Assidragon on 10/11/2016 at 19:14
Quote Posted by Starker
I personally think that a complete loss of knowledge is unlikely even by the time we start starving to death en masse. Even thousands of years ago we had a small number of people who could read and write when people in entire regions could be wiped out by successive famines and plagues. Such people will almost certainly be protected and fed by ruling elites.
That depends on how you define "knowledge". The extreme basics of knowledge - knowing the alphabet, perhaps basic calculus, basic geography, etc - would be unlikely to be lost, no. But anything deep is also equally unlikely to remain.
Deep sciences nowadays look like magic to most people. How many people do you think could teach - heck, even properly understand - quantum physics? Genetics? Advanced mathemathics? Do you know how to design a microchip, for example? You probably wouldn't. There's only a handful of people who know, and they are under NDA to never tell anyone outside the circle. Should they die... then gg. It's made even worse by the fact these guys would use softwares designed by equally specialized people... who will rely on the microchips these folks designed. Break one part of the chain and you may irrecoverably lose the whole thing.
By my estimate, about 3/4 of our knowledge could be easily lost in case a major disruption, no matter how hard the elites try.
Quote Posted by faetal
From what I can gather from the current state of this topic - everyone agrees that it's unlikely humans will go extinct after a ME event, however some people agree it is possible, but there is a lot of scepticism over
how it might happen.
To be fair, it's hard to make predictions about an event we only have speculations about...
Quote Posted by faetal
The modern scientific method and structured archiving of knowledge is only really a few hundred years old and without the internet and distributed archives, suddenly knowledge resides on paper, which degrades over time (1000 years will easily do it) and people, which tend to die.
I can easily imagine it happening under harsh enough circumstances. If you can't, why not?
You are way too generous there. Our knowledge is increasingly stored digitally, which has a shelf-life of
decades. HDDs or magnetic tapes don't retain data very long unless you refresh them, and even if you evade media failure, you will need a device that can properly read your data back and interpret it. With the life cycle of most softwares, I'm not confident that we could succesfully recover a ten year old backup... not without a major undertaking in getting a stone-age software back from the grave, at least.
Starker on 10/11/2016 at 19:51
Maybe it's because I come from a time where computers weren't ubiquitous, but I don't see why learning things from books is that much worse. And maybe we won't preserve the deeper sciences, but how about stuff like selective breeding, hygiene and hydroponics (which could be useful to keep the seed crop disease free, for example)? Not all our technology is high tech.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 19:56
I'm talking about a total loss of knowledge. It'll take X amount of years for all of the digital stuff to be inaccessible, X amount more for the in paper stuff to be so incomplete that it may as well be useless and then you have to rely on knowledge curators who are presumably going to be carried by those who are dealing with supplies and protection, but even that is going to depend on what the available food versus human metabolism landscape looks like. If people are living hand to mouth and are malnourished, then I'm not sure how much patience they're going to have for keeping a scribe on board to make sure we still remember how to build computers. If the ecological situation was such that humans couldn't keep themselves fully nourished and able to accumulate excess, we may well see a reversing of history, where we go from internet, to just computers, to no computers and just books, to few books, to no books, to just oral traditions. At which point, after a few generations of knowledge degradation we'll probably end up with various religions based on the tech of the elders or whatever.
That's just a hypothetical on how 1-4,000 years might go, only on the subject of civilisation and tech, assuming that the environmental harshness is past an extreme threshold. Give that scenario another few thousand or tens of thousands of years, with another species somewhere (or various difference species) thriving in a new niche and there is the basis for one way in which humans could conceivably go extinct in the aftermath of a ME event.
Bear in mind, I can also imagine plenty of more positive outcomes, they're just less interesting to me since they're easier to imagine.
Starker on 10/11/2016 at 20:13
And that's fine, but I'm talking about why I think it's unlikely. I'm not saying that there will definitely be a positive outcome no matter what.
Oh, and I wasn't responding to you, faetal, about the computer thing, but to the poster immediately before me.
Assidragon on 10/11/2016 at 20:21
Quote Posted by Starker
Maybe it's because I come from a time where computers weren't ubiquitous, but I don't see why learning things from books is that much worse. And maybe we won't preserve the deeper sciences, but how about stuff like selective breeding, hygiene and hydroponics (which could be useful to keep the seed crop disease free, for example)? Not all our technology is high tech.
It's increasingly like that, though. Paper is not totally niche, but it's really heading that way. In an age where John Deer tractors are guided by GPS, farmers plan and track crops in excel sheets and communicate with the government over emails, not much leaves papertrail.
To make it worse, engineering is 100% computer planning already. I don't even know a single engineer or architect who doesn't use some sort of CAD software. And engineering is kinda
very important. It's hard to make any theoretical knowledge into actual use without having the proper equipment.
Also, there's a big question here: if you skip all the deeper sciences and just retain the books with immediate, useful knowledge... how much of that knowledge will still remain "knowledge"? Take, say, selective breeding. If you don't understand what makes it work (=eg biology and genetics), then it will look like a set of arcane rules, not science. At that point, it may as well be lost - it will only keep eroding with time instead of improving.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 20:52
Quote Posted by Starker
Maybe it's because I come from a time where computers weren't ubiquitous, but I don't see why learning things from books is that much worse. And maybe we won't preserve the deeper sciences, but how about stuff like selective breeding, hygiene and hydroponics (which could be useful to keep the seed crop disease free, for example)? Not all our technology is high tech.
I can't imagine how much slower my education would have been if I'd had to rely on physical media. Having an idea, then wondering where the relevant literature to research that idea is, then having to spend the next few years poring over journal back-issues to see what you can find? Way too slow. It's also the fact that the books might not be where you are and there might not be Amazon to get you your book quick. With any kind of starvation pressure, travelling long distances to get a rumoured manual on electrical engineering is going to be a borderline religious mission. I think a big problem is that for any given area, there is SO MUCH to sift through, that you'll be lucky if you even manage to find enough useful material in whichever building you're ransacking.
I work in a very high tech environment, and I can tell you that without the internet and computing, it'd be drudgery. I also can't imagine trying to do good research while starving.
As I mentioned earlier, go to any place on earth right now to where people are starving and ask them how their tech development is going and where on their to do list obtaining e.g. a genetic engineering lab is.
Starker on 10/11/2016 at 21:30
Quote Posted by Assidragon
It's increasingly like that, though. Paper is not totally niche, but it's really heading that way. In an age where John Deer tractors are guided by GPS, farmers plan and track crops in excel sheets and communicate with the government over emails, not much leaves papertrail.
To make it worse, engineering is 100% computer planning already. I don't even know a single engineer or architect who doesn't use some sort of CAD software. And engineering is kinda very important. It's hard to make any theoretical knowledge into actual use without having the proper equipment.
Also, there's a big question here: if you skip all the deeper sciences and just retain the books with immediate, useful knowledge... how much of that knowledge will still remain "knowledge"? Take, say, selective breeding. If you don't understand what makes it work (=eg biology and genetics), then it will look like a set of arcane rules, not science. At that point, it may as well be lost - it will only keep eroding with time instead of improving.
If selective breeding is such a high tech technology, how were people able to do it before genetics? Did we have rulebooks thousands of years ago?
Also, yes, the engineers of today need computers, but it wasn't that long ago we managed to build quite impressive things even without computers.
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 21:45
Selective breeding is something you can do when you have the luxury of resource abundance. Again, look to places where people are running a resource deficit - they aren't rounding up and selectively breeding anything because they don't have the excess resources to do so.
How we did it hundreds of years ago was by intuited phenotyping - "this one's got nice wool, breed a bit more" type stuff. Perfectly possible without books and in the many, many scenarios I can envisage where humanity carries on, there's plenty of it. In the one where the ecological configuration doesn't match our metabolisms with abundance however, picture us as you would people starving in third world countries. The main goal in those situations is to have as many children as possible in the hopes that a few make it to adulthood, hope to not die of disease or starvation, keep trying to find things to eat and drink. Extrapolate a few thousand years with no neighbouring places of plenty to provide medicine, vaccines, aid packages, concerned looking celebrities etc...
faetal on 10/11/2016 at 21:47
I'm sat at my desk, drinking a glass of wine, talking to people in god knows how many countries, not just because human brains are awesome, but because for the past 100,000 years or so of humans being around, there has been a richness of things we are adapted to eat, and a steady supply of energy-packed hydrocarbons under the earth. Remove those two things and so much goes with it.
Assidragon on 10/11/2016 at 21:50
It depends what you mean by "selective breeding".
If you mean, "this corn looks better than the rest, let's destroy those and keep only this one growing", then yeah, that's perfectly doable without any deeper knowledge.
If you want to create hybrid corns or engineer them towards a specific goal, you'll probably need some knowledge. There's a reason Mendel is still famous for discovering how traits are inherited.
