Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

  Scenario: I think a deadly virus outbreak is far more 
  likely and devastating than a thermal nuclear war. Let's 
  assume that such an outbreak took out most of the 
  governments and the population, and only local communities 
  start to show up afterwards.
  
  How do you reboot modern industry? I'm sure we can scavenge 
  stores and storehouses for a while, but eventually we need 
  to rebuild a very large portion of modern technologies, if 
  not all of them.

Considering the events leading to and resulting in the Dark Ages[0], history would suggest it would take centuries (if not millennia) for societies to rediscover an industrial revolution and get back to where we are now.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

View on HN

In the right hands, knowledge that something specific can be done is often enough to dramatically accelerate discovery. It allows for serious resource allocation in a specific trajectory, while the rate-limiting step in original discovery is working through innumerable dead ends, which both individuals and institutions are understandably reluctant to commit serious resources towards. See: Soviet thermonuclear program.

> In the right hands, knowledge that something specific can be done is often enough to dramatically accelerate discovery. It allows for serious resource allocation in a specific trajectory, while the rate-limiting step in original discovery is working through innumerable dead ends ...

For this theory to hold, it would have to explain the inordinate duration of the Dark Ages.

My explanation of same is the prerequisite for successful discovery is collective understanding of foundational principles, not awareness of previous achievements. For example, just because someone has knowledge of the Catskill Aqueduct[0] existing doesn't mean recreating another like it would be any quicker if the underlying knowledge was lost.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catskill_Aqueduct

I don't disagree with you, but I think we can do something to accelerate such process. Maybe not 1,000 years, maybe just a few generations? After all we already made the progress and now need to relearn and rebuild it. And hopefully enough technicians, engineers and scientists survive.

> I don't disagree with you, but I think we can do something to accelerate such process. Maybe not 1,000 years, maybe just a few generations? After all we already made the progress and now need to relearn and rebuild it.

Consider as a counter example the Antikythera mechanism[0]. It took well over a millennium for collective knowledge to reach the same point such that similar devices could be created.

For immediate survival needs, rediscovery would very likely be quicker. Things like crop irrigation, water management in general, and/or food preservation I imagine would be the quickest to be rediscovered.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

Reply on news.ycombinator.com