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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   943 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?

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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