241–250 of 323 posts
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I'd like to see a log being kept in orbit. Like every 10 years it's rotated (FIFO, oldest comes down, new one is launched) with a large delta so that it might survive our current civilization in case of global / climate craziness.
What about burying something on the moon, with monoliths and radio sources marking its location?
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How would we get at the information if we don't have the technology to launch a rocket/spaceship to retrieve it?
The satellites orbit would naturally decay to the point of reentry. I'm not sure of the engineering, but it might be possible to do a controlled descent to a specific place for survivors to rendezvous with.
Controlled descent is not necessary if they are built to last.
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There are vastly more Z80's in circulation that Raspberry Pis.
Also, in a worse-case scenario, it's much easier to build a Z80 by hand from individual transistors and/or logic gates¹ (which would still be absurdly difficult, but not impossible) than any ARM CPU (including the ones in any generation of RPi). In a slightly-less-than-worse-case scenario, it's much easier to build a Z80-based computer by hand (i.e. with a Z80 you pulled off some other piece of hardware) than your av…
I'd guess that those 8500 transistors would be better used to build thousands of much simpler logic controllers to help automate infrastructure that's lost its computer control systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
There are simpler "transistor computers" that might be more feasible to build from discrete components:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Transistor_co...
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Most likely the source of the end of the world is going to be the Sun throwing a X class solar flare at us and just frying everything in its path. What you need is a super-deep immortal vault that isn't anywhere near any known fault lines, and who's ingress point is sufficiently above ground, and can be accessed safely if under water, and supplies its own electricity for thousands of years. Everything outside of the…
Little do we know, there are five of them in existence already, by several ancient civilizations :) I kid, but the more secure a vault is the more irretrievable it is, which only makes it useful to aliens, not us.
The unanimous response was "not much". Mostly anomalously concentrated resources. So... if they are right, even though we have no reason to believe there was a developed civilization before us, it's not that crazy to merely entertain the possibility.
Why does the author think the global supply chain will collapse in the next ten years? What scenario do they envision? Climate change? Will cost trillions of dollars and billions of lives, but will likely be played out over course of several decades. We will be stressing out about it but its not going to be electronics-ending apocalyptic Nuclear war? Please. The countries that have the capability are also level-heade…
> this prepper BS is just fantasy driven by a hyper-apocalyptic news cycle shlepping around clickbait Au contraire, it’s the belief that our system can continue like it’s doing that is the real hyperbole. Collapse is just baseline reality of civilizations. - HISTORY: Collapse is a property of every civilization we’ve studied. These people were as smart if not smarter than us, working with societies smaller and simple…
How would you define "civilization?" Because sure, every civilization has an expiration date, but for current computing technology to be lost requires a worldwide civilizational collapse. Current global civilization is a decentralized collection of many civilizations which have all shared and replicated the knowledge of computing.
>our debt keeps increasing
Public and private debt are separate things. Public debt has generally seen a continuous march upwards. Private debt has been peaky, with no upward trend. Debts are fine when the debt is incurred for a purpose that has a sufficient return on investment. Public debts of sovereign currency issuers can always be repaid, and the yields on those bonds are whatever the currency issuer decides. And further debts shouldn't be judged as nonviable just because of the quantity of existing debt. Rather, the question at each point should be whether the investment is a good one.
> Soil is in a weird zombie state kept alive by oil
Soil is renewable, and can be made even with simple techniques. The terra preta soil of the Amazon rainforest was largely human-made, and thus the Amazon itself is largely a human construct. Creating it didn't require any oil.
>there is no fertile soil for the acceptance of limitation
Malthusian thinking has often been the default, and one of the most popular modes of thinking since the Enlightenment. The mid 20th century was full of best-selling Malthusian books by the Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich, M. King Hubbert, and EF Schumacher. The entire fields of biology and ecology have been predicated on Malthusianism. Darwin was explicitly inspired by Malthus.
It has been to the great surprise of the intelligensia of each successive generation that there hasn't been mass starvation. We've been able to do more and more, with less and less. Any serious type of collapse hypothesis needs to factor in the history of losing bets on that side of the argument, and internalize why their predictions were wrong. It wasn't just luck every time.
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Oh, no. I can’t believe it’s gotten this bad. I’m amazed we haven’t done much in the way of climate change control. It’s going to be too late very, very soon.
> It’s going to be too late very, very soon. Sorry to ruin this for you, but it is already too late. We are already in the process of damage control.
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Bad news on that seed vault. [1] 1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-s...
> “A lot of water went into the start of the tunnel and then it froze to ice, so it was like a glacier when you went in,” she told the Guardian. Fortunately, the meltwater did not reach the vault itself, the ice has been hacked out, and the precious seeds remain safe for now at the required storage temperature of -18C.
"The vault managers are now taking precautions, including major work to waterproof the 100m-long tunnel into the mountain and digging trenches into the mountainside to channel meltwater and rain away. They have also removed electrical equipment from the tunnel that produced some heat and installed pumps in the vault itself in case of a future flood."
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IMHO you could be using the same chips for a surprisingly long time - you're likely to need some electronics maintained e.g. replacing capacitors, but if you really need to get some computing power for a 2100 post-apocalyptic scenario where there's just a few million people, then scavenging working chips from random gadgets has a lot of potential. E.g. a hard drive controller or a kids toy may be running on something…
Raspberry Pi is 4 gigahertz. Madness! You're in a postapocalyptic world and you find someone's drawer of raspberry pi sideprojects: a solar panel, a low power screen... ... you find a controller ... you find their emulation raspberry pi. ... all of a sudden, the world isn't as desolate.
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Little do we know, there are five of them in existence already, by several ancient civilizations :) I kid, but the more secure a vault is the more irretrievable it is, which only makes it useful to aliens, not us.
I remember reading a worldbuilding stack exchange question about what would be left of mankind in millions of years, were we to disappear today. The unanimous response was "not much". Mostly anomalously concentrated resources. So... if they are right, even though we have no reason to believe there was a developed civilization before us, it's not that crazy to merely entertain the possibility.
I don't think just developing a Z80 operating system is enough. The whole ecosystem needs to be preserved. In agriculture, we have the doomsday seed vault [0] just for this purpose. If we anticipate collapse of the current economic system or society, I think we should build a doomsday computer vault, that keeps everything we need to rebuild the computing industry in a underground bunker. It keeps everything we need i…
Indeed. It takes a civilisation to build an iPhone.
I don't think people appreciate that even within the highest-tech manufacturing industries there is a lot of tacit knowledge. People shake their fists about "technology transfer" to China, and before that Japan; but that's taken decades for them to reach parity. And that's with running, copyable examples and all the parts of an existing supply chain widely available. Similarly the process for making a nuclear bomb can be written in a short paper, but few countries have successfully replicated it.
"Post-collapse recovery" and "technology transfer" are the same problem, except that post-collapse recovery is cribbing from a dead example rather than a live one and in much worse circumstances.
Collapse recovery is a fun little competence fantasy to play out in your own head. Like "the rapture" for atheists. But within our lifetimes, we have to put in the work to avoid the collapse.