Hyperdepression and technological regression

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by TGLS

There's a twisted logic to the targeting of civilians, as it motivates your adversary to not put you in a position where you have no choice but to go ahead with nuclear war. Whether or not this means TL loss probably depends more on whether unaligned nations are targeted or if nuclear winter is valid.

There's another reason to target civilians, including those of neutral nations. "If I can't win, nobody does", also known as a counter-recovery strike. This targets civilian populations, industries, and resources (or their extraction hubs), and other infrastructure with an eye to destroying the capital and workers that would aid the enemy in recovering after a nuclear war. The idea being that this way while you might lose, everyone else loses worse and for longer, so in the long run you actually 'win'. Of course if everyone with the warheads opts for counter-recovery (and if you're the cold-war USA or USSR and have a thousand plus of the things, why not?) and nuclear winter turns out to be a real thing, it's going to be a pretty hard life for the survivors and their descendants for quite some time.

Thankfully, we didn't get to see if anyone was morally bankrupt enough to test a counter-recovery strategy.

[Opellulo]

History-wise there aren't that many good examples in favor of "global technological regression": the "great collapse of 1200 AC" is still a theory (and the scarce evidence found so far point to climate change more than "invasion from the sea people"), the Fall of the Roman Empire is questionable since things in Constantinople went on just fine. Another examples that's often used is Middle Ages, that were instead a period of fervent changes and inventions; the "Dark Ages" trope is more a modern reinterpretation than proper history.

This concept is a child of the Cold War "M.A.D." mentality and to an infamous quote wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein about the "WW4 fought with stick and stones" so more a cautionary tale about man-made (and enforced) holocausts than natural ones.

Everything is fine if you want to use it a story device but at least don't make it "natural".

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Rupert

There's another reason to target civilians, including those of neutral nations. "If I can't win, nobody does", also known as a counter-recovery strike. This targets civilian populations, industries, and resources (or their extraction hubs), and other infrastructure with an eye to destroying the capital and workers that would aid the enemy in recovering after a nuclear war. The idea being that this way while you might lose, everyone else loses worse and for longer, so in the long run you actually 'win'. Of course if everyone with the warheads opts for counter-recovery (and if you're the cold-war USA or USSR and have a thousand plus of the things, why not?) and nuclear winter turns out to be a real thing, it's going to be a pretty hard life for the survivors and their descendants for quite some time.

Thankfully, we didn't get to see if anyone was morally bankrupt enough to test a counter-recovery strategy.

Conveniently (*) a basic deterrence-oriented counter-value strategy is already in large part a counter-recovery strategy if the deterrence goal fails and you launch it.

Originally Posted by Opellulo

This concept is a child of the Cold War "M.A.D." mentality and to an infamous quote wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein about the "WW4 fought with stick and stones" so more a cautionary tale about man-made (and enforced) holocausts than natural ones.

It definitely doesn't originate there. There's at least one clear example of a catastrophic technological regression story published in the late 19th century. (And more examples earlier than the 1940s.)

[Varyon]

I don't think an economic depression "alone" could cause a sufficient regression to drop a TL, but anything called a "hyperdepression" may well have enough add-on effects - including worldwide unrest that basically result in civil war at the least - to eliminate enough knowledge (in the form of destroyed records and slain experts) to cause such. Because, really, TL is arguably more about knowledge than stuff. Certainly, destruction of key infrastructure is going to be problematic, but so long as the knowledge remains you're probably only looking at a generation or two before that infrastructure is largely rebuilt - potentially in a more efficient manner, given it's being rebuilt to a plan rather than how it sprung up initially. Of course, that time period between the collapse and the rebuild is one that is ripe for story and roleplaying potential.

Of course, secret knowledge - like the formula for Roman concrete IIRC - is very susceptible to destruction. Fortunately, loss of KFC's secret recipe isn't going to cause a TL regression, even if for some it makes life seem less worth living.

[martinl]

You might manage some tech regression if you got everyone in the world so angry at the scientifically and technically educated that any survivors went into hiding and stayed there. This is tricky because any region that didn't do this would probably have a huge advantage, but humans in large groups have done some very inadvisable stuff.

A hyperdepression would certainly accompany such a development.

[Willy]

Originally Posted by martinl

You might manage some tech regression if you got everyone in the world so angry at the scientifically and technically educated that any survivors went into hiding and stayed there.

If the reason for the mess is a technological failure, such a behaviour is even understandable. Imagine our modern world were next to nothing goes without digital tech and that tech now fails due to a experiment, a computervirus, or a scientifily created catastrophe.

If the repercusions of that failure are big enough scientists of all kinds will have a hard time. This was often a theme in scify or distopic novels. Also remember historically a lot of leaders / gouvernments tried to restrict tech they didn´t like for more reasons i can count. The more backward, idelogical or fanatic the more often it happened. Even if not a new technique with disruptive potential was often stopped by the gouvernment which feared unrest and instability. Not to mention that some "leaders" will try to use such problems to gain power. A lot of cults had such a background or even tried to make a doomsday scenario happen.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Opellulo

History-wise there aren't that many good examples in favor of "global technological regression": the "great collapse of 1200 AC" is still a theory (and the scarce evidence found so far point to climate change more than "invasion from the sea people"), the Fall of the Roman Empire is questionable since things in Constantinople went on just fine.

Only technically. The Byzantine Empire was 'Roman' in name only, it used Roman law (to a point) and its government was an extension of Roman rule, but the ground-level culture was tremendously different. They spoke Greek instead of Latin, the relationship between the dominant religion and the state was totally unlike anything in Roman history, in many ways they had more in common with the polities of the Near and Middle East than they did Rome proper.

In some ways, it was a bit like modern Japan or India, with a Western-style government ruling a very non-Western culture and society. The native culture had a Roman overlay, but they weren't Roman. They weren't even really of Classical Civilization. Even the population demographics and female fertility rates of the Eastern and Western Empires were different.

The Western Empire did indeed Fall, and more importantly, it did so because its cultural and religious foundation had rotted away. Which is part of the 'regression' memory-trope, because even if the tech theoretically remained, the cosmopolitan large-scale society and economy that had enabled it was gone, so the tech became de facto gone as well.

The tech that continued to advance after the collapse was that which could be done on a local scale, or at least on a smaller scale than the Empire had managed. Sometimes that actually accelerated things, as people have noted: the sudden lack of slavery-power encouraged the development of other energy sources like water power.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by malloyd

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.

Other things that small populations can’t support include a high degree of specialisation in either labour or capital (including human capital (skills and knowledge) as well as plant & equipment, workshops and jigs), full employment of specialised capital, and production on really large scales (for want of a market for the output — as Adam Smith put it “the division of labour is limited by yhe extent of the market”). That means that productivity is limited, reducing incomes and wealth. So not only might sophisticated products and processes (which is not exactly the same as the ones invented last) fall out of general use, but other aspects of GURPS TL might be affected.

I always like to note that destruction of transport systems and damage to (or degraded performance of) the systems that assign and deliver inputs to firms and products to consumers can effectually reduce the scope for specialisation and production at scale. After war and kleptocracy, the strongest correlates of stagnant poverty are slow and ineffective commercial courts and gross lack of transport infrastructure.

Anyway, the point is well made that the situation after a collapse of industry will not be exactly like a lower tech level that is on the way up through a process of research and development. Perhaps they would be even less alike than TL3 in China and TL3 in northern Italy, or the late neolithic in Mesopotamia and the late neolithic in Mexico.

May I suggest the notation “TL8 - 2”?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Only technically. The Byzantine Empire was 'Roman' in name only, it used Roman law (to a point) and its government was an extension of Roman rule, but the ground-level culture was tremendously different. They spoke Greek instead of Latin, the relationship between the dominant religion and the state was totally unlike anything in Roman history, in many ways they had more in common with the polities of the Near and Middle East than they did Rome proper.

In some ways, it was a bit like modern Japan or India, with a Western-style government ruling a very non-Western culture and society. The native culture had a Roman overlay, but they weren't Roman. They weren't even really of Classical Civilization. Even the population demographics and female fertility rates of the Eastern and Western Empires were different.

The Western Empire did indeed Fall, and more importantly, it did so because its cultural and religious foundation had rotted away. Which is part of the 'regression' memory-trope, because even if the tech theoretically remained, the cosmopolitan large-scale society and economy that had enabled it was gone, so the tech became de facto gone as well.

The tech that continued to advance after the collapse was that which could be done on a local scale, or at least on a smaller scale than the Empire had managed. Sometimes that actually accelerated things, as people have noted: the sudden lack of slavery-power encouraged the development of other energy sources like water power.

...Where are you getting the Eastern Roman Empire as lacking in technology, scale, and economy? Is there any actual historical basis for that claim?

I mean, if you're in the western Roman territories and were enjoying Roman hegemony before it broke down, it wouldn't do you any good that those benefits were still available at the far side the continent. But that's not what you're asserting.

[Inky]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

It definitely doesn't originate there. There's at least one clear example of a catastrophic technological regression story published in the late 19th century. (And more examples earlier than the 1940s.)

Are you thinking of After London? Or is the one you were thinking of a different one?
Of course, before that, the idea that "the ancients" had had technologies far in advance of their own which were now lost was popular in mediaeval times. After London mentions one such legend, in fact, "malleable glass", supposed to have been known to the Romans, or the Egyptians, depending who you asked, and which was one of the things alchemists tried to recreate.

Individual technologies have definitely been lost for centuries and then rediscovered, it's happened many times.
Besides concrete, plumbing is a well-known example! (Don't know whether the people of, say, post-Roman Britain had really lost the knowledge of how to do it or just the infrastructure to pull it off on a large scale or the knowledge of why it was useful, but the fact remains).
The Ancient Greeks had clockwork devices of a complexity not seen afterwards for centuries.
The basic idea of TENS was known to some doctors in ancient Rome. They used a live weakly electric fish in a bucket!
Given the above, I'm quite prepared to believe that the "Baghdad battery" was a battery. It would certainly be easier to use than a fish.
And so on.

But dropping an entire TL as a whole is another matter. As somebody mentioned above, even if infrastructure was damaged and trade and travel reduced, some higher TL things are as easy as their lower TL equivalents once people know about them. However little equipment they may have brought with them, all time travellers with half a brain know always to boil the water and why. And a "TL8 - 2" civilisation, to use Agemegos's notation, would have things in common with being a time traveller!