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Comment by Red_Tarsius | Hacker News Reader

But our scientific knowledge could be lost, maybe forever. The survivors may also forget the concepts of free speech, human rights, the separation of faith and state. What are the chances that we rediscover all of this? Such thoughts require a minimum threshold of resources. But climate change might disrupt our sources of food production.

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A hundred million people with smartphones will be able to preserve that.

Try to come up with a realistic scenario that kills the last 100m humans. I've never seen one. You'd become at least internet famous if you could do it.

The humans that survive such an event will not be the smartphone engineers, but the subsistence farmers.

You don't need smartphone engineers just repair techs. We already have billions of smartphones, millions of which will last a century with proper care. There are palm pilots that still work today.

But also as the world collapses a thousand motivated people could and would relocate a basic computer fab to a safe location. Guaranteed.

> millions of which will last a century with proper care

I strongly doubt that. Electronics are not designed to last that long; components age. Also, planned obsolescence is king these days.

How are you going to charge those devices reliably and consistently? What knowledge-bases will you be able to connect to with no Internet?

Our technology stack is like a house of cards. Smartphones are at the top. There's no way they will be of any use in the event that the foundation and the walls collapse.

There is a great short story with the unfortunate name "The man who came early". It's about a American GI who is stationed at Keflavik during the cold war and somehow gets thrown back in time to the Icelandic saga age. He wants to give people there so kind of technology that's much simpler than a smart phone and it all fails. Even something simple as gun powder doesn't get off the ground. They don't know how to get Salpeter. Even if the had the powder they would be missing so much technology to make the guns. As the main character says "you haven't the tools to make the tools to make the tools". Also resources.

Also Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", which has a similar theme.

How long would smartphones be able to preserve knowledge? When you can no longer get clean power to charge them, they will cease to function. When they break, there will be no means to repair them. And most critical knowledge isn't even contained on the phone, it's on other machines which are likely inaccessible given the number of failure points in our global networks. If a catastrophe occurs, this high technology will be the first class to break. And no one person or group can recreate them; they depend upon global supply chains and expertise and manufacturing techniques siloed in hundreds of companies. And if a collapse did occur, we might have more pressing needs than recreating such technological marvels, like feeding and clothing ourselves. The value of such technology would vanish overnight if the supporting infrastructure collapsed.

To preserve knowledge you need it to be usable and accessible as the high edifice of our technological society crumbles. That would mean quality paper, vellum or some other durable material. We know it can last for hundreds to thousands of years if properly cared for. And I suspect that with the essentials of our knowledge base preserved and disseminated in such a way, we could quickly re-master the missing advanced stuff in a handful of decades. But if we relied on smartphones to save us, we'd quickly become savage and starving cavemen!

One of the more dangerous tendencies of modern times is that precision manufacturing techniques are often undocumented and are learned skills which require passing on from masters to trainees. There's plenty of technology from WW2 and earlier which we already can't recreate even though we know exactly what they look like. The people who knew retired and died. The drawings and documentation are useless without full training--we'd have to rediscover and refine the processes from scratch. Just last week I was reading about the restoration of a German WW2 fighter plane. They had to replace the entire engine because they couldn't manufacture a replacement part for the (repairable) original, because the machines to make the parts no longer exist and the expertise was lost. We'd have to make the machines to make the machines that make the part. Our technology base is built upon a house of cards. It's not a new phenomenon, but what is new is our utter reliance upon technology we have little control over to feed us and run our lives, making its loss quite disastrous.

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