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When things like this happen, I think about how during WW1 people talked about the possibility of "bombing a country back to the stone age". Destroy enough libr
by sixothree 1y ago
When things like this happen, I think about how during WW1 people talked about the possibility of "bombing a country back to the stone age". Destroy enough libraries, have enough people abandon their areas of specialty employment into different fields, and given enough time, you can erase a society's institutional knowledge and capability.
If we lose enough key resources like the Internet Archive we could definitely shifting the pendulum in that direction.
- petralithic 1y agoThe siege of Baghdad and the House of Wisdom by the Mongols arguably still affects us today.
- andirk 1y agoAnd the entire "Dark Ages"?
- petralithic 1y agoDark Ages, maybe not as much since Europe recovered during the Renaissance, but the Middle East hasn't necessarily been too stable since the Islamic Golden Age.
- gosub100 1y agoI think it would only be a mild tragedy, if there is such a thing, if, say, we lost 3nm lithography or carbon fiber airplanes. Most of that stuff is luxury anyway. We wouldn't lose the core science and data, it might set us back for a generation which isn't necessarily a bad thing.