5 ms·

Here is a practical concern: What if there was some kind of collapse of society or catastrophic scenario where it wasn't possible to run power plants, internet,

Here is a practical concern: What if there was some kind of collapse of society or catastrophic scenario where it wasn't possible to run power plants, internet, and/or phone service on a large scale anymore. Choose your favorite doomsday scenario: Comet hits the earth, nuclear holocaust, or even an all-out conventional global war. How long would it take for the world to come back from that without access to our current electronic tools and online repo of limitless knowledge? Many fundamental things would have to be re-learned.

marshray 13y ago
Go find some old films and see where Japan and Germany were just 5-10 years after being all but flattened in WWII. They didn't reconstruct in isolation obviously, but it's pretty amazing what humans can do.
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  Not really responsive to the question, though. We (the Allied powers, particularly the US) went out of our way to give Japan and Germany a helping hand after the war, having seen the problems caused by allowing defeated nations to fall into ruin.
  - johnchristopher 13y ago
    What nations and what period of US history are you referring to ?
    - pjc50 13y ago
      Presumably the post-WW1 era of collapse in Germany, which is usually credited as a major cause of WW2.
      - johnchristopher 13y ago
        Ah, I thought gp was referring to nations the US would have defeated before WWII.
        CamperBob2 13y ago
        No, I meant the Marshall Plan. WWI left Germany in a humiliated condition that eventually led to another war, so they didn't want to repeat the mistake with post-WWII Japan, especially with the Soviets vying for influence in the same part of the world.
    - Daniel_Newby 13y ago
      The Confederate States of America too.
auggierose 13y ago
Wait, I know this TV show. It's called "Revolution".
allochthon 13y ago
Agreed. If there were something catastrophic that were to happen, there would be a whole lot of levels between the skills needed to camp out and the skills needed to stand up a large server farm or wafer fab that would be challenging to traverse. Some of the intermediate levels are still in living memory or are well-documented, but some of them would need to be reverse engineered through trial and error and may not even be apparent at this point.
- vidarh 13y ago
  A lot of it would be tremendously difficult, but at the same time even piecemeal knowledge and resourcefulness would place people at a massive advantage when "re-inventing" a lot of the things we already know is possible. I lack the knowledge to build a high performance modern internal combustion engine, for example. But the idea is enough to start someone on figuring out the basics much faster than the initial invention even if all other knowledge of it was lost. And in the meantime, a steam engine is "trivial" and easy to fuel. Heck, you'd be able to find even school children with a sufficient if basic understanding of old iron making processes to kickstart metal-making processes if need be. And understanding even something as basic as how a bicycle dynamo works allows you to bootstrap an electricity supply. I wouldn't be able to build an advanced chip fab, but I vaguely remember enough beginning electronics that I'd know roughly what to experiment with to figure out how to get to working transistors, diodes and resistors. And I know enough to start looking at the right things to be able to etch basic circuit boards. And just knowing the idea of photo-litography and scaling down a mask gets you far towards figuring out how to create basic circuits. It'd still take a lot of work and a long time, but nowhere near as long as it took to get there initially. And so on. Even if we did not just lose all the technology, but also "lost" all the experts who could otherwise fill in vastly more details than people with the pop-sci version of the knowledge of the fields, there are so many areas like this where understanding the basics and knowing the principles if not the implementation of what has been proven to work can massively short-circuit the process. We would certainly face massive setbacks, but there is also another issue here: The resources required. Even if we had the knowledge to continue to make high end CPUs, if we lose the fabs, we don't want to go straight back to trying to build a high end chip fab for the simple reason that it would take an immense amount of other technology and resources, while we could stand up the pre-requisites for producing simple, 1970's level boards, components and even chips in a tiny fraction of the time and with far more manageable resources and already start to reap a massive amount of benefits, including tools to help substantially speed up the effort of bringing up the next iteration.
nekopa 13y ago
This is the idea behind a site I've always wanted to create: The A.R.K. Project (Apocalypse Reboot Kit) The basic idea is to categorize different apocalyptic scenarios (zombies, ww3, comet, biohazard wipe-out, etc) and develop 'kits' to bring back civilization. Some kits could be quite small, maybe a collection of books on how to get power stations back up and running, etc (for scenarios where basically only people got wiped out)to full on room sized kits which may have to go back to the very basics, - teaching people how to read, how to extract ore from the ground and so on. I thought it could make for an interesting forum based site, with discussions about what would go into each kit, finding old books like the one mentioned in the fine article all the way up to philosophical discussions regarding would you want to reintroduce religion to a primitive society, if not, how would you deal with man's instinct to inquire to the unknown? I may still try to get it up and running one day...
- npx 13y ago
  This reminds me of the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (which I highly recommend reading). I've always loved the idea. If you could somehow finance it with Bitcoin, it would be a perfect homage to Stephenson :)
  - nekopa 13y ago
    Second the reading of Cryptonomicon, great book. My idea was originally inspired by reading his Diamond Age many moons ago. I loved the idea of the primer, especially as it started from scratch and worked up to more complex ideas. The bitcoin idea is great, may have to add that
- krrrh 13y ago
  The people involved in the open source ecology movement are taking a stab at this idea. http://opensourceecology.org http://opensourceecology.org
  - nekopa 13y ago
    That's a very interesting site. Thanks for the link.
michaelbuckbee 13y ago
There's a really interesting book series called "The Cross Time Engineer". It puts a modern day engineer back into the middle ages and follows his path to rebooting an industrial society from just the knowledge in his skull. While it's surely not wholly accurate, everything related to the material science and technology level is at least plausible. http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-Stargard/dp/0345327624 http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-...
- jhonkola 13y ago
  And for a cynical take on the "modern engineer brings advances to middle age" also taking into account social aspects, Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86) is good reading.
  - spiritplumber 13y ago
    Don't forget "The man who came early", which deals with just the sort of cannot-reconstruct-the-technology-chain issue in case of accidental time travel.
    - esperluette 13y ago
      And of course the handy Time Traveler's Poster from Topatoco ...
- nekopa 13y ago
  I think Orson Scott Card also writes something similar in the book 'Hot Sleep'. Long story short, some people wanted to recreate society by starting a primitive colony where there was know to be iron ore under the surface. They didn't fare too well...
AlexDanger 13y ago
You're aware of Wikimedia's doomsday policy? For some reason I cant find the link, but the gist is if the world finds itself close to a calamitous scenario, operators around the world are to begin printing articles deemed important for basic survival. Anyone got a link?
- pdw 13y ago
  Wikipedia's Terminal Event Management Policy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Manage...
- thelinked 13y ago
  Found it! It was an April fools joke for 2009. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Manag...
  - AlexDanger 13y ago
    Oh really? Thats a shame, because it actually seems like a pretty good idea....
aunty_helen 13y ago
How is this a practical concern? The world gets destroyed as we know it, how to use a lathe is the least of your problems. Open your fridge, pick anything from it. Think of the supply chain and layers upon layers of society that was needed to get that to you. You can now be, fearful that in an apocalypse event all that wouldn't be there and you'd be stuffed (which is perfectly correct reasoning) or you can appreciate the world as it is now and how it probably will be tomorrow.
- VLM 13y ago
  As an intellectual exercise this is Exactly how your lathe was originally created, minus the zombie apocalypse. Even if you abstract out segments (I'll just buy screws from a screwmaker) that doesn't mean the screwmaker doesn't avoid doing the work. Someone got to make the machine that made the screws. Or the machine that made the machine that made the screws. Eventually you start thinking about mining engineering problems which is also fun, in conventional definition and DF. More importantly this is exactly how a design engineer thinks. Exactly. I want a IC fabrication thingy. Well that would need X, Y, and Z, each of which need... and you quit designing small parts when mass production makes it impractical to make your own SHCS to assemble the parts. And if the math shows you're better off bolting a COTS subassembly on, you do it instead of making the parts, or you're better off making your own leadscrew threads you do that. But fundamentally for the first steps its the same. The other thing is supply chains rarely fail completely but partially fail every day. You may need to replace the ball bearing in the headstock of your lathe and the replacement may no longer be COTS. Turn out bodging a different bearing might be a wise idea. You just never know in advance if you'll be rigging up your own babbit bearing or creating your own half-nut, so what not think about the whole thing. As an OCD fixation it could get annoying, but for bored daydreams it beats watching Oprah reruns on TV.
6d0debc071 13y ago
> How long would it take for the world to come back from that without access to our current electronic tools and online repo of limitless knowledge? In the initial post-collapse scenario there'd be a massive die-off. Cities would be impossible to live in, only those with access to water supplies and crop packages would get to live. Those in the third world would, ironically, be much better placed than those in developed countries from the perspective of not noticing things going sideways. The common theme, regression to more local form of government, i.e. feudalism, would probably play out. To build back up from there would take hundreds of years. You'd have to be in a position to re-establish supply chains. Which would require both the ability to organise on a significant level and the ability to have a crop surplus to support non farming specialists. The saving grace would be the existence of certain select bits of knowledge; the idea of levers, basic mathematics entrenched in a very efficient number system, simple bits of tech like heliographs and one time pads, the printing press. Stuff that, if you're aware it's possible, you can make with relatively little effort. And social themes, like the idea of loans and relatively free trade that allow innovation to happen, the scientific methods - stuff like that. I don't think that having books about how to make a machine shop would honestly make that much difference. We could work that stuff out for ourselves by the time we were in a position to operationalise it. Hundreds of years, most of which would be things like getting agriculture in place, waiting for the population to grow to a decent size - things like that - rather than reinventing stuff.

marshray 13y ago

Go find some old films and see where Japan and Germany were just 5-10 years after being all but flattened in WWII. They didn't reconstruct in isolation obviously, but it's pretty amazing what humans can do.

CamperBob2 13y ago
Not really responsive to the question, though. We (the Allied powers, particularly the US) went out of our way to give Japan and Germany a helping hand after the war, having seen the problems caused by allowing defeated nations to fall into ruin.
- johnchristopher 13y ago
  What nations and what period of US history are you referring to ?
  - pjc50 13y ago
    Presumably the post-WW1 era of collapse in Germany, which is usually credited as a major cause of WW2.
    - johnchristopher 13y ago
      Ah, I thought gp was referring to nations the US would have defeated before WWII.
      - CamperBob2 13y ago
        No, I meant the Marshall Plan. WWI left Germany in a humiliated condition that eventually led to another war, so they didn't want to repeat the mistake with post-WWII Japan, especially with the Soviets vying for influence in the same part of the world.
  - Daniel_Newby 13y ago
    The Confederate States of America too.

auggierose 13y ago

Wait, I know this TV show. It's called "Revolution".

allochthon 13y ago

Agreed. If there were something catastrophic that were to happen, there would be a whole lot of levels between the skills needed to camp out and the skills needed to stand up a large server farm or wafer fab that would be challenging to traverse. Some of the intermediate levels are still in living memory or are well-documented, but some of them would need to be reverse engineered through trial and error and may not even be apparent at this point.

vidarh 13y ago
A lot of it would be tremendously difficult, but at the same time even piecemeal knowledge and resourcefulness would place people at a massive advantage when "re-inventing" a lot of the things we already know is possible. I lack the knowledge to build a high performance modern internal combustion engine, for example. But the idea is enough to start someone on figuring out the basics much faster than the initial invention even if all other knowledge of it was lost. And in the meantime, a steam engine is "trivial" and easy to fuel. Heck, you'd be able to find even school children with a sufficient if basic understanding of old iron making processes to kickstart metal-making processes if need be. And understanding even something as basic as how a bicycle dynamo works allows you to bootstrap an electricity supply. I wouldn't be able to build an advanced chip fab, but I vaguely remember enough beginning electronics that I'd know roughly what to experiment with to figure out how to get to working transistors, diodes and resistors. And I know enough to start looking at the right things to be able to etch basic circuit boards. And just knowing the idea of photo-litography and scaling down a mask gets you far towards figuring out how to create basic circuits. It'd still take a lot of work and a long time, but nowhere near as long as it took to get there initially. And so on. Even if we did not just lose all the technology, but also "lost" all the experts who could otherwise fill in vastly more details than people with the pop-sci version of the knowledge of the fields, there are so many areas like this where understanding the basics and knowing the principles if not the implementation of what has been proven to work can massively short-circuit the process. We would certainly face massive setbacks, but there is also another issue here: The resources required. Even if we had the knowledge to continue to make high end CPUs, if we lose the fabs, we don't want to go straight back to trying to build a high end chip fab for the simple reason that it would take an immense amount of other technology and resources, while we could stand up the pre-requisites for producing simple, 1970's level boards, components and even chips in a tiny fraction of the time and with far more manageable resources and already start to reap a massive amount of benefits, including tools to help substantially speed up the effort of bringing up the next iteration.

nekopa 13y ago

This is the idea behind a site I've always wanted to create: The A.R.K. Project (Apocalypse Reboot Kit) The basic idea is to categorize different apocalyptic scenarios (zombies, ww3, comet, biohazard wipe-out, etc) and develop 'kits' to bring back civilization. Some kits could be quite small, maybe a collection of books on how to get power stations back up and running, etc (for scenarios where basically only people got wiped out)to full on room sized kits which may have to go back to the very basics, - teaching people how to read, how to extract ore from the ground and so on. I thought it could make for an interesting forum based site, with discussions about what would go into each kit, finding old books like the one mentioned in the fine article all the way up to philosophical discussions regarding would you want to reintroduce religion to a primitive society, if not, how would you deal with man's instinct to inquire to the unknown? I may still try to get it up and running one day...

npx 13y ago
This reminds me of the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (which I highly recommend reading). I've always loved the idea. If you could somehow finance it with Bitcoin, it would be a perfect homage to Stephenson :)
- nekopa 13y ago
  Second the reading of Cryptonomicon, great book. My idea was originally inspired by reading his Diamond Age many moons ago. I loved the idea of the primer, especially as it started from scratch and worked up to more complex ideas. The bitcoin idea is great, may have to add that
krrrh 13y ago
The people involved in the open source ecology movement are taking a stab at this idea. http://opensourceecology.org http://opensourceecology.org
- nekopa 13y ago
  That's a very interesting site. Thanks for the link.

michaelbuckbee 13y ago

There's a really interesting book series called "The Cross Time Engineer". It puts a modern day engineer back into the middle ages and follows his path to rebooting an industrial society from just the knowledge in his skull. While it's surely not wholly accurate, everything related to the material science and technology level is at least plausible. http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-Stargard/dp/0345327624 http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-...

jhonkola 13y ago
And for a cynical take on the "modern engineer brings advances to middle age" also taking into account social aspects, Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86) is good reading.
- spiritplumber 13y ago
  Don't forget "The man who came early", which deals with just the sort of cannot-reconstruct-the-technology-chain issue in case of accidental time travel.
  - esperluette 13y ago
    And of course the handy Time Traveler's Poster from Topatoco ...
nekopa 13y ago
I think Orson Scott Card also writes something similar in the book 'Hot Sleep'. Long story short, some people wanted to recreate society by starting a primitive colony where there was know to be iron ore under the surface. They didn't fare too well...

AlexDanger 13y ago

You're aware of Wikimedia's doomsday policy? For some reason I cant find the link, but the gist is if the world finds itself close to a calamitous scenario, operators around the world are to begin printing articles deemed important for basic survival. Anyone got a link?

pdw 13y ago
Wikipedia's Terminal Event Management Policy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Manage...
thelinked 13y ago
Found it! It was an April fools joke for 2009. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Manag...
- AlexDanger 13y ago
  Oh really? Thats a shame, because it actually seems like a pretty good idea....

aunty_helen 13y ago

How is this a practical concern? The world gets destroyed as we know it, how to use a lathe is the least of your problems. Open your fridge, pick anything from it. Think of the supply chain and layers upon layers of society that was needed to get that to you. You can now be, fearful that in an apocalypse event all that wouldn't be there and you'd be stuffed (which is perfectly correct reasoning) or you can appreciate the world as it is now and how it probably will be tomorrow.

VLM 13y ago
As an intellectual exercise this is Exactly how your lathe was originally created, minus the zombie apocalypse. Even if you abstract out segments (I'll just buy screws from a screwmaker) that doesn't mean the screwmaker doesn't avoid doing the work. Someone got to make the machine that made the screws. Or the machine that made the machine that made the screws. Eventually you start thinking about mining engineering problems which is also fun, in conventional definition and DF. More importantly this is exactly how a design engineer thinks. Exactly. I want a IC fabrication thingy. Well that would need X, Y, and Z, each of which need... and you quit designing small parts when mass production makes it impractical to make your own SHCS to assemble the parts. And if the math shows you're better off bolting a COTS subassembly on, you do it instead of making the parts, or you're better off making your own leadscrew threads you do that. But fundamentally for the first steps its the same. The other thing is supply chains rarely fail completely but partially fail every day. You may need to replace the ball bearing in the headstock of your lathe and the replacement may no longer be COTS. Turn out bodging a different bearing might be a wise idea. You just never know in advance if you'll be rigging up your own babbit bearing or creating your own half-nut, so what not think about the whole thing. As an OCD fixation it could get annoying, but for bored daydreams it beats watching Oprah reruns on TV.

6d0debc071 13y ago

> How long would it take for the world to come back from that without access to our current electronic tools and online repo of limitless knowledge? In the initial post-collapse scenario there'd be a massive die-off. Cities would be impossible to live in, only those with access to water supplies and crop packages would get to live. Those in the third world would, ironically, be much better placed than those in developed countries from the perspective of not noticing things going sideways. The common theme, regression to more local form of government, i.e. feudalism, would probably play out. To build back up from there would take hundreds of years. You'd have to be in a position to re-establish supply chains. Which would require both the ability to organise on a significant level and the ability to have a crop surplus to support non farming specialists. The saving grace would be the existence of certain select bits of knowledge; the idea of levers, basic mathematics entrenched in a very efficient number system, simple bits of tech like heliographs and one time pads, the printing press. Stuff that, if you're aware it's possible, you can make with relatively little effort. And social themes, like the idea of loans and relatively free trade that allow innovation to happen, the scientific methods - stuff like that. I don't think that having books about how to make a machine shop would honestly make that much difference. We could work that stuff out for ourselves by the time we were in a position to operationalise it. Hundreds of years, most of which would be things like getting agriculture in place, waiting for the population to grow to a decent size - things like that - rather than reinventing stuff.