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Old 09-25-2021, 03:51 PM   #11
benz72
 
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Default Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression

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Originally Posted by Willy View Post
Pretty sure something like this could happen in a highly globalized world like ours.
SNIP
A TL regression isn't about losing the ability to import cheap parts for bicycles (or whatever) from a distributed manufacturing network, it is the loss of the ability to produce bicycles (or whatever) generally.
Having to locally source intermediate assemblies, basic parts or raw materials is not the same thing as losing TL.
Will the above scenario change availability, prices, lead times, quality, &c. ? Very probably, but there are century old technologies for mass producing bolt and bearings and chain and sprockets and tires. Loss of that ability is what I think of when we talk about TL regression. YMMV
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Old 09-25-2021, 04:11 PM   #12
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Default Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression

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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".
Australasia is a good example of how you need concentations of technology and markets to support surprisingly simple technologies. Smaller and more isolated peoples often had less of the full 'Polynestian tool kit' or 'Australian-Tasmanian tool kit' because they just did not have enough people to keep the full set of skills or reinvent things if their expert whatchamacallit maker died. The same happened with the fall of the Western Roman empire. In some places they stopped using potter's wheels for a few hundred years because there was no safe way to travel, no market for simple things if you did, and plenty of old pottery to dig out of graveyards and ruins if you wanted something fancy. People just made pots for themselves and their neighbours in their farmyards.
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Old 09-25-2021, 04:28 PM   #13
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Default Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression

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Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec View Post
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?
For a complex society to collapse, something has to attack:

- people with specialized skills
- long-distance exchange
- concentrations of people

Depressions are not great at those things (they can cause the cities to clear out, but if the economy recovers in 10 or 20 years the skills are all there; they can cut trade, but poor people are highly motivated to trade). So depressions can be contributing factors, but they are rarely the first thing survivors mention. Its possible that the beginning of the end of Roman Britain was the removal of salaried garrisons along the Rhine. Britain was losing its cities but it had big villas in the south-east which were probably funded by selling grain to the Rhine garrison and which probably helped keep the cities going. But if it were not for civil wars, and invasions, and catastrophically bad government, and a collapse of long-distance trade, Britain could have recovered.
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Old 09-25-2021, 04:40 PM   #14
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Default Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression

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Bear in mind that in Atlas Shrugged they have a supervillain (although Rand thinks of him as a superhero) going around blowing up all the factories to make the decline happen.
Actually, no, he didn't blow up any factories. He persuaded the owners to blow up some of them, though that mainly happened in the extractive industries (copper mining and petroleum).

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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Old 09-25-2021, 04:47 PM   #15
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Default Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression

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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.
I see this as the key variable: how many of the technologies that dropped out in the crisis were actually lost forever, versus couldn't be maintained at the time but were well-enough documented to re-establish when conditions improve?

The lesson of the Roman concrete isn't that the three factories collapsed. It's that the techniques and formulas for making concrete were embodied in just those three factories and their personnel.

I think you'd have to posit a "for want of a nail" situation where the tools or techniques needed to re-establish a key industry were lost somehow along the way. By way of analogy: you have the plans for a Saturn V, but you can't actually produce one because some of the parts were hand-made by craftsmen and those skills are no longer practiced in the era of CAD/CAM.
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Old 09-25-2021, 08:17 PM   #16
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I think you'd have to posit a "for want of a nail" situation where the tools or techniques needed to re-establish a key industry were lost somehow along the way. By way of analogy: you have the plans for a Saturn V, but you can't actually produce one because some of the parts were hand-made by craftsmen and those skills are no longer practiced in the era of CAD/CAM.
You are right we may have a extensive knowledge and skill now, to produce fairly advanced stuff, which needs ready markets and a long list of special skills and supplies, people and factorys.

A lot of important things got lost in the history by accident, even if the knowledge was considered a important state secret. A example is the greek fire and the technique to use the liquid as a weapon.

Nowadays we are even more vulnerable, because most advenced tech we have is depending on a working society. But this knowledge take years to be learned and is stored in mostly digital form. A lot of people know how a old fashioned light source worked and enough people can build the tools for it. But how many people know the exact way a LED works and can build one. Not to mention computer chips or similar tech?

I would say the good old TL from post WWII can we keep, it needs a lower population base and fewer resources, but our actual near TL 9? Not a chance if something like the black death or a geomagnetic storm happens.

Yes poor people and refugees are able to cover a lot of ground, but remember nowadays this people use modern means of transport, and a road system unbeaten in history. If you use your own feet or horses, it would take month to walk from east to westcoast, especially if the people have to work on there way for food.


Imho a lot of people drastically underestimate the impact of broken trade and long range travel. Once the disruption is longer than a generation the people who have the knowledge are too old to transfer the konwledge fully to younger ones, and a lot of stuff has to be shown and couldnīt be learned from books or I pads. We have a lot of black smith, but how many really can make a sword? Same goes for nearly everything else.
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Old 09-25-2021, 09:02 PM   #17
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Default Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression

S.A. Fisher has a few posts and Pyramid articles on the 'bush technology' which you get in places like Central Africa or Afghanistan.

As a complex society or empire collapses, you often don't get what came before the state, because that world is dead and there is no time to rebuild it and it does not necessarily meet their needs anyways. You get people repurposing the scraps from that complex society to meet their needs with the resources available to them, and figuring out ways to make the things they need. So post-Roman technology was not pre-Roman technology, it was some new things, some things which had been superceded a thousand years before the Romans came, and some bits of Roman technology. The post early in this thread about how a collapse of our civilization would almost certainly keep the germ theory and firearms manufacture and simple electric devices is a good example.
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Old 09-25-2021, 09:21 PM   #18
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Default Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression

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Originally Posted by Willy View Post
A lot of important things got lost in the history by accident, even if the knowledge was considered a important state secret. A example is the greek fire and the technique to use the liquid as a weapon.
Secrets are way easier to lose than non-secrets. Two can keep a secret really well when they're both dead and their notes destroyed.
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Originally Posted by Willy View Post
Nowadays we are even more vulnerable, because most advenced tech we have is depending on a working society. But this knowledge take years to be learned and is stored in mostly digital form. A lot of people know how a old fashioned light source worked and enough people can build the tools for it. But how many people know the exact way a LED works and can build one. Not to mention computer chips or similar tech?
Quite a lot of people I should think. LEDs are a rather old piece of superconductor technology. They've been around since the sixties and ubiquitous for a long time. A small fraction of people, to be sure, since most people never learn anything about how to produce semiconductor electronics at all.

Microchips, well, that's a place where to a large extent knowing how isn't the problem. The facilities involved are big and rare, and the chemical industry and tooling production that support them are also big. It would not be too hard in a more destructive scenario to wind up with no fabs capable of producing those. Rebuilding on a smaller scale (and likely a significantly lower resolution as well) might be feasible to retain an earlier TL8 computational capability.
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Originally Posted by Willy View Post
I would say the good old TL from post WWII can we keep, it needs a lower population base and fewer resources, but our actual near TL 9? Not a chance if something like the black death or a geomagnetic storm happens.
WWII? A tech level that depended heavily on world trade in several mineral resources, enormous chemical industry, and sophisticated large-scale metallurgy?

If you've got the infrastructure for those, what are you expecting to lose?
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Originally Posted by Willy View Post
Imho a lot of people drastically underestimate the impact of broken trade and long range travel. Once the disruption is longer than a generation the people who have the knowledge are too old to transfer the konwledge fully to younger ones, and a lot of stuff has to be shown and couldnīt be learned from books or I pads. We have a lot of black smith, but how many really can make a sword? Same goes for nearly everything else.
...Yes, we've mostly if not entirely lost the art of swordmaking, what with the 200+ years since artisinal swords were a product in great demand. But we didn't lose it to societal collapse, we lost it to obsolescence.
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Old 09-25-2021, 09:48 PM   #19
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Default Re: Hyperdepression and technological regression

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...Yes, we've mostly if not entirely lost the art of swordmaking, what with the 200+ years since artisinal swords were a product in great demand. But we didn't lose it to societal collapse, we lost it to obsolescence.
You mean aside from the various hobbyists who make fully functional swords using steels ranging from historically correct through to ultra-modern alloys, and using techniques ranging from 'primitive' and largely historically correct to ultra-modern?
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Old 09-25-2021, 10:46 PM   #20
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You mean aside from the various hobbyists who make fully functional swords using steels ranging from historically correct through to ultra-modern alloys, and using techniques ranging from 'primitive' and largely historically correct to ultra-modern?
No, unless they were able to learn their techniques directly from the historical lineage without re-inventing things, I don't mean aside from them.

Anything discovered once can be discovered again. Nothing surprising about that.
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