Dusk OS

I feel I can empathize with the ideology, and I want to argue that an idea like this is a big piece of some puzzle.

The puzzle: During the collapse, I think the biggest thing we would lose is our ability to communicate with each other in a reliable way. Like telecommunications and internet and all that. Who and what do we trust?

I imagine that before a collapse like this would happen, people would get a hint to gather as much as they can to help with their survival. Those things would include: this OS, the knowledge to load a sequence of bytes from whatever device is holding the OS to as many CPUs/controllers as possible, strategies to connect any number of arbitrary CPUs to radio devices, some knowledge of public keys and private keys. maybe all neatly organized into a handbook

The OS itself would be responsible for providing as easy an interface for any average joe to generate public/private keys, communicate with other people who have followed their same protocol, and use those public keys to build trust from communications. before the collapse happens, you may even collect a list of public keys you are likely to already trust.

The OS could maybe even have software for building communities of trust or even handling adhoc finances through (don't hate me for this) cryptocurrency.

anyways, this is all based on an assumption that the ability to communicate quickly (and build trust in a decentralized yet controllable way) is the best mitigation we have to a collapse

this answer is slightly influenced by the movie leave the world behind lol

> Those were all local events.

> The only thing removing mankind's ability to make computers is a large (Chicxulub-ish-sized) meteor strike or andromeda-strain-like sci-fi story made real.

One of the possible causes of the Bronze Age Collapse (which btw was very non-local) is a prolonged drought that apparently lasted for decades. It's wasn't severe by itself but long enough for the fertile soil to keep shrinking year after year, decreasing the size of sustainable population.

I dwell on this sometimes and I think that probably we underestimate how fragile our food production system is. Feeding 8 billion people is not an easy endeavor. Multi-year global food reserves are not only non-existent but maybe even non-possible at this scale. A global event that would somehow disrupt our ability to produce food for several years in a row will make the hell break loose. I'm not confident that humanity couldn't plunge in a couple of dark age centuries as a result, all bets are off in a truly global famine.

Then the curious question is how likely is such an event? Chicxulub -- yes, but these are extremely rare, once in millions of years. The Volcanic Winters however occur every few centuries, the "Year Without a Summer" was 1816. Could we have "3 years without a summer" at some point? And not just in the northern hemisphere but globally? I don't know, maybe.

After all, the way I think of it is this: modern food production at scale is sun + water + fertilizers. Production of fertilizers seem distributed enough to be resilient at a global scale. Water at the Earth scale is sun again -- as long as it's shining it will rain somewhere, even if the distribution shifts (with dramatic effects for sure, but not a completely desperate situation). But then the sun does seem to be the single point of failure. If there's dust or ash or something else shielding the sun then it is in fact desperate.

For whatever reason they weren't building domes anymore in Europe where they had been (the fall of the Western Roman empire sort of changed priorities for a while). And after a generation of not building domes the artisans (in Europe) lost the ability to do it.

There's a much closer example: The US spent the 60s developing the capability to land humans on the moon. And they were successful. They did it about, what, 7 or 8 times? But then they stopped doing it. And now some 60 years later they're having a hard time doing it again (see the woes of NASA's Artemis and Boeing's Starliner). Imagine if the pause wasn't 60 years, but several hundred years.

My solar powered calculator will be fine.

> massively disruptive event

That’s not the same as what I was replying to: “a global extinction-level event”

The difference is pretty substantial.