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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   923 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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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)

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