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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

If humans were still around after being sent back to the stone age (without 100% infrastructure destruction), how long would it take to figure out how to generate enough power to boot a computer? I would hope that there are enough humans who know what electricity is even at a basic level to be able to get some generators running within a couple of years. Even still, there should still be a few power sources left that would just require fuel and the flip of a switch.

If it's catastrophic enough that the event destroys all of our computers and generators forever, I would be doubtful that humans would still be around in any capacity where knowledge would be an important factor.

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It's not just booting a computer though. Hypothetically, if Silicon Valley is wiped from the planet tomorrow at the same time as a massive EMP killing all electronics on earth simultaneously (extreme), its assumed we could get most of that data back. I'm guessing we'd lose a significant amount of information though.

The real loss would be the engineers -- without people manning these systems I'm not sure we're getting that data back very quickly. What if you lose the key players -- the people who have the passwords, the knowledge, and control over these systems? It's losing the combination to the worlds most valuable vault, but the vault is digital and restoring it takes privileged information.

That's true. I would assume that we would be able to regain most of the basic "this is what makes us the 21st century" information. Almost everything else, in my mind, would be of questionable value to the new society. If Facebook went dark, if Google went dark, Yahoo, Microsoft, hell even Wikipedia; yeah there'd be significant loss and it would take a long time to recover from. But the benefit of the information age versus the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is that you can't just destroy the Library and all that knowledge is gone. There's a wealth of information and culture on my computer alone. If the biggest sources of knowledge were gone tomorrow, individuals would be able to rebuild the basics of the information age very quickly. We might be set back to 1970, but without the literal decimation of the human population, there's no way we'd be set back to the stone age.

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