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Comment by complaintdept | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced society would be able to recover after a collapse. We've extracted the easy to get resources already and what's left is extracted and refined with some really advanced technology. We can recycle a bunch of stuff, but that will only get you so far. On top of that, most of our knowledge is stored digitally, much of it in proprietary formats. If we don't somehow manage to recover it before the existing expertise dies out (assuming enough of it survives the initial catastrophe) we may not get it back for a very long time, if ever.

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We would be at a huge disadvantage on the energy front. Most easily accessible fossil fuels are gone. Some countries have oil deposits that can be reasonably extracted now that the holes are made, but those places are few and far between.

On the other hand there would be vast resources of refined steel, aluminum and other metals. The average home contains materials that would make a monarch from 200 years ago jealous. Not to mention invaluable machinery like precision lathes. You just need to find a way to power them.

Without a readily available source for fertilizer and the supply chains necessary for modern agriculture we couldn't possibly feed more than a billion people or so. But whatever society rises from the ashes of that catastrophe could use the abundant building materials to harness water and wind energy and climb back up the technological ladder.

Computing would be pretty low priority though, first we would need to get farming back on track. Without modern farming you need most of the population to work in agriculture, preventing you from making any significant progress in other fields.

Wind. Wind, by itself, without storage, isn't great for our version of civilization. However, it'd totally be workable for 19th c, at least, if not early 20th c. If there were clever storage solutions, you could run our civilization, but at a lower per capita energy budget, to begin with.

Most of the important resources we have extracted are sitting around on the surface. When the steel rusts, it turns into some of the best iron ore. Most of the stuff we threw away ends up in landfills, mining those will get lots of resources and knowledge. That would be plenty for pre-industrial civilization.

The big problem is used the easy energy for industrial civilization. Solar mirrors and wind would be possible, but low density until more advanced. We assume that our energy-heavy industrial civilization is the only way, but it is possible that low-energy or low penetration industrial is possible. There is also possibility of biologically developed civilization.

Lots of current knowledge would be lost but there are tons of books from current and earlier eras. If those are preserved, there would be plenty of knowledge for early industrial civilization. In fact, the main problem would be finding anything or getting caught looking at past. One thing we could do today is make more durable books, and then reprint the important things like practical knowledge.

> Most of the stuff we threw away ends up in landfills, mining those will get lots of resources and knowledge.

I actually think this is something that’s inevitable for us today. The amount of high-value material that we’ve “discarded” by collecting it into one place and then ignoring it - the processes need to be developed, but at some point we’re going to recognize how much useable stuff we’ve just been piling up in the corner.

> I’m not convinced society would be able to recover after a collapse.

Like ever? Or do you have a time frame in mind? Our current state is evidence enough that people can get there eventually. This is all fun imaginary speculation, of course, but I’d wager that even if we lost all written/stored information and the scientists and engineers, just knowing what was possible puts the remaining people way ahead of where we were in the past. We didn’t know what was possible the first time through, didn’t know what to look for. Having memory of what existed and even a child’s understanding of how it worked, passed by word of mouth, would probably be enough to dramatically accelerate progress compared to it’s natural development.

Ever. Depends on the collapse, but one view is we'd never get back. The easy sources of energy, ie coal and oil, have all been mined/drilled already, and you need those to jumpstart/bootstrap civilization to the point where you're able to produce enough food in order to have excess capacity of workers so you're able to get to renewable energy. Without those easy sources of energy, you don't get to have a post-collapse industrial revolution and you're stuck repurposing what's left over from the before times, and hoping it doesn't break because you can never make a fab to produce ICs to replace computers that break.

Generations after the collapse, the stories of what's possible will be viewed the same way we view stories of dragons from the middle ages. Fiction.

This seems to be imagining some other much bigger kind of collapse than what the thread started with. The top post proposed an EM event that knocks out computers, which is not something that destroys all books and mechanical machines, nor kills any people immediately.

I don’t necessarily buy the energy argument. Why would it have to be coal & oil primarily? Maybe it doesn’t. Coal and oil aren’t gone, but there’s also ample solar, wind and hydro to power a new society. Would losing computers actually cease coal & oil production completely? I kinda doubt that. I’m sure it would be a temporary setback and slow things down, but there was a lot of coal and oil production before computers.

The hypothetical question here seemed to already assume that food production and energy aren’t gone, it was just whether we can rebuild electrical compute without computers, based on knowledge of mechanical compute.

We can certainly imagine some epic worst-case scenario where no people with knowledge of any engineering survives, no books survive, and future humans have to start from absolute scratch. That seems far less likely than the probability that some of our knowledge carries. But even in the total doomsday scenario, what we have already is evidence that it worked the first time, and yes we can imagine hypotheticals that make it harder, but we already survived stories of dragons once, right? The default assumption kinda has to be that it might happen again given time.

When Cortez landed in Mexico and found the Mayan pyramids, they were ancient relics and the locals had no idea how they were created nor maintained. The knowledge was lost. Similar with the Egyptian ones. We know they could be built; we still don't know how.

> we still don’t know how.

Sure we do. Humans today could easily build a new pyramid if we chose to. You might be conflating the question of proving exactly what they did with the question of whether we could achieve a similar result today, those are two very different things and we’re discussing the latter. There is written evidence about the construction of the pyramids in Egypt from 4500 years ago, and anthropologists have have multiple plausible techniques with evidence (in part because we know there were multiple different construction techniques employed). If the knowledge was lost at some point, it’s not anymore.

Cortés and the conquistadors could have done it too, without knowing exactly how it was done before. Just having seen them, he’d know it could be done, and if he cared he could have figured it out. The Spaniards didn’t want to Mayan build pyramids, they were busy building castles and monuments - their own version of pyramids.

The technology to build large stone monuments has been repeatedly rediscovered. Once you have stone chisels, a quarry, and a log supply, plus enough food to maintain a population of people to work the stone and haul it, and a stable leadership, you can rebuild these in a few hundred years.

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