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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   905 thread views

Transnational Thursday for October 31, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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But if we were set back to the technological level of the 1700s, how possible would it be for us to recover to our modern-day level? Most of the easily-accessible coal and oil have been depleted. Modern farming and transportation would be destroyed, very possibly leading to Malthusian living conditions and a lack of leisure time necessary to rebuild the machines and infrastructure that we know are possible. Within a few generations, most of the practical knowledge necessary to build complex machinery, etc., would be lost completely. It also seems likely to me that in the aftermath of a large-scale nuclear war, many of the most intelligent people would be dead, which might further complicate efforts to build society back to its present level of affluence and technological advancement.

Most of the easily-accessible coal and oil have been depleted.

offset by known locations of some remaining, some in progress mining operations being left and technology being invented already

Modern farming and transportation would be destroyed

not all of it, enough to bounce back

very possibly leading to Malthusian living conditions and a lack of leisure time necessary to rebuild the machines and infrastructure that we know are possible

seems dubious, but it is unverifiable and there is no known way to verify it

Within a few generations, most of the practical knowledge necessary to build complex machinery, etc., would be lost completely.

seems extremely dubious, I would buy utterly losing CPU production... But outright losing most machinery production? It is not SO hard to bootstrap when you are motivated, knowledge exists and world heavily fragmented. At least somewhere you will have people going to rebuild. And that is even if someone went omnicidal stupid and nuked say Peru and Keyna instead of finishing their main rival. Just to spite survivors.

It also seems likely to me that in the aftermath of a large-scale nuclear war, many of the most intelligent people would be dead

many of [insert group] would be dead, for nearly all descriptions

but even with selective death of top 40% of most intelligent/hard working/insert descriptor here survivors would rebuild. I think that you underestimate resilience of humanity (or maybe I overestimate)

But if we were set back to the technological level of the 1700s, how possible would it be for us to recover to our modern-day level?

Very. Null risk.

I've cited Ord previously on this topic, but I'm feeling lazy today so I'll just quote:

Even if civilization did collapse, it is likely that it could be reestablished. As we have seen, civilization has already been independently established at least seven times by isolated peoples.12 While one might think resource depletion could make this harder, it is more likely that it has become substantially easier. Most disasters short of human extinction would leave our domesticated animals and plants, as well as copious material resources in the ruins of our cities—it is much easier to re-forge iron from old railings than to smelt it from ore. Even expendable resources such as coal would be much easier to access, via abandoned reserves and mines, than they ever were in the eighteenth century. 13 Moreover, evidence that civilization is possible, and the tools and knowledge to help rebuild, would be scattered across the world.

13 Overall the trend is toward resources becoming harder to access, since we access the easy ones first. This is true for untouched resources in the ground. But this leads people to neglect the vast amount of resources that are already in the process of being extracted, that are being stored, and that are in the ruins of civilization. For example, there is a single open-cut coal mine in Wyoming that produces 100 million tons of coal each year and has 1.7 billion tons left (Peabody Energy, 2018). At the time of writing, coal power plants in the US hold 100 million tons of ready-to-use coal in reserve (EIA, 2019). There are about 2 billion barrels of oil in strategic reserves (IEA, 2018, p. 19), and our global civilization contains about 2,000 kg of iron in use per person (Sverdrup & Olafsdottir, 2019).

This is, of course, leaving aside the issue that substantial chunks of the world would be directly untouched by nuclear war (Africa/South America, also probably New Zealand and Ireland), so it's not exactly like literacy will be lost forever in 20 years or something even if rebuilding fails in all the places that are involved.

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