This sounds much easier than creating a society where people feel happy and secure enough to have families. I wonder when 45 will add this to his campaign checklist.
True, but Its 100% possible for us to get knocked back into the iron age, and if that happens, there’s a very real chance we won’t be able to climb up again.
Easy to access sources of a lot of the resources needed to rebuild a modern civilization are gone, the only reason we can get to the remaining deposits is because we already have the advanced equipment to extract it. It’s entirely possible that if we get knocked back down the tech ladder, we may never climb back up again
Fall out of repair, and be unable to be repaired effectively without tools, resources, or knowledge that are no longer accessible?
Abso-fucking-lutely
Take a deep sea oil rig. How long do you think it’ll be operational without maintenance with all that sea water? After not too long you won’t be able to repair the damage without serious industrial capabilities, and that’s assuming you even know how to fix it.
Really even as relatively little as a few decades of total chaos and disorganization would be enough to make crawling back really hard. A century and more and it really could be impossible, or at least improbable - especially given that the humanity that comes out of the other end of the crisis is the same one that got us into it. So the remaining pieces of major valuable infrastructure left will probably get wrecked as the survivors fight over them
As the fiery tendrils of the celestial catastrophe engulfed the world, humanity found itself cast back to the primordial embrace of the Stone Age. The once towering achievements of civilization crumbled into dust, leaving survivors to navigate a world stripped of its technological marvels. In this new epoch, where the remnants of mankind struggled to eke out an existence, a daring expedition was conceived in the sun-scorched lands of Argentina. A ragtag crew, armed with little more than salvaged tools and an unyielding spirit, prepared to embark on a perilous voyage across the treacherous seas to scour the mysterious ice-clad wilderness of Antarctica and the riches entombed on the base therein. Their mission: to uncover forgotten secrets, salvage survival, and reclaim a semblance of the ingenuity that once defined their species. On the timeworn deck of a makeshift sailing ship, the brave explorers cast off into the unknown, setting forth on a journey that would either revive the flame of human innovation or be swallowed by the icy abyss of a desolate world.
Guy I jam with in a band is a coder. He said that ChatGPT is fucking nuts. It’s getting to the point where it will be able to point out the flaws in his code and offer fixes. Only a matter of time when we can take a photo of something and our personal Jarvis will tell us: what it is. What it does. How to use it. How to fix it. Shit is wild man.
ChatGPT is mediocre in a silo. It has no context for distributed systems and will never compete with real developers. The benefit of ChatGPT is the time it will save a good developer from writing boilerplate. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who says otherwise is bitten by the bias bug.
I have consulted chatGPT on code for Ansible, which is garbage anyway. Then I sent it my ideas, which it spotted and suggested fixes for bugs within. Then I ran it and did 5 days of work in one.
For code I do enjoy, I’ll want to keep the experience in my brain. For ansible, I’ll let chatGPT suffer the PTSD instead. But we’re already there.
I don’t get this under estimation of humanity. If 99% of humans died, the planet became 3-5 degrees warmer, and all computers literally popped out of existence, we’d recover a ton of technology within a few centuries. We’d use a strange mish-mash of old and new tech, but people would write down a ton of information from the generations that remember the before times, and using previously learned principles, new generations would reverse engineer a ton of useful things.
Radio communications would be relatively easy to remake and will almost always exist in some form. A ton of useful developments like agricultural technologies and energy technologies would be too valuable to be lost for long. Gunpowder and firearms aren’t going anywhere. All of these bedrock technologies would never totally disappear as they’re too useful.
Even in a world constantly at war, these technologies would be essential to winning those fights. If you forget how to make guns, a group that didn’t will conquer you. If you rediscover an old technology, it could give you an upper hand. If there isn’t perpetual war, the risk of it and the benefits of trade will allow even more development and rediscovery.
The biggest reason for you underestimating humans is that you forget that most of our technology isn’t physical. A boat may decay and become inoperable within a few decades, but the engineering principles that allow for the boat to function are unlikely to decay and fall out of disuse. Engines are useful. Boats are useful. Construction of high quality versions of these things won’t happen overnight, but low quality and functional versions will get built.
People, even without writing, are exceptional at remembering useful ideas. With writing, we can store information outside of our minds and write out more complicated ideas than our working memory can handle. You think everyone is going to forget how to write mathematics? Hell no. We’ll never lose written language, and that will allow us to find knowledge that no one alive remembers. The necessity of learning unknown concepts alone will ensure people would remember how modern languages are written.
The most impressive technology humans have is language, ideas, forms. Without forms, we’d never have built the most impressive physical structures and technology we have. Every advanced building began as a blueprint, and even Stonehenge required planning and communication. If every physical technology we’ve ever made disappeared at once, we’d rebuild many of those things by writing down what we remember and sharing knowledge with eachother.
TLDR: Ideas can outlive physical technology, and we’ll never stop using useful tech in any apocalyptic situation. Only the Planet of the Apes neurological disease would stop humans permanently.
It would have to be a really wild scenario where humans get stuck permanently in the iron age again. While they are fun thought experiments, I just can’t see to many ways that humans survive but our technology and books disappear from existence.
See my other comment on ideas. The communication abilities and intelligence of humans would need to be crippled for us to die off. We’d never truely go back to the iron age, because we have non physical technology that’s difficult to destroy. We’re unlikely to forget how to make steel because it’s too useful, even if all steel is destroyed.
Plenty of people around who can build wood gas generators… and there’s going to be plenty of warlords who will happily employ them and provide resources.
I wonder if there’s anything they could be doing to reduce the deaths of their young men who are of age to start building families (20-30 year olds)? It must be a total mystery if they’re resorting to using female prisoners as breeders. I guess we’ll never know.
Not an expert on this at all but I feel like it’s less of “the human race is going to die out” vs the owner class needs cheap labor and bodies for war to continue infinite growth.
My running theory is in the United States, Republican’s obsession with abortion is tied to the fact they need poor and broken families to pump out kids for future cheap labor and the prison industrial complex to make a nation function moving forward. That and the gray sunami of a upside down pyramid with not enough young to take care of the older generations (I think Japan and China are experiencing this currently).
Well in Russia it’s about replacing all the kids and men dying in Ukraine. The Russian losses are staggering and Russia is basically throwing their people into a meat grinder.
If only a fraction of a percent are coming home “after the war” Russia is in big big trouble regardless of population growth or shrinkage due to other causes.
In the USA I’d agree it’s about cheap labor. They don’t want to let the Mexicans in too so gotta keep those white babies flowing.
Russia has like 500 million people, they could send 499 million to their deaths and they would be fiiiiiine.
Most of their economy is oil and gas extraction which doesn’t require a very large labor force. They can just outsource exploration to Europeans corporations anyway.
No, their population peaked in 94 at about 150M. They definitely have a serious population/demographic crisis. Arguably it’s one of the reasons Putin decided now was the moment to escalate in Ukraine, before it’s too late. Also why they’re taking Ukrainian children.
In germany the sheinking population or rather the aging population is causint serious issues for the pension system. The current working population is paying the pensions for the current pensioners. So what happens is fewer and fewer people pay for more and more people, leading to my generation not being able to get state pension, instead needing to get private plans
A bit embarrassing to admit this but the first time I was in Germany I was mildly shocked by the number of non-ethnic Germans I saw speaking German. Yes I am aware that immigration has increased there.
That requires long term planning that I doubt they are capable of or willing to engage in. It takes a minimum of 16 years to go from conception to worker in the developed world. In practice over 20 if you want them to be able to make real money for you.
Who plans for 16 years ahead? No one. The horizon is way too long. No one is going to lobby a politician today for an investment that might pay off that far in the future. You could get about 7% return on an index fund this year alone and instead you want to try for the slim possibility that you can pay a worker less in 16 freaken years? Companies usually won’t go beyond even a 5 year investment, 8 if they are a utility. This would be an investment that is literally over twice as risky as a nuclear power plant.
The US has an easy way out of the demographic trap through immigration. Countries like China and Japan don’t have that because no one wants to immigrate to China and Japan basically doesn’t allow it at all.
Population collapse for the human race isn’t so much a problem, we’ll weather through it as a species. For an economy, population decline is very not good though. You need working age people to support the young and old, as well as everything else your taxes go to.
Lol invade Ukraine after promising not to. Getting entire generations of sperm makers killed in illegal war. Force female prisoners to be baby factories. Ladies and gentlemen: the bad guys.
Sounds like somethings that needs a steady stream of new convicts and flexible legislation that can be wielded to that purpose. Just like with US corporate correctional system. I think they can manage it.
In journalism the writers don’t write the heds. That’s an editor’s job. It goes back to the days of print journalism when only the editor would know how many column-inches they would have for a given story on any given page. It’s still industry standard for digital publishing as well.
I’m not making any claim as to the rationality of the Russian State member. The Duma has some crazies, just like Congress does. They don’t speak for the entire country, though.
That reminds me. Anyone here ever hear about the bureaucratized rape in West Virginia coal mining camps back in the day? If a man was injured and couldn’t work his wife could take “Esau scrip” which she would have to pay back with her body. Capitalism! The entire situation is a stark reminder that capitalists wil LITERALLY rape and murder you to protect their position.
Yeah, they don’t teach a lot of things in school. I only know about it because of BtB. The whole episode on The Battle of Blair Mountain is nuts and shows how far the owner class will go to keep people in line.
BtB just did a separate story on the Hawk’s Nest disaster in West Virginia in which they killed thousands of men by knowingly giving them silicosis and covered the whole thing up.
“We’ve had multitudes of women and tell us as little girls they remember their mothers coming to the company store and one of the things that a lot of more the lovely ladies had to do was come upstairs. Some of the young girls had the stories shared by their mothers stating that they would be escorted in the shoe room. There would be a selected guard that would be waiting for them and they would receive a brand new pair of shoes with no accountability other than to perform whatever the service the guard wished to have in lieu of pay. We had one woman in particular share with us that her mother was a young girl about 25 years old and bought her first pair of shoes here and the women’s entire life those shoes remained in the shoe box on her closet shelf never to be worn and she refused to wear another pair of shoes her entire life. She made her shoes out of cardboard, newspapers and twine.”
Joy Lynn, owner and tour guide, Whipple Company Store
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