Comment by spencerflem

2 months ago

We as in civilization? We made it at least a few thousand years without it.

Or do you mean the circumstances that would lead to this (nuclear war perhaps) would make us toast

> We as in civilization? We made it at least a few thousand years without it.

Civilization is a continuity of discrete points of time.

We were able to enter (so-called) Dark Ages where things were forgotten (e.g., concrete) and still continue because things were often not very 'advanced': with the decline of Rome there were other stories of knowledge, and with the Black Death society hasn't much beyond blacksmithing and so was able keep those basic skills.

But we're beyond that.

First off, modern society is highly dependent on low-cost energy, and this was kicked off by the Industrial Revolution and easy accessible coal. Coal is much depleted (often needing deeper mines). Then next phase was with oil, and many of the easy deposits have been used up (it used to bubble up to the ground in the US).

So depending on how bad any collapse is, getting things up without easily accessible fossil fuels may be more of challenge.

I'm not sure we can actually support 8 billion people's food production and distribution logistics without CPU's anymore.

>We made it at least a few thousand years without it.

We did that during a period of peculiar circumstances that won't ever be replicated. Relatively large, distributed population with many different ecological environments that we were already pre-adapted to. A far smaller single-point-failure population that can't just go out and hunt for its food among the vast wildlife might have it pretty rough if industrial civilization were to falter.

i just learned about the Haber process. This guy, Fritz Haber, realized we could suck nitrogen out of the literal air and make soil fertilizer with it. The population is like 4 times higher than it would be without it.

Scary how high up this tightrope is.

The civilization as it is.

  • I mean, the chips they're talking abt didn't exist until like 40 years ago I think we could manage.

    But tbh I don't see it as at all likely short of something like nuclear war that would be the much bigger problem.

    • It would be chaos at first, but if it's at all physically survivable our species likely will, then we're only a few years away from a "humans exist, but most their knowledge has been lost". Only a few more years later before no human alive has ever interacted with a CPU using device, then the whole notion of a CPU kind of disappears before too long.

      We've had this happen before of course. There's a ton of things ancient civilizations were doing that we are clueless about. So clueless, that one of the leading theories is that they must have been aided by aliens.

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