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Notes -
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.
offset by known locations of some remaining, some in progress mining operations being left and technology being invented already
not all of it, enough to bounce back
seems dubious, but it is unverifiable and there is no known way to verify it
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.
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)
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Very. Null risk.
I've cited Ord previously on this topic, but I'm feeling lazy today so I'll just quote:
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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