6 ms·

Ask HN: If we woke up tomorrow and...

56 points by ftse 18y ago

If we woke up tomorrow and all technology had gone, assuming we could still make a fire, how long would it take to get back to where we are now?

mcav 18y ago
Long enough that most of humanity would die very quickly. Without tools to grow food to satisfy our current population, we couldn't make enough. Couple that with lack of heating for cold regions, general lack of knowledge of survival skills, and the realization that we must first get metal before we can even create decent tools... I'd say we'd be goners.
- agotterer 18y ago
  Sure a lot of humanity would be wiped out. But the strong will survive. The resourceful ones would be left standing in the end. People in cold regions would work there way to warmer ones or stay warm with fire and making clothing. I'm not sure the scope of the original question. Whether we are starting from pre-language times or we wake up tomorrow as is with no technology. But assuming we aren't starting from scratch and still have basic communication and enough skills to irrigate and hunt we could survive.
- dctoedt 18y ago
  Don't forget to stir in another factor: Localized conflicts would soon break out over scarce food and other resources, It's an interesting question whether the people most likely to prevail in such conflicts (and thus most likely to avoid near-term starvation) would be those possessing the skills to recreate even rudimentary technologies.
- khafra 18y ago
  Also, we've used up a good deal of what got us started the first time. Unless the metal ores were returned to their starting places in the ground when the technology disappeared, the quantities reachable and usable without high technology simply aren't there anymore--a chicken and egg problem. We'd also have far less runway to wean ourselves off fossil fuels this time; coal would be useful, but whale oil would be a more workable solution than petroleum. So even if when technology disappeared we lost the need for food and water, we still might never make it back.
dotmatrix 18y ago
We still have the knowledge, so assuming that knowledge is utilized i guess you could answer that question by simply reverse engineering the amount of time it took to obtain the knowledge of achieving a significant process and then determine from that point how long did it take to implement the solution. Since you would be implementing the solution only you would then need to know how many key solutions are you re building and you could figure this question out quite easily.
noodle 18y ago
i think you should clarify more. for example: do we still have the knowledge but have no material technological items? do we still have the stuff but no knowledge? are we being impeded by some sort of magical force? are there dragons?
- TweedHeads 18y ago
  If we have the knowledge, ten years. If we don't, a thousand. If there is magic, until the magician decides. If there are dragons, never.
  - bprater 18y ago
    Stop the dragon bashing!
    - pistoriusp 18y ago
      Any mention of dragons brings fond memories the Pug, Macros, Thomas and Arutha. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then I suggest you pick up a copy of Feist's "Magician."
      - whatusername 18y ago
        I noticed wandering past a bookshop today he has a new title out... http://www.amazon.com/Rides-Dread-Legion-Book-Demonwar/dp/0061468363 http://www.amazon.com/Rides-Dread-Legion-Book-Demonwar/dp/00... Actually - interesting that Amazon don't have it available for the next week - I saw it on the shelf in Australia. Feist's newer work is still enjoyable - but it's no-where near the level of his earlier stuff.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - jodrellblank 18y ago
    If we have the knowledge? If who has? Even with everyone alive today, the world's premier superpower (the USA) has recently let on that it can no longer make components of its current nuclear missile fleet. http://www.domain-b.com/aero/mil_avi/miss_muni/20090310_trident_missile.html http://www.domain-b.com/aero/mil_avi/miss_muni/20090310_trid... All the replies saying "we'd know how to X" are ... optimistic.
pavelludiq 18y ago
At first i would be concerned with not freezing to death and finding food, I'll leave technological advancement for the better days. You see, we started to develop technologies only after we had people who could afford not to have to kill their own food, so they had some free time to make now tools or have new ideas. cave men weren't stupid, they just didn't have any spare time to waste.
jfoutz 18y ago
I assume every artifact made by man disappears instantly? No books, no canned food, no clothes. Everyone i know would die in a week. My grandma grew up very poor in the dustbowl. She would have a chance, but it's cold at night. So, you're left with people who can recreate their tools in a few days, and don't really need what they have. the !Kung in africa? There's probably 20,000 people in the world like that. Expansion around the globe would likely happen as fast as the first time. 100k years? I think teching back up would take a lot longer. The easy to get natural resources are gone. 100k years aren't really enough for plants to turn back into oil. Maybe really big earthquakes would bring metals to the surface. Once upon a time there were black puddles of oil on the ground. Now, we have to pump saltwater into deep reserves to get the oil out. I suppose there's plenty of easy to reach coal. I don't know much about copper mines, they always look very deep to me. perhaps there is a lot of easy to get surface copper, just not in high enough concentrations to make it worthwhile to mine.
- anamax 18y ago
  > Once upon a time there were black puddles of oil on the ground. Now, we have to pump saltwater into deep reserves to get the oil out. Hmm. I know where to find some of said black puddles. While there are reasons why they're not being exploited today, I guess that makes me pretty valuable when all the tech goes away, at least until someone figures out that we need metal to deal with said "puddles".
  - seanb 18y ago
    Just out of curiosity, what part of the world are these puddles in? Assuming that all technology won't be disappearing anytime soon, it's probably safe to share ;)
    - anamax 18y ago
      They're in the US. One is actually well known, but it looks like no one thinks of it that way, at least for now.
      - 18y ago
baddox 18y ago
If every piece of human technology disappeared, I would probably die in a few seconds, since I sleep on the 7th hour.
cmos 18y ago
Now that we have all witnessed the greatness that is online porn, probably not that long.
brianobush 18y ago
funny thing was just the other day I was showing my children how to make fire with two sticks. Didn't work. Father failure, though they did understand the idea of friction and the result: heat. Now, my second attempt is using a boot lace with bow (from curved stick) to turn a wood axle with a top brace. Makes smoke, but no fire yet. Somehow, this was much easier when I was younger. However, my point is the basic skills are just as important as the knowledge.
known 18y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_Away http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_Away
- Zev 18y ago
  I prefer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe - Crusoe built all sorts of things to make his life easier from wood. Tom Hanks just spoke to a volleyball the entire time.
gcheong 18y ago
Do you have an interview at Google or Microsoft?
raquo 18y ago
So the question is whether the humanity will be able to stabilize before current generation (with the knowledge of technology) will die (including because of age)
pg 18y ago
Despite the generally frivolous answers, this is an interesting question and one I often wonder about. What turns out to take up all the time if we want to reproduce where we are now? Presumably the optimal plan is to spend practically all your effort on machine tools. It would be interesting to be able to figure out what would be the best benchmark of progress. Would it be the precision with which you could machine metal? That might do up to about 1900. It might turn out that most of the time was spent on something nontechnical, like moving stuff from place to place before you'd developed fast ways of doing that. So maybe in practice the most important benchmark would be how fast you could move stuff. Reproducing where we are now would in some ways be harder than getting here was. E.g. the most accessible coal and mineral deposits used to be sitting right on the surface, but now those are gone.
- jpwagner 18y ago
  "Reproducing where we are now would in some ways be harder than getting here was.." Opposing factor to speed up these sorts of setbacks is that much of the experimentation/testing would already be done. We'd know the fuel efficiency of coal for example. We'd know not to bother with methods that have failed. I'm more curious what technologies we'd realize never needed to exist. Would electric cars be the route we choose? Would open source operating systems be 100% adopted...etc
- blackguardx 18y ago
  Minerals are definitely the hardest part. You wouldn't need coal. If you can make a fire, charcoal is easily produced from wood. Making forges and blast furnaces isn't too difficult. To build one, pile up dirt or clay walls to form a bathtub like structure. Make sure you have holes at the base so air from your bellows can make it though. Construct a fire in the tub and pile on alternating layers of charcoal and iron ore. Keep pumping on the bellows for the next few days until the the charcoal burns up. Your iron ore should now have turned into pieces of high carbon steel, perfect for making any tool from ploughs to blades. You might be able to find iron ore as dark colored sand in stream beds. I don't know where you would find copper or zinc. Once you have steel, everything follows. If society knows about existence of a technology, reproducing it shouldn't be difficult. The hardest part about progress is inventing brand new things. If you are interested in learning how to make machine tools from very simple materials, look up the Gingery series on making a complete metalshop from scrap: http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/index.html http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/index.html
nixme 18y ago
Are you asking this question in reference to last night's Battlestar Galactica finale? It was somewhat surprising to see everyone give up technology so easily and start anew with just clothing, some food, and their own language. But I guess being cooped up in those ships for that long and seeing how the abuse of technology led them to such events could have that effect. To answer your question, it's hard to guess. Without medical or agricultural technology, I think most of our current population would die out. The rest would war over the remnants of societal structure. Technical progress, as we see it, would take a long time to begin -- primarily dependent on stability. There are too many unpredictable events that would alter the length of time before returning to stability and our current standards.
- qw 18y ago
  I have not seen that episode. Thank you very much for telling me how it ends. I guess that will teach me the dangers of not seeing everything the second it airs. A couple of comments like that, and I can throw away my PVR completely, and save a lot of money. To keep on topic, I think that many would die due to lack of food and medical technology, but it wouldn't take long to reach the technology level of 1900. The difference between then and now, is that we know it is possible. How much time was wasted because people didn't think something was possible?
  - nixme 18y ago
    Sorry, I honestly did not mean to ruin it for anyone. There's plenty in the episode worth watching that a few comments can't possibly tell.
  - tlrobinson 18y ago
    Seems like you should have stopped reading after the first sentence.
    - qw 18y ago
      The first sentence said it all really. The article was about giving up technology. The only remaining fact would be if they had a choice or not.
yters 18y ago
One big problem is that we need working technology to access much of our technical knowledge.
- jpwagner 18y ago
  HA! I love this thought. I hope we can assume that knowledge is infinitely accessible. If not, it may turn out more like "idiocracy" in that initially we build things that suck.
kenver 18y ago
If we woke up and all the technology was gone, would we want to get back to where we are now...a second time around would be a good chance to fix/improve stuff.
cool-RR 18y ago
I think it's a very interesting question. I would say three to five years. In my opinion, technological tools are overrated. Most things can be built by hand using common materials. Actually, it would be a very cool project! Take a bunch of hackers. Set up an isolated camp for them in a remote area. There will be no technology there, but there will be plenty of edible plants, fresh water, and some medical supplies. The hackers will be supplied with a sample of every raw material that Earth has to offer. And when I say raw, I mean, for example, iron ore. Have video cameras all around the place to make sure they are not bringing technology from anywhere. Measure how long it takes them to build, say a computer. I think it will be less than a year. (The reason I answered 3-5 years to the main question is because in the situation you described most humans will be busy fighting each other, and hackers will have less time to devote to rebuilding technology.)
geuis 18y ago
Was this somehow inspired by the BSG finale? However, I find this kind of question fascinating. This question is posited in the book Marrow, and it takes a very advanced society about 5000 years to get back to where they were. I think the situation right away would work more or less like this. Within the first few weeks to months, nasty. We're literally talking about BILLIONS of people that will starve to death within a matter of several months. Based on your scenario, we're not looking at instantly restored nature. Vast areas of the world would suddenly be large, vacant, barren land where the cities were. Places that were verdant farm land before being paved over by roads, cities, and suburbs are likely to be nutrient starved and unfarmable for many years. You would immediately have millions of people moving out into surviving "wilderness" areas. Trees burning, wild animals being hunted for food. I'm mainly thinking of the U.S., but the ideas apply to most other industrialized countries. "Third world" and agrarian societies might actually fair better. We're talking about the utter decimation of many remaining "protected" species. Suddenly removing everything humans have built, at this point in history, would seriously fuck what's left of nature on the land. On the other hand, humans would no longer have immediate access to the deep ocean. Given the results of ocean recovery in protected areas in recent years, its encouraging to think that many threatened and endangered species and ecosystems would immediately start recovering. The next important thing to take into account is culture and religion. There will likely be surviving populations worldwide that represent the varieties of cultures and religions that we already have. In small pockets, you might find members of the intelligentsia trying to recreate primitive paper as soon as possible, to re-record as much general knowledge as they can. In other parts of the world, particularly the Muslim populations, there will be a religious fervor and general destruction of any remaining advanced knowledge. This will also happen in much of America, due to our retarded Evangelican populations. We might actually find more preservation efforts in Europe and Japan, due to their longer-term cultural histories mixed with being extremely modern. I can't say about China, but they have a long history and might also work to preserve knowledge. People are adaptable, and anything short of a global disaster that fucks the basic life processes of the world, people will survive. It would likely take several hundred years at a minimum, and at most several thousand, before we saw some resemblance of modern technology re-emerging. However, the only cultural artifacts that people would have is what was created from the morning after, onward. There would be no Pyramids, Stonehenge, Jerusalem, Aztec ruins, or anything. No cave paintings, primitive burials, etc. By saying "all technology", this means that all physical remains of our progress would need to disappear too. We would only be left with our memories. In every graveyard around the world, all caskets would disappear. All pacemakers and artificial joints would be gone from the skeletons. They would also be gone from the living. After a couple of generations without any physical remnants of our civilization's evolution, with no pre-history, our descendants would be completely cut off from their past. They would of course be able to re-learn about evolution over the billions of years of life because fossils won't go anywhere. They could relearn about our own evolution, but only from the biology side of things. I would imagine that future historians would eventually realize their legends of an ancient global civilization might have some credence, even though there is no physical evidence. There would be the tell-tale signs, the footprint, that our technology had even though the tech itself is gone. There would be the atmospheric carbon levels, the concentrations of uranium where reactors and weapons were, and hundreds of other alterations to the physical world that we've made.
jodrellblank 18y ago
All technology? I guess we're back at the bottom of the Civilization advances tree, eh? Do you want triremes, maths, militia or granaries? England has ~65 millions of people. Take away all manmade technology (including buildings, tarmac, concrete) and any city would be many square miles of bare earth collapsing into holes where sewers and tunnels and underground trains once were. Within a day or two it would be many square miles of human waste, corpses, mud if it rained, and people making their way to the nearest rivers. Within a couple of weeks, significant fractions of people have starved or died of lack of medical treatment, fighting, illness from river water contaminated with sewage and corpses, etc. OK, you can drink from the river you may not get ill for a while. What can you eat but other people? City areas -> wastelands. Out in the country, farmers with easily harvested crops in season are the best off, until they get looted. With no food stores or shops, animals and current crops will be eaten quickly and that's pretty much that. Good luck surviving on hedgerow food and hunting with no experience and everyone else trying to as well. Some strong willed resourceful people in remote niches will survive (nobody could travel to them very quickly). After a few years we'll see who. Small farms, maybe some farm animals, fast growing trees coming into usable sizes. Levers, (wooden) wheels, barrows, hammers hoes, heaters, cookers, flint/stone axes, they'll be around. Maybe in short order some beach sand melting -> glass jars, glasses. The people who survive are the people who currently live with reduced technology and will be busy staying alive. What then? I don't know. A few decades to a population big enough and connected enough for mass trade, I suppose. By then a similar sort of grind up through metalwork, blacksmithing, banking, debt, economic collapse... What technology could we skip to that would hasten us through such developments? I say at least two hundred years.
stavrianos 18y ago
Seems to me that there are two ways it could go, depending on how you take the question. If when all the tech disappears the resources reappear, I'd say it doesn't take too long at all. Maybe ten years, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand, but nothing more than that. This is a sort of "If people with modern knowledge fall back in time" scenario. On the other hand, if the resources aren't available, ie all the iron that's been mined over the last hundred years is simply gone then we'd be pretty boned, and would probably go extinct. This is more of a post-apocalyptic scenario, except you can't even mine the I-beams out of old skyscrapers, but all the cheaply accessible metal's been mined anyways so your civilization simply can't advance past the bronze age (or wherever you manage to scrape it up to). We'd be like the australian aborigines, who lived for (if wikipedia is to be believed) an astronomical 40000 years on the continent without developing anything more sophisticated than the boomerang.
nazgulnarsil 18y ago
I think people speculating in this thread would greatly enjoy Earth Abides by George Stewart.
tesseract 18y ago
You'd hopefully get pretty far while current experts are still alive. Otherwise, you'd better at least have a plan for getting printing and libraries up and running pretty darn quickly so they can leave instructions for the next generation...
electromagnetic 18y ago
Well I suppose the bigger question is, does everything the technology created go away too? Technology built everything, but do all our houses disappear or just all the wiring and plumbing and crap? Because if the house goes, then surely so should all the people who were brought about by technology. Realistically there would be approximately (assuming the max for 10,000 years ago) about 10 million people on the planet. If so, with the distribution spread throughout the world then I think if humanity were born with our present knowledge I think we would do rather well, presuming we were swapped out with the Cro-Magnon. I bet about 50% of the people would probably die off within the first decade just through lack of knowledge (again presuming even IQ and knowledge distribution), but if people managed to start bringing back technology I think we could advance things pretty quick. I mean one person with the knowledge of how to make steel and devoted their life to teaching everyone how to make advanced tools, well we'd have skipped 9,800 years in the space of maybe 50. So I suppose it's all in how it would happen and then a large handful of random chance and human nature. I mean if the one guy who remembered how to build a blast forge, also knew how to make gun powder (I know the principle on how to build both) decided to instead of helping the world decided to build a machine gun and build his own country then it could all end when someone usurped him without the knowledge to build tools or weapons.
jodrellblank 18y ago
On reading the replies, I suddenly remembered this: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/planning-fallac.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/planning-fallac.html My revised estimate for the time it would take to recreate all of history is approximately as long as it took the last time, plus a bit.
jodrellblank 18y ago
The last time a similar topic came up at HN, it was the "what if you time travelled back to the past" question. I didn't think of it in time for that thread, but I wanted to turn the question around: Looking back through history, if we wanted to spot a technologically advanced person appearing in the past and trying to create 'future' technology, what markers should we look for? (and ... has this happened?).
kellishaver 18y ago
I think you would see a large drop in population before we were able to rebuild. Population growth only occurs when the technology can support it. If we were starting over without any of the knowledge we have now, then it seems reasonable to assume that it would take roughly the same amount of time. If we had history to look back on, then maybe we would be looking at a few hundred years instead of a few thousand. I think the more interesting question is, if we had the knowledge of our past history to look back on, what would we do differently? Would we be more green from the start, for instance? A lot of the problems with adapting to green tech today isn't that the technology is necessarily so knew and unknown, it's that well-established infrastructures and systems are in place that are implemented on vastly different technologies and the cost/logistics of replacing them is prohibitive.

56 points by ftse 18y ago

If we woke up tomorrow and all technology had gone, assuming we could still make a fire, how long would it take to get back to where we are now?

mcav 18y ago

Long enough that most of humanity would die very quickly. Without tools to grow food to satisfy our current population, we couldn't make enough. Couple that with lack of heating for cold regions, general lack of knowledge of survival skills, and the realization that we must first get metal before we can even create decent tools... I'd say we'd be goners.

agotterer 18y ago
Sure a lot of humanity would be wiped out. But the strong will survive. The resourceful ones would be left standing in the end. People in cold regions would work there way to warmer ones or stay warm with fire and making clothing. I'm not sure the scope of the original question. Whether we are starting from pre-language times or we wake up tomorrow as is with no technology. But assuming we aren't starting from scratch and still have basic communication and enough skills to irrigate and hunt we could survive.
dctoedt 18y ago
Don't forget to stir in another factor: Localized conflicts would soon break out over scarce food and other resources, It's an interesting question whether the people most likely to prevail in such conflicts (and thus most likely to avoid near-term starvation) would be those possessing the skills to recreate even rudimentary technologies.
khafra 18y ago
Also, we've used up a good deal of what got us started the first time. Unless the metal ores were returned to their starting places in the ground when the technology disappeared, the quantities reachable and usable without high technology simply aren't there anymore--a chicken and egg problem. We'd also have far less runway to wean ourselves off fossil fuels this time; coal would be useful, but whale oil would be a more workable solution than petroleum. So even if when technology disappeared we lost the need for food and water, we still might never make it back.

dotmatrix 18y ago

We still have the knowledge, so assuming that knowledge is utilized i guess you could answer that question by simply reverse engineering the amount of time it took to obtain the knowledge of achieving a significant process and then determine from that point how long did it take to implement the solution. Since you would be implementing the solution only you would then need to know how many key solutions are you re building and you could figure this question out quite easily.

noodle 18y ago

i think you should clarify more. for example: do we still have the knowledge but have no material technological items? do we still have the stuff but no knowledge? are we being impeded by some sort of magical force? are there dragons?

TweedHeads 18y ago
If we have the knowledge, ten years. If we don't, a thousand. If there is magic, until the magician decides. If there are dragons, never.
- bprater 18y ago
  Stop the dragon bashing!
  - pistoriusp 18y ago
    Any mention of dragons brings fond memories the Pug, Macros, Thomas and Arutha. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then I suggest you pick up a copy of Feist's "Magician."
    - whatusername 18y ago
      I noticed wandering past a bookshop today he has a new title out... http://www.amazon.com/Rides-Dread-Legion-Book-Demonwar/dp/0061468363 http://www.amazon.com/Rides-Dread-Legion-Book-Demonwar/dp/00... Actually - interesting that Amazon don't have it available for the next week - I saw it on the shelf in Australia. Feist's newer work is still enjoyable - but it's no-where near the level of his earlier stuff.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- jodrellblank 18y ago
  If we have the knowledge? If who has? Even with everyone alive today, the world's premier superpower (the USA) has recently let on that it can no longer make components of its current nuclear missile fleet. http://www.domain-b.com/aero/mil_avi/miss_muni/20090310_trident_missile.html http://www.domain-b.com/aero/mil_avi/miss_muni/20090310_trid... All the replies saying "we'd know how to X" are ... optimistic.

pavelludiq 18y ago

At first i would be concerned with not freezing to death and finding food, I'll leave technological advancement for the better days. You see, we started to develop technologies only after we had people who could afford not to have to kill their own food, so they had some free time to make now tools or have new ideas. cave men weren't stupid, they just didn't have any spare time to waste.

jfoutz 18y ago

I assume every artifact made by man disappears instantly? No books, no canned food, no clothes. Everyone i know would die in a week. My grandma grew up very poor in the dustbowl. She would have a chance, but it's cold at night. So, you're left with people who can recreate their tools in a few days, and don't really need what they have. the !Kung in africa? There's probably 20,000 people in the world like that. Expansion around the globe would likely happen as fast as the first time. 100k years? I think teching back up would take a lot longer. The easy to get natural resources are gone. 100k years aren't really enough for plants to turn back into oil. Maybe really big earthquakes would bring metals to the surface. Once upon a time there were black puddles of oil on the ground. Now, we have to pump saltwater into deep reserves to get the oil out. I suppose there's plenty of easy to reach coal. I don't know much about copper mines, they always look very deep to me. perhaps there is a lot of easy to get surface copper, just not in high enough concentrations to make it worthwhile to mine.

anamax 18y ago
> Once upon a time there were black puddles of oil on the ground. Now, we have to pump saltwater into deep reserves to get the oil out. Hmm. I know where to find some of said black puddles. While there are reasons why they're not being exploited today, I guess that makes me pretty valuable when all the tech goes away, at least until someone figures out that we need metal to deal with said "puddles".
- seanb 18y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what part of the world are these puddles in? Assuming that all technology won't be disappearing anytime soon, it's probably safe to share ;)
  - anamax 18y ago
    They're in the US. One is actually well known, but it looks like no one thinks of it that way, at least for now.
    - 18y ago

baddox 18y ago

If every piece of human technology disappeared, I would probably die in a few seconds, since I sleep on the 7th hour.

cmos 18y ago

Now that we have all witnessed the greatness that is online porn, probably not that long.

brianobush 18y ago

funny thing was just the other day I was showing my children how to make fire with two sticks. Didn't work. Father failure, though they did understand the idea of friction and the result: heat. Now, my second attempt is using a boot lace with bow (from curved stick) to turn a wood axle with a top brace. Makes smoke, but no fire yet. Somehow, this was much easier when I was younger. However, my point is the basic skills are just as important as the knowledge.

known 18y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_Away http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_Away

Zev 18y ago
I prefer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe - Crusoe built all sorts of things to make his life easier from wood. Tom Hanks just spoke to a volleyball the entire time.

gcheong 18y ago

Do you have an interview at Google or Microsoft?

raquo 18y ago

So the question is whether the humanity will be able to stabilize before current generation (with the knowledge of technology) will die (including because of age)

pg 18y ago

Despite the generally frivolous answers, this is an interesting question and one I often wonder about. What turns out to take up all the time if we want to reproduce where we are now? Presumably the optimal plan is to spend practically all your effort on machine tools. It would be interesting to be able to figure out what would be the best benchmark of progress. Would it be the precision with which you could machine metal? That might do up to about 1900. It might turn out that most of the time was spent on something nontechnical, like moving stuff from place to place before you'd developed fast ways of doing that. So maybe in practice the most important benchmark would be how fast you could move stuff. Reproducing where we are now would in some ways be harder than getting here was. E.g. the most accessible coal and mineral deposits used to be sitting right on the surface, but now those are gone.

jpwagner 18y ago
"Reproducing where we are now would in some ways be harder than getting here was.." Opposing factor to speed up these sorts of setbacks is that much of the experimentation/testing would already be done. We'd know the fuel efficiency of coal for example. We'd know not to bother with methods that have failed. I'm more curious what technologies we'd realize never needed to exist. Would electric cars be the route we choose? Would open source operating systems be 100% adopted...etc
blackguardx 18y ago
Minerals are definitely the hardest part. You wouldn't need coal. If you can make a fire, charcoal is easily produced from wood. Making forges and blast furnaces isn't too difficult. To build one, pile up dirt or clay walls to form a bathtub like structure. Make sure you have holes at the base so air from your bellows can make it though. Construct a fire in the tub and pile on alternating layers of charcoal and iron ore. Keep pumping on the bellows for the next few days until the the charcoal burns up. Your iron ore should now have turned into pieces of high carbon steel, perfect for making any tool from ploughs to blades. You might be able to find iron ore as dark colored sand in stream beds. I don't know where you would find copper or zinc. Once you have steel, everything follows. If society knows about existence of a technology, reproducing it shouldn't be difficult. The hardest part about progress is inventing brand new things. If you are interested in learning how to make machine tools from very simple materials, look up the Gingery series on making a complete metalshop from scrap: http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/index.html http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/index.html

nixme 18y ago

Are you asking this question in reference to last night's Battlestar Galactica finale? It was somewhat surprising to see everyone give up technology so easily and start anew with just clothing, some food, and their own language. But I guess being cooped up in those ships for that long and seeing how the abuse of technology led them to such events could have that effect. To answer your question, it's hard to guess. Without medical or agricultural technology, I think most of our current population would die out. The rest would war over the remnants of societal structure. Technical progress, as we see it, would take a long time to begin -- primarily dependent on stability. There are too many unpredictable events that would alter the length of time before returning to stability and our current standards.

qw 18y ago
I have not seen that episode. Thank you very much for telling me how it ends. I guess that will teach me the dangers of not seeing everything the second it airs. A couple of comments like that, and I can throw away my PVR completely, and save a lot of money. To keep on topic, I think that many would die due to lack of food and medical technology, but it wouldn't take long to reach the technology level of 1900. The difference between then and now, is that we know it is possible. How much time was wasted because people didn't think something was possible?
- nixme 18y ago
  Sorry, I honestly did not mean to ruin it for anyone. There's plenty in the episode worth watching that a few comments can't possibly tell.
- tlrobinson 18y ago
  Seems like you should have stopped reading after the first sentence.
  - qw 18y ago
    The first sentence said it all really. The article was about giving up technology. The only remaining fact would be if they had a choice or not.

yters 18y ago

One big problem is that we need working technology to access much of our technical knowledge.

jpwagner 18y ago
HA! I love this thought. I hope we can assume that knowledge is infinitely accessible. If not, it may turn out more like "idiocracy" in that initially we build things that suck.

kenver 18y ago

If we woke up and all the technology was gone, would we want to get back to where we are now...a second time around would be a good chance to fix/improve stuff.

cool-RR 18y ago

I think it's a very interesting question. I would say three to five years. In my opinion, technological tools are overrated. Most things can be built by hand using common materials. Actually, it would be a very cool project! Take a bunch of hackers. Set up an isolated camp for them in a remote area. There will be no technology there, but there will be plenty of edible plants, fresh water, and some medical supplies. The hackers will be supplied with a sample of every raw material that Earth has to offer. And when I say raw, I mean, for example, iron ore. Have video cameras all around the place to make sure they are not bringing technology from anywhere. Measure how long it takes them to build, say a computer. I think it will be less than a year. (The reason I answered 3-5 years to the main question is because in the situation you described most humans will be busy fighting each other, and hackers will have less time to devote to rebuilding technology.)

geuis 18y ago

Was this somehow inspired by the BSG finale? However, I find this kind of question fascinating. This question is posited in the book Marrow, and it takes a very advanced society about 5000 years to get back to where they were. I think the situation right away would work more or less like this. Within the first few weeks to months, nasty. We're literally talking about BILLIONS of people that will starve to death within a matter of several months. Based on your scenario, we're not looking at instantly restored nature. Vast areas of the world would suddenly be large, vacant, barren land where the cities were. Places that were verdant farm land before being paved over by roads, cities, and suburbs are likely to be nutrient starved and unfarmable for many years. You would immediately have millions of people moving out into surviving "wilderness" areas. Trees burning, wild animals being hunted for food. I'm mainly thinking of the U.S., but the ideas apply to most other industrialized countries. "Third world" and agrarian societies might actually fair better. We're talking about the utter decimation of many remaining "protected" species. Suddenly removing everything humans have built, at this point in history, would seriously fuck what's left of nature on the land. On the other hand, humans would no longer have immediate access to the deep ocean. Given the results of ocean recovery in protected areas in recent years, its encouraging to think that many threatened and endangered species and ecosystems would immediately start recovering. The next important thing to take into account is culture and religion. There will likely be surviving populations worldwide that represent the varieties of cultures and religions that we already have. In small pockets, you might find members of the intelligentsia trying to recreate primitive paper as soon as possible, to re-record as much general knowledge as they can. In other parts of the world, particularly the Muslim populations, there will be a religious fervor and general destruction of any remaining advanced knowledge. This will also happen in much of America, due to our retarded Evangelican populations. We might actually find more preservation efforts in Europe and Japan, due to their longer-term cultural histories mixed with being extremely modern. I can't say about China, but they have a long history and might also work to preserve knowledge. People are adaptable, and anything short of a global disaster that fucks the basic life processes of the world, people will survive. It would likely take several hundred years at a minimum, and at most several thousand, before we saw some resemblance of modern technology re-emerging. However, the only cultural artifacts that people would have is what was created from the morning after, onward. There would be no Pyramids, Stonehenge, Jerusalem, Aztec ruins, or anything. No cave paintings, primitive burials, etc. By saying "all technology", this means that all physical remains of our progress would need to disappear too. We would only be left with our memories. In every graveyard around the world, all caskets would disappear. All pacemakers and artificial joints would be gone from the skeletons. They would also be gone from the living. After a couple of generations without any physical remnants of our civilization's evolution, with no pre-history, our descendants would be completely cut off from their past. They would of course be able to re-learn about evolution over the billions of years of life because fossils won't go anywhere. They could relearn about our own evolution, but only from the biology side of things. I would imagine that future historians would eventually realize their legends of an ancient global civilization might have some credence, even though there is no physical evidence. There would be the tell-tale signs, the footprint, that our technology had even though the tech itself is gone. There would be the atmospheric carbon levels, the concentrations of uranium where reactors and weapons were, and hundreds of other alterations to the physical world that we've made.

jodrellblank 18y ago

All technology? I guess we're back at the bottom of the Civilization advances tree, eh? Do you want triremes, maths, militia or granaries? England has ~65 millions of people. Take away all manmade technology (including buildings, tarmac, concrete) and any city would be many square miles of bare earth collapsing into holes where sewers and tunnels and underground trains once were. Within a day or two it would be many square miles of human waste, corpses, mud if it rained, and people making their way to the nearest rivers. Within a couple of weeks, significant fractions of people have starved or died of lack of medical treatment, fighting, illness from river water contaminated with sewage and corpses, etc. OK, you can drink from the river you may not get ill for a while. What can you eat but other people? City areas -> wastelands. Out in the country, farmers with easily harvested crops in season are the best off, until they get looted. With no food stores or shops, animals and current crops will be eaten quickly and that's pretty much that. Good luck surviving on hedgerow food and hunting with no experience and everyone else trying to as well. Some strong willed resourceful people in remote niches will survive (nobody could travel to them very quickly). After a few years we'll see who. Small farms, maybe some farm animals, fast growing trees coming into usable sizes. Levers, (wooden) wheels, barrows, hammers hoes, heaters, cookers, flint/stone axes, they'll be around. Maybe in short order some beach sand melting -> glass jars, glasses. The people who survive are the people who currently live with reduced technology and will be busy staying alive. What then? I don't know. A few decades to a population big enough and connected enough for mass trade, I suppose. By then a similar sort of grind up through metalwork, blacksmithing, banking, debt, economic collapse... What technology could we skip to that would hasten us through such developments? I say at least two hundred years.

stavrianos 18y ago

Seems to me that there are two ways it could go, depending on how you take the question. If when all the tech disappears the resources reappear, I'd say it doesn't take too long at all. Maybe ten years, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand, but nothing more than that. This is a sort of "If people with modern knowledge fall back in time" scenario. On the other hand, if the resources aren't available, ie all the iron that's been mined over the last hundred years is simply gone then we'd be pretty boned, and would probably go extinct. This is more of a post-apocalyptic scenario, except you can't even mine the I-beams out of old skyscrapers, but all the cheaply accessible metal's been mined anyways so your civilization simply can't advance past the bronze age (or wherever you manage to scrape it up to). We'd be like the australian aborigines, who lived for (if wikipedia is to be believed) an astronomical 40000 years on the continent without developing anything more sophisticated than the boomerang.

nazgulnarsil 18y ago

I think people speculating in this thread would greatly enjoy Earth Abides by George Stewart.

tesseract 18y ago

You'd hopefully get pretty far while current experts are still alive. Otherwise, you'd better at least have a plan for getting printing and libraries up and running pretty darn quickly so they can leave instructions for the next generation...

electromagnetic 18y ago

Well I suppose the bigger question is, does everything the technology created go away too? Technology built everything, but do all our houses disappear or just all the wiring and plumbing and crap? Because if the house goes, then surely so should all the people who were brought about by technology. Realistically there would be approximately (assuming the max for 10,000 years ago) about 10 million people on the planet. If so, with the distribution spread throughout the world then I think if humanity were born with our present knowledge I think we would do rather well, presuming we were swapped out with the Cro-Magnon. I bet about 50% of the people would probably die off within the first decade just through lack of knowledge (again presuming even IQ and knowledge distribution), but if people managed to start bringing back technology I think we could advance things pretty quick. I mean one person with the knowledge of how to make steel and devoted their life to teaching everyone how to make advanced tools, well we'd have skipped 9,800 years in the space of maybe 50. So I suppose it's all in how it would happen and then a large handful of random chance and human nature. I mean if the one guy who remembered how to build a blast forge, also knew how to make gun powder (I know the principle on how to build both) decided to instead of helping the world decided to build a machine gun and build his own country then it could all end when someone usurped him without the knowledge to build tools or weapons.

jodrellblank 18y ago

On reading the replies, I suddenly remembered this: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/planning-fallac.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/planning-fallac.html My revised estimate for the time it would take to recreate all of history is approximately as long as it took the last time, plus a bit.

jodrellblank 18y ago

The last time a similar topic came up at HN, it was the "what if you time travelled back to the past" question. I didn't think of it in time for that thread, but I wanted to turn the question around: Looking back through history, if we wanted to spot a technologically advanced person appearing in the past and trying to create 'future' technology, what markers should we look for? (and ... has this happened?).

kellishaver 18y ago

I think you would see a large drop in population before we were able to rebuild. Population growth only occurs when the technology can support it. If we were starting over without any of the knowledge we have now, then it seems reasonable to assume that it would take roughly the same amount of time. If we had history to look back on, then maybe we would be looking at a few hundred years instead of a few thousand. I think the more interesting question is, if we had the knowledge of our past history to look back on, what would we do differently? Would we be more green from the start, for instance? A lot of the problems with adapting to green tech today isn't that the technology is necessarily so knew and unknown, it's that well-established infrastructures and systems are in place that are implemented on vastly different technologies and the cost/logistics of replacing them is prohibitive.