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I've seen this before, thought it was super interesting, kudos to the author. Leaving this comment for contrast with some other negative comments.
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> 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 yea…
(disclaimer - I know very little about this, it's just common sense and theorycrafting) > Multi-year global food reserves are not only non-existent but maybe even non-possible at this scale. I agree with the sentiment, but I will risk a hypothesis that in "western" world we have enough canned and highly processed food (the one that lies on the shelf of your grocery store and has best before set 2-3 years ahead) to su…
> I will risk a hypothesis that in "western" world we have enough canned and highly processed food (the one that lies on the shelf of your grocery store and has best before set 2-3 years ahead) to survive "covid but for crops" event.
The "western world" is definitely more prepared but if you want to rely on that during global and desperate famine you'll need to have the guts (and the heart) to machine gun hundreds of millions of refuges rushing into the western world to survive. Or nuke them before they depart.
> We waste massive amout of food on a daily basis. We have a huge variety of food available, and not everything has to be affected.
Absolutely all the food we have is based on the ability of plants to absorb sunlight. Exception would be an electric light greenhouse powered by the nuclear plant. Or by the coal/oil (that's some sunlight we can actually store). Take away the sunlight and the whole food variety goes down with it.
> And after the initial shock we got back to seamingly normal life.
Try to imagine a desperate famine: your kids have nothing to eat and will die in a matter of weeks unless you do something. There's no reason to believe the situation will improve. In such times killing your neighbor who has some food left keep your kids alive a bit longer is not an unusual decision. Someone has to die anyway, that is so.
Now imagine that at a global scale, famine is everywhere.
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> The loss of the ability to make many things, including computers but also other more important things like the industrial process for making ammonia, globally, simultaneously, is the end of humanity. The end of us sedentary people. No more ammonia by itself won’t affect hunter-gatherers and uncontacted peoples. But if we’re talking about not the end of these things in itself but an event like a nuclear winter: sure…
Most proper preppers have years of food not months.
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There are no Dark Ages. People in the Byzantine Empire (capitale in Europe) and the Abbasid Caliphate very much knew how to build domes and where actually busy advancing the state of the art. The fact that the Franks were more interested in warring against each others than building great things is no evidence of a dark age. They started building again once peace came back and didn’t restart from where they left off b…
> The idea that humanity somehow went back is a fantasy pushed forward by catholic commentators. A tangential aside: Wouldn't that make the catholics look bad and as such why would they spread it? ("We had all this great tech before the catholic/christians came along and ruined everything and now we don't have nice things" seems like another way to look at it)
The way it was framed (and often still is with a dash of 19th century nationalism added) is:
The unwashed barbarian from the east came pouring tearing apart the beautiful christian roman empire before one of their chief saw the light and converted. Guided by faith, the franks unified once again the warring provinces which sadly were broken apart again through inheritences - but such is the law - before their god annointed kings heroically pushed away the unfaithful from the south. The properous Italian cities, whose families gave us more Pope than any others, rediscovered the brightness of the Antiquity especially the best of them, Aristotle, who turns out to be the easiest to reframe in a way compatible with catholicism, propelling the world into the Age of Enlightnment which had to be spread out to the furthest shores.
>Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers around. Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to…
Like, what's going on? The pessimism is pretty high. Are you alright?