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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 solut

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
Yeah I think that's the "pro" part. But I think potentially a virus can kill a lot more than a nuclear war (I could definitely be wrong) so there aren't many people left. Most resources online don't really teach common people to build factories anyway. For example how does a community build a small steel factory? We need a lot more details than Wikipedia.
dredmorbius 2y ago
Probably best not to get hung up on specific scenarios, though if you want to explore that space, Jared Diamond, Collapse, offers a theory of civilisational collapse and likely mechanisms based on previous history: <https://archive.org/details/jared-diamond-collapse-how-societies-choose-to-fail-or-succeed https://archive.org/details/jared-diamond-collapse-how-socie...> I could see a pathology, one more likely attacking our agricultural base than humans directly, as being one fairly likely precipitating event. A cascade failure, including supply-chain collapse and financial contagion as well as developing political dysfunction and potentially regional or global war as consequential features of a more fundamental failure, and then the problems of local self-sufficiency in a world that's grown all-but-entirely interconnected, might do it. But the question here is far more how to recover and with what knowledge than "why'd it happen in the first place". Neal Stephenson's unspecified "agent" from Seveneves is useful here. We know that something destroyed the Moon, what it was specifically isn't really of any narrative importance.

__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

Yeah I think that's the "pro" part. But I think potentially a virus can kill a lot more than a nuclear war (I could definitely be wrong) so there aren't many people left. Most resources online don't really teach common people to build factories anyway. For example how does a community build a small steel factory? We need a lot more details than Wikipedia.

dredmorbius 2y ago

Probably best not to get hung up on specific scenarios, though if you want to explore that space, Jared Diamond, Collapse, offers a theory of civilisational collapse and likely mechanisms based on previous history: <https://archive.org/details/jared-diamond-collapse-how-societies-choose-to-fail-or-succeed https://archive.org/details/jared-diamond-collapse-how-socie...> I could see a pathology, one more likely attacking our agricultural base than humans directly, as being one fairly likely precipitating event. A cascade failure, including supply-chain collapse and financial contagion as well as developing political dysfunction and potentially regional or global war as consequential features of a more fundamental failure, and then the problems of local self-sufficiency in a world that's grown all-but-entirely interconnected, might do it. But the question here is far more how to recover and with what knowledge than "why'd it happen in the first place". Neal Stephenson's unspecified "agent" from Seveneves is useful here. We know that something destroyed the Moon, what it was specifically isn't really of any narrative importance.