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09-25-2021, 06:33 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Oct 2007
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Hyperdepression and technological regression
We have read plenty of stories, I am sure, of war (or maybe pandemic) reversing technological advancements. But could this happen with just economic collapse, without mushroom clouds or piles of plague-struck bodies?
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09-25-2021, 06:59 AM | #2 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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To the extent it works at all, I don't see why an economic collapse is vastly less believable. That's how the regression is supposed to work in the piles of bodies cases anyway - the lowered population (and maybe damaged capital infrastructure) supposedly can't support the higher TL. Which is also what's wrong with the concept really, because a what a smaller economy can't support is major investments, not high technology. What you get should look more like high tech poverty than lower technology. There are lots of kinds of technology that don't demand particularly huge investments, particularly not compared to the lower tech things they are replacing. I've pointed out before that single shot black powder firearms are simpler to build than many of the flashier bits of TL3 weapons and armor, crystal radios don't take much beyond an ability to draw wire and pound metal into foil, and you can get most of TL5 medicine with the germ theory of disease, the concept of specifics, and the ability to make metal surgical tools. Edit: the traditional story justification for this sort of collapse is "running out of oil". That doesn't work so well in a modern context, because we know actually burning enough fossil fuels to run out will render the planet an uninhabitable greenhouse, but it works for a more retro story, or one set somewhere other than Earth or with a different really vital resource.
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-- MA Lloyd Last edited by malloyd; 09-25-2021 at 07:16 AM. |
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09-25-2021, 07:32 AM | #3 |
Join Date: Oct 2011
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
Sure. Consider the example of Roman concrete; there were three concrete factories in the Roman Empire, which supplied the needs of the whole Empire, with their buyers overwhelmingly being government. The empire collapses, trade networks fragment, and now you can only reliably sell to the province you're located in, and one province doesn't have the demand to keep a factory going, so all three factories shutter for lack of demand and the technique for making concrete is forgotten.
High technology frequently requires a large market to make the degree of specialization required profitable. When the market fragments, the people and specialized equipment necessary for cutting-edge tech will find itself swiftly repurposed, and techniques and data get lost because preserving them is expense for no revenue. Having said that, it's a fair question how far down you could really go. A worldwide depression shaving off one TL is extremely plausible, maybe even demonstrable. Heck, look up "institutional archaeology" if you're unfamiliar with the term - technology companies already have to sink time and effort into fighting this, as market and employment shifts destroy knowledge networks that cannot readily be rebuilt from scratch. Could we get two TLs? I think we could, if the energy sector was badly disrupted. The price of electricity and/or oil goes through the roof, and suddenly lots of things become commercially nonviable, shipping is disrupted, starvation becomes a possibility, the Internet becomes an intermittent and possibly local phenomenon...three? I'm struggling to see how you get three, although it's fair to say that such an economic collapse almost certainly causes the wars and plagues you were trying not to posit. |
09-25-2021, 07:54 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
That's the dodgy bit. Certainly [some] technologies (and not just high ones, concrete after all is not a particularly high technology) require large markets to justify. Others not so much so. You lose the stuff that requires a major capital investment relative to what your new situation can support, not the stuff that's "high tech". There's some overlap, but there is plenty of stuff in the disjoint parts of both sets. You get "change" instead of "regression".
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-- MA Lloyd |
09-25-2021, 09:30 AM | #5 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
I think it's plausible. As others said, if the institution that dominates your market disappears, then at least in that field, you're going to lose tech.
It needs other elements to make for a general purpose TL drop, though. I could imagine a cyberpunk setting where a few secretive megacorps control all access to fusion power, cloning, FTL, computing, advanced metalurgy, etc., etc. An economic collapse might at first strengthen these corps, but they'll find the floor dropping out from under them in a hyperdepression. At that point, if they get all retributive and destroy their records and technology as they go bankrupt (or just a few critical ones do), the infrastructure will be lost. Now, in today's world that's not very critical. If we lost our present-day companies but still had the individual engineers and scientists, we'd be back where we are today in a decade or two. But that's partially because the people who designed and built the basic IC manufacturing equipment are still alive. If it's the year 2160, there's going to be a big gap between the best IC fab you can build without any experience and the level of IC fab you need to build the latest tech. This is all very hand-wavy, but as far as a generally accepted theory for how the world got a given way, it could work for you. Other solutions include a nanite leak sending out nanomachines that break down certain critical components of your setting's modern technology, or an abrupt loss of a critical power source. In either case, if the condition lasts for long enough for the experienced techs to die off just of old age, you'll get a tech regression. The most I expect this to lose you is 1 TL. Maybe 2 at the high end. |
09-25-2021, 04:11 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature |
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09-25-2021, 09:52 AM | #7 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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The kind of disruption you postulate is one of the plot elements in Atlas Shrugged, which has some passages tracing how the failure of one transaction or business firm disrupt the plans of other businesses, which fail in their turn.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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09-25-2021, 10:27 AM | #8 | |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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If I were make technological regression happen on Earth more or less nonviolently I'd blame it on virtual reality. Most of the population spends so much time online in virtual paradises that there's a demographic collapse and then the automated maintenance and manufacturing systems start to break down... Last edited by David Johnston2; 09-25-2021 at 10:41 AM. |
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09-25-2021, 04:40 PM | #9 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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But, yes, his role in the story was that of a villainous mastermind, and that was how the viewpoint characters thought of him most of the way through. Then they changed sides, in a reversal much like that at the end of Watchmen. The whole novel so perfectly fits the pulp formula that I'm sure Rand knew exactly what she was doing. She even gave us the villain's long speech explaining his master plan!
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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10-17-2021, 11:18 AM | #10 | |
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression
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