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Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

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Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#21

Post by rnernento »

frankbreetz wrote: post #2

If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.

Why? There's sooooooo much electronic equipment in the world right now. Huge datacenters, landfills filled to the brim with electronics. I think it's a stretch to assume that would all just evaporate.

You could load the entirety of Wikipedia onto an e-reader and power it with almost no electricity.

Data centers are basically bunkers and there is a tremendous amount of replication occurring.

If anything I think we're likely to leave by far the largest accumulation of knowledge in history, regardless of how bad things get.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#22

Post by kijin »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #9
Tepix wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have an example of such a complete collapse in the world since the arrival of globalization. It's easy to envision that a lot of knowledge will be conserved somewhere.

Yes, in our hard drives.

No, in books and journals. We're still printing them by the billions every year.

Software of various kinds might be lost, since we usually don't print them out. But the theory required to re-implement them are all available on paper, sitting in a library somewhere. A book on algorithms and data structures will be far more useful to a future civilization than raw source code for a hardware architecture that won't even exist anymore.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#23

Post by ekianjo »

frankbreetz wrote: post #2

If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.

> If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.

A collapse is never binary (unless you are talking about planetary collapse where life does not recover at all anytime soon). It's actually very hard to even imagine circumstances where the whole body of knowledge we have would be completely lost. Even with 10% of the knowledge and existing machinery left, we could pretty much rebuild everything in a matter of centuries.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#24

Post by ekianjo »

cookieswumchorr wrote: post #14
whatshisface wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that to happen our current civilization would have to be defined as every civilization on Earth.

there currently is one single civilization earth. All the cultural diffences between countries are far less than it would take to define different civilizations

> there currently is one single civilization earth. All the cultural diffences between countries are far less than it would take to define different civilizations

What is your definition of a civilization then? As far as i know there is no "global" culture, you can live in many different places and have a totally different everyday life experience.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#25

Post by gdfasfklshg4 »

rnernento wrote: post #21
frankbreetz wrote: post #2

If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.

Why? There's sooooooo much electronic equipment in the world right now. Huge datacenters, landfills filled to the brim with electronics. I think it's a stretch to assume that would all just evaporate. You could load the entirety of Wikipedia onto an e-reader and power it with almost no electricity. Data centers are basically bunkers and there is a tremendous amount of replication occurring. If anything I think we're…

> Data centers are basically bunkers and there is a tremendous amount of replication occurring.

All encrypted at rest. Lose those keys and the data is gone...

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#26

Post by abs221 »

I think populism took hold of United states politics at some point in the last 30-40 years and since then we've been looking inwards ever since and stopped looking outwards and expanding our presence.

Such a shame.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#27

Post by imtringued »

frankbreetz wrote: post #2

If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.

There isn't a lot of essential technology beyond energy, agriculture and mining. The biggest driving factor is actually making a society that rewards technological progress. Give that society half a millenia and it will invent computers again.

If you wanted to let a society recover from technological collapse then you would merely need a list of possible inventions ordered by the date of their invention. 3D CAD models with micrometer tolerances are not useful to such a society anyway.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#28

Post by pygy_ »

ekianjo wrote: post #24
cookieswumchorr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there currently is one single civilization earth. All the cultural diffences between countries are far less than it would take to define different civilizations

> there currently is one single civilization earth. All the cultural diffences between countries are far less than it would take to define different civilizations What is your definition of a civilization then? As far as i know there is no "global" culture, you can live in many different places and have a totally different everyday life experience.

Science and technology (and maybe trade?) are our global culture.

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#29

Post by arethuza »

mtrovo wrote: post #13

Maybe a silly question but how well connected was the world during Greek and Persian civilisations? Shouldn't their ideas and works survive on neighbours empires that we have a good track record? I wonder if it's possible that some of the inventions attributed to China and India today could be tracked to works lost on one of these civilisations collapses.

I guess one question there would be which Greek civilisation - there was a significant collapse of civilisation (the "Late Bronze Age collapse") starting around 1200BC or so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

The works of Homer, written down much later, are probably based on oral histories of the times before this collapse. There still seems a lot of debate as to what caused this widespread collapse.

What I find fascinating is that there are vast ruins like Gla that aren't even mentioned by Homer that appear to date from just before this time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gla

Re: Civilizational Collapse, Part 4

#30

Post by baybal2 »

ekianjo wrote: post #23
frankbreetz wrote: post #2

If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive.

> If our current civilization completely collapsed, I would think most of our technology would be gone forever. It is hard to imagine another civilization figuring out how to read a hard drive. A collapse is never binary (unless you are talking about planetary collapse where life does not recover at all anytime soon). It's actually very hard to even imagine circumstances where the whole body of knowledge we have woul…

A fictional universe of battletech illustrates that quite realistically.

They have fusion reactors for every housewife, godlike metallurgy and rocket engines, but they can't make advanced computers no matter how hard they try after an interstellar nuclear civil war put an end to interstellar trade and, thus, complex economies and long supply chains.

Such things require enormous societal organisations to work, and that requires period of civility, prosperity, and material security to make people with brains to do things like that and not to scramble to work on better bomb shelters.

After few generations of people living caring about only basic necessities, the society went into downward spiral because the less scientists and engineers there were, the less were available to teach the next generation of them, and maintain advanced manufacturing equipment.

Despite the basic knowledge of science still being there, there were nobody with hands on skills and material capacity to make complex manufacturing equipment even after a period of relative prosperity 300 years later.

It's like asking a average random engineering or physics PhD to make AMSL 3500 EUV scanner. He will have a basic idea how the thing works, but it will take him more than a lifetime just to make a single part of it if he were to work alone without societal and material facilities for making something so complex.

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