. Far funnier, with a very nice through line of laughing at how slow humans were to come up with some pretty obvious ideas. (Often, humanity invented something as a toy before realizing, a hundred+ years later, that it could be used for real.)
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I like The Knowledge the same way I like the US version of "The Office", in that any time I just want something on so I can shift my brain off whatever it's jammed up on, I can start it up at any point in the middle and just play it (the audiobook, of course). I don't know that I thought it was a great book, but it was a book-length description of a version of Dwarf Fortress I would definitely play. :) The Knowledge also works with a slightly different set of constraints, in that it's explicitly about rebooting --- that takes a lot of fossil fuel options off the table, for instance, because all the easy-to-get coal and oil has been taken.
cyberge99 2y ago
Check out the Phil Gingery series of books. He discusses how to build a lathe using scrap metal and sand (starting with a foundry). From there it’s all magnitude.
- derstander 2y ago
  Should this be David Gingery instead?
duchenne 2y ago
There is a manga/anime about this: doctor stone. For the knowledge preservation, I guess that a copy of deepseek has most of the required information. But, it would be hard to run it in a primitive world.
- ferguess_k 2y ago
  Thanks. I think the knowledge should contain at least text, image and tutorial videos. It would be nice if it contains some VR training programs too. The only problem is, we need to find secure areas and long term power supply for these stuffs. The "good" thing about the virus is that it's not going to kill the infrastructure, but it kills the people who maintain them. I'm thinking, maybe private citizens should prepare such a small library as well, just for survival. There must be some VR games about camping, fishing, tool making, etc.
AdieuToLogic 2y ago
Scenario: I think a deadly virus outbreak is far more likely and devastating than a thermal nuclear war. Let's assume that such an outbreak took out most of the governments and the population, and only local communities start to show up afterwards. How do you reboot modern industry? I'm sure we can scavenge stores and storehouses for a while, but eventually we need to rebuild a very large portion of modern technologies, if not all of them. Considering the events leading to and resulting in the Dark Ages[0], history would suggest it would take centuries (if not millennia) for societies to rediscover an industrial revolution and get back to where we are now. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
- hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
  I don't disagree with you, but I think we can do something to accelerate such process. Maybe not 1,000 years, maybe just a few generations? After all we already made the progress and now need to relearn and rebuild it. And hopefully enough technicians, engineers and scientists survive.
  - AdieuToLogic 2y ago
    > I don't disagree with you, but I think we can do something to accelerate such process. Maybe not 1,000 years, maybe just a few generations? After all we already made the progress and now need to relearn and rebuild it. Consider as a counter example the Antikythera mechanism[0]. It took well over a millennium for collective knowledge to reach the same point such that similar devices could be created. For immediate survival needs, rediscovery would very likely be quicker. Things like crop irrigation, water management in general, and/or food preservation I imagine would be the quickest to be rediscovered. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  In the right hands, knowledge that something specific can be done is often enough to dramatically accelerate discovery. It allows for serious resource allocation in a specific trajectory, while the rate-limiting step in original discovery is working through innumerable dead ends, which both individuals and institutions are understandably reluctant to commit serious resources towards. See: Soviet thermonuclear program.
cjameskeller 2y ago
I'd suggest looking in the direction of the Global Village Construction Set being worked on by Open Source Ecology: https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Const...
- hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
  Thanks, first time heard about it.
dredmorbius 2y ago
It's probably more useful to look both at how our modern technological society did evolve, and at groups which are seriously considering existential risk, complexity, and potential paths to a reboot. Among the latter is the Long Now Foundation, which has proposed a Manual for Civilization (02010): <https://longnow.org/ideas/manual-for-civilization/ https://longnow.org/ideas/manual-for-civilization/> I've my own disagreements with LNF, but the concept is worth consideration and the effort to compile useful knowlege worth studying for both points of agreement and difference. The question of how, why, where, and when the Industrial Revolution (writ broadly, ~1700 to present) emerged has filled books. The so-called Needham Question asks why it was the British Isles and not China which saw the IR take off. Needham's exploration of this topic, begun in 1954, has produced 27 books to date and remains underway. Wikipedia's article gives a good overview, as well as the general organisation of the work and its contents to date: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China#Volumes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...> I've been partial to histories of the world through the lens of history, most notably Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization: A History (2017) and Energy in World History (1994), and Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power (2009). <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil#Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil#Books> <https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sources-of-power-9780313356278/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sources-of-power-9780313356278...> Smil has also looked at many other elements of technological history, material usage, and energy transitions, see the publications section of his Wikipedia bio above. What's notable is that most of the material and energy ingredients of the modern world have been known since antiquity, but were not, or could not be, usefully employed, for various reasons. There's endless speculation as to why, with theological, technical, scientific, social, political, geographical, and other justifications given. I suspect it's many of these inter-operating, and that the bootstrapping process is a sensitive and delicate one. Many of these elements are covered in the series the Princeton Economic History of the Western World: <https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-princeton-economic-history-of-the-western-world https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-princeton-economic-hi...> There are of course other books which touch on this topic (and I'd strongly recommend Polanyi's The Great Transformation), but if you want one-stop shopping over many dimensions of the question, this is an excellent place to start. My own thinking leads me to believe that there are nine fundamental dynamics to technological mechanisms: - Fuels - Materials - Power transmission and transformation (simple machines, electromagnetic, etc.) - Process knowledge (technical) - Causal knowledge (scientific) - Networks (nodes and links, physical or logical, experience "network effects" and network contagion) - Systems (feedback) - Information (input, parsing, storage/retrieval, logic, transmission) - Hygiene (addressing unintended / unanticipated consequences) In particular, the availability or discovery of new fuels and materials has typically resulted in widespread societal changes and progress, though also in other areas (e.g., information technologies, from speech to writing to maths to printing to digital IT). At the same time, each mechanism has limitations and consequences which also affect capabilities and impose limits. By way of outlining a specific answer: the shape of a solution or reboot will depend tremendously on what materials and fuels are available, how they're accessed (our own waste dumps are likely to be major sources moving forward), and the consequences of past and present industrialisation on that landscape. Fundamental requirements of food, housing, and basic production capital will establish general capabilities. Transportation, over land and sea, possibly air, will determine requirements for self-sufficiency or possibilities of trade. Our ability to address basic production and distribution (whether through market or other means) general living conditions within and between specific societies and polities. I'd additionally strongly recommend the work of William Ophuls and Thomas Homer-Dixon.
defrost 2y ago
Kartiya are like Toyotas. When they break down we get another one. – remark by a Western Desert woman about westerners who work in Indigenous communities
stevefan1999 2y ago
Here's how one Chinese RPG game think of it: they save as much knowledge as possible, and then send it to the outer space, hoping to find a right planet to settle down again and rebuild civilization first, and then one day make a call back home and return earth to its former glory. (That's Genshin Impact/Honkai Impact 2&3) Here's how one Japanese RPG game think of it: they separated human body and soul and send it to outer space as well, and the "people" who lived in the earth will now be humanoid androids instead to prevent themselves from being "corrupted", in other word, your soul could remote control the robot from outer space, and achieved "immortality". (That's Nier Replicant/Gestalt/Automata) But after all, the only problem is: how do we prevent the entropy/information we human build over thousands of year from being annihilated from a single black swan, disastrous event. That's one of the reason I liked informatics so much.
- drivingmenuts 2y ago
  Who are we saving it for? That level of black swan will end humanity and … well, that's it. We won't need the info. Any species that arises after us will likely follow different paths of development. Any species receiving the information would have to be at a very specific point of development in order to even understand what they received. If we're saving it to aid future generations of humans understand us and/or rebuild or something useful, then by all means, save it. But if we're just trying to prove to the universe that we existed, I don't think the universe cares one way or the other.
dgrin91 2y ago
I actually think that in a virus scenario humanity would be able to bounce back fairly quickly (meaning 100 years instead of 10,000), presuming there is a solution for the virus Why? Because the virus doesn't actually kill infrastructure. Many roads and bridges will be ok-ish sitting around with no load for a while. Many factories and tools will be mostly in tact. Most importantly though, it infra will be fine. A laptop with a backup of Wikipedia can sit around for a few decades, and generating some electricity locally is not that big of an issue. That would kickstart humanity's recovery. We don't need to reinvent the wheel, just read how someone else did it
- __d 2y ago
  I think this is both true and yet completely insufficient. There’s a whole system that produces the people and materials that enable every field of endeavor. Having the books and the eg. sub-nanometer scale silicon wafer etching machine does not get you a new iPhone.
  - ferguess_k 2y ago
    Yeah, I agree. The whole chain is long and no one really knows everything. Even China doesn't produce everything albeit it is the manufacturing powerhouse of the world right now. Since I live in Canada, a country that needs to import a lot of manufactured goods from foreign countries, I'm worried that a reboot is not possible. Adding the US into the picture improves quite a bit, but again US has transformed from a manufacturing giant to a financial one for many decades.
    - __d 2y ago
      I was surprised a couple of years ago to read that the US no longer made the aluminum tubing used to make bicycle frames. Despite having quite a significant custom frame building scene and many craftspeople, such a simple raw material was no longer made in the US. I'm sure there are many, many things like this, for most countries.
- hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
__d 2y ago
I think it’s unlikely that a reboot gets us to iPhones again (within hundreds of years anyway) because of the easy resources all gone issue. Can we get back to imperial Roman quality of life? Or 1600s Europe? Maybe, but different. For the first few generations we’d have some people with useful knowledge. After that, interpreting the artifacts will become harder. There also the question of whether the remnant population would want to rebuild the society that had collapsed. I think it’s much more productive to focus on not wiping out most of humanity in the first place.
- hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
  I agree that it looks grim, but I do think preserving a full set of documentation for every industry helps the future generation to reboot. The resource part is not solvable, I have to admit that. The only hope is that with much less population and a forever mind of scarcity we do not need that much resources. Actually, taking away the virus part, looks like we are dead if we can't get out of earth to mine other planets economically before the resources are depleted. But as far as I heard, that is super expensive. Maybe colonization with terraformation is the only answer? But we are so far from it.
  - __d 2y ago
    Information would absolutely be useful. The current generation however will struggle: there won't be an Internet, so all the information will be in paper books. And finding what you want when presented with a library without a paper catalog ... there's a whole bunch of people needed to rebuild indexes that had moved online. I'm confident that small numbers of people can survive with the resources available. Maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands in total, in medium-sized groups on fertile land and in good climates. But I don't think rebooting to 21st century technology would be possible inside hundreds of years.
    - ornornor 2y ago
      Isn’t the Dewey decimal system universal so that the same book will have the same reference no matter which library it’s in? So all it would take is one analog index somewhere and it would apply to every library. Even without it, there are sections that are labeled in libraries that require no index.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dsq 2y ago
One problem is lack of law and order. You can build something and have it stolen by the local warlord or just randomly burned out of spite.

cratermoon 2y ago

Tom Murphy over at Do The Math[1] argues that we would not be able to reboot modernity after an apocalypse. The short version of his argument is that we long ago mined/drilled/farmed/harvested the easy resources that can be gotten with pre-industrial technology. The raw materials we are extracting today require modern methods and materials. We can't bootstrap ourselves from human and animal muscle power back to industrial capacity because it is inadequate to the task. We might have the theoretical knowledge to do it, but we'd be unable to build out the infrastructure. And no, scavenging won't solve it because the energy and technology required to recover the raw materials again requires industrial processes and materials we won't have the ability to harness. 1 https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
He has a point. I thought about including this point into my original post but hesitated because I didn't really know how hard/easy to mine resources nowadays. Optimistically, it might not be a blocking issue, because the much smaller population does not need that much resources. But we need to make some calculations. And I'm sure it's going to be very tough for countries that lack resources.
- analog31 2y ago
  A population without the Haber-Bosch process would be much smaller.
  - hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
    Yeah there are so many key knowledge that ordinary people just take for granted. But that's how we built up modern industries throughout the centuries. I guess it is not realistic to ask for one generation to rebuild everything, and that's why I think we really need a lot of those "knowledge" and "tools" storage. I know many countries have such storage for wars, but are they accessible to ordinary people in case most of the population is wiped out?
    - analog31 2y ago
      Not just knowledge, but the Haber Process is part of a complex machine that involves mining and transporting the feedstock (methane), distributing and applying the product (ammonia), etc. Economic infrastructure (dollar, euro, etc). Nobody knows how to build a major government money system from scratch. We've turned the Earth into a complex and delicate machine for sustaining human life. We don't know how complex or delicate.
  - smallmancontrov 2y ago
    So the population is smaller for a while and then it gets bigger. What of it? Unthinkable suffering, yes, but that wasn't the claim, the claim was about capability.

tptacek 2y ago

There's a book about this! Lewis Dartnell's "The Knowledge". I'm not saying it's actually a real answer, but it's fun in a sort of mental Dwarf Fortress kind of way.

jshprentz 2y ago
A similar book is Ryan North's "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler." It is framed as part of a user manual for a rental time machine that can travel as far back as 12,100,000 BCE and return to the present day. Should the time machine break during a visit to the past, the "Repair Guide" section of the manual helpfully explains: "There are no user serviceable parts inside ... ." The rest of the manual (about 400 pages) "contains all the science, engineering, mathematics, art, music, writing, culture, facts, and figures that are required for one human—without any specialized training—to build a civilization from the ground up."
- ornornor 2y ago
  I read that book cover to cover when it came out and it was pretty cool. It won’t get us back to advanced semiconductors because there is just too much to reinvent to get there but it would get us back to 1930s type lifestyle with modern niceties on top.
edanm 2y ago
The Knowledge was nice, but I found Ryan North's book to be much better, at least as a book. Far funnier, with a very nice through line of laughing at how slow humans were to come up with some pretty obvious ideas. (Often, humanity invented something as a toy before realizing, a hundred+ years later, that it could be used for real.)
- tptacek 2y ago
  I like The Knowledge the same way I like the US version of "The Office", in that any time I just want something on so I can shift my brain off whatever it's jammed up on, I can start it up at any point in the middle and just play it (the audiobook, of course). I don't know that I thought it was a great book, but it was a book-length description of a version of Dwarf Fortress I would definitely play. :) The Knowledge also works with a slightly different set of constraints, in that it's explicitly about rebooting --- that takes a lot of fossil fuel options off the table, for instance, because all the easy-to-get coal and oil has been taken.

cyberge99 2y ago

Check out the Phil Gingery series of books. He discusses how to build a lathe using scrap metal and sand (starting with a foundry). From there it’s all magnitude.

derstander 2y ago
Should this be David Gingery instead?

duchenne 2y ago

There is a manga/anime about this: doctor stone. For the knowledge preservation, I guess that a copy of deepseek has most of the required information. But, it would be hard to run it in a primitive world.

ferguess_k 2y ago
Thanks. I think the knowledge should contain at least text, image and tutorial videos. It would be nice if it contains some VR training programs too. The only problem is, we need to find secure areas and long term power supply for these stuffs. The "good" thing about the virus is that it's not going to kill the infrastructure, but it kills the people who maintain them. I'm thinking, maybe private citizens should prepare such a small library as well, just for survival. There must be some VR games about camping, fishing, tool making, etc.

AdieuToLogic 2y ago

Scenario: I think a deadly virus outbreak is far more likely and devastating than a thermal nuclear war. Let's assume that such an outbreak took out most of the governments and the population, and only local communities start to show up afterwards. How do you reboot modern industry? I'm sure we can scavenge stores and storehouses for a while, but eventually we need to rebuild a very large portion of modern technologies, if not all of them. Considering the events leading to and resulting in the Dark Ages[0], history would suggest it would take centuries (if not millennia) for societies to rediscover an industrial revolution and get back to where we are now. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
I don't disagree with you, but I think we can do something to accelerate such process. Maybe not 1,000 years, maybe just a few generations? After all we already made the progress and now need to relearn and rebuild it. And hopefully enough technicians, engineers and scientists survive.
- AdieuToLogic 2y ago
  > I don't disagree with you, but I think we can do something to accelerate such process. Maybe not 1,000 years, maybe just a few generations? After all we already made the progress and now need to relearn and rebuild it. Consider as a counter example the Antikythera mechanism[0]. It took well over a millennium for collective knowledge to reach the same point such that similar devices could be created. For immediate survival needs, rediscovery would very likely be quicker. Things like crop irrigation, water management in general, and/or food preservation I imagine would be the quickest to be rediscovered. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
smallmancontrov 2y ago
In the right hands, knowledge that something specific can be done is often enough to dramatically accelerate discovery. It allows for serious resource allocation in a specific trajectory, while the rate-limiting step in original discovery is working through innumerable dead ends, which both individuals and institutions are understandably reluctant to commit serious resources towards. See: Soviet thermonuclear program.

cjameskeller 2y ago

I'd suggest looking in the direction of the Global Village Construction Set being worked on by Open Source Ecology: https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Const...

hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
Thanks, first time heard about it.

dredmorbius 2y ago

It's probably more useful to look both at how our modern technological society did evolve, and at groups which are seriously considering existential risk, complexity, and potential paths to a reboot. Among the latter is the Long Now Foundation, which has proposed a Manual for Civilization (02010): <https://longnow.org/ideas/manual-for-civilization/ https://longnow.org/ideas/manual-for-civilization/> I've my own disagreements with LNF, but the concept is worth consideration and the effort to compile useful knowlege worth studying for both points of agreement and difference. The question of how, why, where, and when the Industrial Revolution (writ broadly, ~1700 to present) emerged has filled books. The so-called Needham Question asks why it was the British Isles and not China which saw the IR take off. Needham's exploration of this topic, begun in 1954, has produced 27 books to date and remains underway. Wikipedia's article gives a good overview, as well as the general organisation of the work and its contents to date: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China#Volumes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...> I've been partial to histories of the world through the lens of history, most notably Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization: A History (2017) and Energy in World History (1994), and Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power (2009). <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil#Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil#Books> <https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sources-of-power-9780313356278/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sources-of-power-9780313356278...> Smil has also looked at many other elements of technological history, material usage, and energy transitions, see the publications section of his Wikipedia bio above. What's notable is that most of the material and energy ingredients of the modern world have been known since antiquity, but were not, or could not be, usefully employed, for various reasons. There's endless speculation as to why, with theological, technical, scientific, social, political, geographical, and other justifications given. I suspect it's many of these inter-operating, and that the bootstrapping process is a sensitive and delicate one. Many of these elements are covered in the series the Princeton Economic History of the Western World: <https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-princeton-economic-history-of-the-western-world https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-princeton-economic-hi...> There are of course other books which touch on this topic (and I'd strongly recommend Polanyi's The Great Transformation), but if you want one-stop shopping over many dimensions of the question, this is an excellent place to start. My own thinking leads me to believe that there are nine fundamental dynamics to technological mechanisms: - Fuels - Materials - Power transmission and transformation (simple machines, electromagnetic, etc.) - Process knowledge (technical) - Causal knowledge (scientific) - Networks (nodes and links, physical or logical, experience "network effects" and network contagion) - Systems (feedback) - Information (input, parsing, storage/retrieval, logic, transmission) - Hygiene (addressing unintended / unanticipated consequences) In particular, the availability or discovery of new fuels and materials has typically resulted in widespread societal changes and progress, though also in other areas (e.g., information technologies, from speech to writing to maths to printing to digital IT). At the same time, each mechanism has limitations and consequences which also affect capabilities and impose limits. By way of outlining a specific answer: the shape of a solution or reboot will depend tremendously on what materials and fuels are available, how they're accessed (our own waste dumps are likely to be major sources moving forward), and the consequences of past and present industrialisation on that landscape. Fundamental requirements of food, housing, and basic production capital will establish general capabilities. Transportation, over land and sea, possibly air, will determine requirements for self-sufficiency or possibilities of trade. Our ability to address basic production and distribution (whether through market or other means) general living conditions within and between specific societies and polities. I'd additionally strongly recommend the work of William Ophuls and Thomas Homer-Dixon.

defrost 2y ago

Kartiya are like Toyotas. When they break down we get another one. – remark by a Western Desert woman about westerners who work in Indigenous communities

stevefan1999 2y ago

Here's how one Chinese RPG game think of it: they save as much knowledge as possible, and then send it to the outer space, hoping to find a right planet to settle down again and rebuild civilization first, and then one day make a call back home and return earth to its former glory. (That's Genshin Impact/Honkai Impact 2&3) Here's how one Japanese RPG game think of it: they separated human body and soul and send it to outer space as well, and the "people" who lived in the earth will now be humanoid androids instead to prevent themselves from being "corrupted", in other word, your soul could remote control the robot from outer space, and achieved "immortality". (That's Nier Replicant/Gestalt/Automata) But after all, the only problem is: how do we prevent the entropy/information we human build over thousands of year from being annihilated from a single black swan, disastrous event. That's one of the reason I liked informatics so much.

drivingmenuts 2y ago
Who are we saving it for? That level of black swan will end humanity and … well, that's it. We won't need the info. Any species that arises after us will likely follow different paths of development. Any species receiving the information would have to be at a very specific point of development in order to even understand what they received. If we're saving it to aid future generations of humans understand us and/or rebuild or something useful, then by all means, save it. But if we're just trying to prove to the universe that we existed, I don't think the universe cares one way or the other.

dgrin91 2y ago

I actually think that in a virus scenario humanity would be able to bounce back fairly quickly (meaning 100 years instead of 10,000), presuming there is a solution for the virus Why? Because the virus doesn't actually kill infrastructure. Many roads and bridges will be ok-ish sitting around with no load for a while. Many factories and tools will be mostly in tact. Most importantly though, it infra will be fine. A laptop with a backup of Wikipedia can sit around for a few decades, and generating some electricity locally is not that big of an issue. That would kickstart humanity's recovery. We don't need to reinvent the wheel, just read how someone else did it

__d 2y ago
I think this is both true and yet completely insufficient. There’s a whole system that produces the people and materials that enable every field of endeavor. Having the books and the eg. sub-nanometer scale silicon wafer etching machine does not get you a new iPhone.
- ferguess_k 2y ago
  Yeah, I agree. The whole chain is long and no one really knows everything. Even China doesn't produce everything albeit it is the manufacturing powerhouse of the world right now. Since I live in Canada, a country that needs to import a lot of manufactured goods from foreign countries, I'm worried that a reboot is not possible. Adding the US into the picture improves quite a bit, but again US has transformed from a manufacturing giant to a financial one for many decades.
  - __d 2y ago
    I was surprised a couple of years ago to read that the US no longer made the aluminum tubing used to make bicycle frames. Despite having quite a significant custom frame building scene and many craftspeople, such a simple raw material was no longer made in the US. I'm sure there are many, many things like this, for most countries.
hnthrowaway0315 2y ago

__d 2y ago

I think it’s unlikely that a reboot gets us to iPhones again (within hundreds of years anyway) because of the easy resources all gone issue. Can we get back to imperial Roman quality of life? Or 1600s Europe? Maybe, but different. For the first few generations we’d have some people with useful knowledge. After that, interpreting the artifacts will become harder. There also the question of whether the remnant population would want to rebuild the society that had collapsed. I think it’s much more productive to focus on not wiping out most of humanity in the first place.

hnthrowaway0315 2y ago
I agree that it looks grim, but I do think preserving a full set of documentation for every industry helps the future generation to reboot. The resource part is not solvable, I have to admit that. The only hope is that with much less population and a forever mind of scarcity we do not need that much resources. Actually, taking away the virus part, looks like we are dead if we can't get out of earth to mine other planets economically before the resources are depleted. But as far as I heard, that is super expensive. Maybe colonization with terraformation is the only answer? But we are so far from it.
- __d 2y ago
  Information would absolutely be useful. The current generation however will struggle: there won't be an Internet, so all the information will be in paper books. And finding what you want when presented with a library without a paper catalog ... there's a whole bunch of people needed to rebuild indexes that had moved online. I'm confident that small numbers of people can survive with the resources available. Maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands in total, in medium-sized groups on fertile land and in good climates. But I don't think rebooting to 21st century technology would be possible inside hundreds of years.
  - ornornor 2y ago
    Isn’t the Dewey decimal system universal so that the same book will have the same reference no matter which library it’s in? So all it would take is one analog index somewhere and it would apply to every library. Even without it, there are sections that are labeled in libraries that require no index.

deleted 2y ago

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dsq 2y ago

One problem is lack of law and order. You can build something and have it stolen by the local warlord or just randomly burned out of spite.