Hacker News Reader

Comment by __d | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s unlikely that a reboot gets us to iPhones again (within hundreds of years anyway) because of the easy resources all gone issue.

Can we get back to imperial Roman quality of life? Or 1600s Europe? Maybe, but different.

For the first few generations we’d have some people with useful knowledge. After that, interpreting the artifacts will become harder.

There also the question of whether the remnant population would want to rebuild the society that had collapsed.

I think it’s much more productive to focus on not wiping out most of humanity in the first place.

View on HN

I agree that it looks grim, but I do think preserving a full set of documentation for every industry helps the future generation to reboot. The resource part is not solvable, I have to admit that. The only hope is that with much less population and a forever mind of scarcity we do not need that much resources.

Actually, taking away the virus part, looks like we are dead if we can't get out of earth to mine other planets economically before the resources are depleted. But as far as I heard, that is super expensive. Maybe colonization with terraformation is the only answer? But we are so far from it.

Information would absolutely be useful.

The current generation however will struggle: there won't be an Internet, so all the information will be in paper books. And finding what you want when presented with a library without a paper catalog ... there's a whole bunch of people needed to rebuild indexes that had moved online.

I'm confident that small numbers of people can survive with the resources available. Maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands in total, in medium-sized groups on fertile land and in good climates. But I don't think rebooting to 21st century technology would be possible inside hundreds of years.

Isn’t the Dewey decimal system universal so that the same book will have the same reference no matter which library it’s in? So all it would take is one analog index somewhere and it would apply to every library.

Even without it, there are sections that are labeled in libraries that require no index.

> because of the easy resources all gone issue.

Definitely true for coal and petroleum (and those are big ones), but are other resources much more available? (e.g. metals could be "mined" from excess infrastructure)

I'm absolutely no expert here, but tin comes to mind. It was a critical ore with limited sources during the bronze age, and required a substantial trading economy to exist to allow bronze-based technology to flourish.

Extracting resources from the detritus of the 20th and 21st centuries would surely be a major activity. But to efficiently do so requires a bunch of power and chemistry and reagents/catalysts that are themselves probably a heap of work to acquire.

Getting iron and mild steel from rebar, fallen bridges, rail lines, cars, etc, would likely be plausible though. It wouldn't be high-quality steel, but for blacksmithing-type stuff, it'd work ok. Probably sufficient for sand-casting too? Aluminium and copper are probably recyclable too, although I'm not sure how aluminium would work with different source alloys?

It would be an interesting research project to focus on one of them, say coal, and gather as much public information about each major coal mines, as possible.

Their location, owner, operator, status, estimated amount, residual amount, techniques required, anything, everything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com