Also that depends on numerous circumstances while author of the historical mistakes book doing his job.
Was the reason of the collaps coming from military conflict? If yes, was that author a winning side of conflict or loosing one or he was enough lucky to stay neytral? Some things will be overexposed or overhidden in any branch.
Was that from global heating? Maybe from deadly virus? From AI? What has been braken, maybe something not important?
Maybe the reader is dealing with collaps of fossil energy industry (no cars, no warm houses and no bitcoin mining, but more important things like science is still there?). Maybe some kind of AI starts being our new government while the half-beaten previous one claims that we need to conquer the AI while in reality it is better government then previous?
Has the author finished his book or died on half-word? How much has the world recovered from the disaster on the moment the book went into right hands - is reader sitting in a bunker or is he is still able to grow foods on his land or is he drifting across a submerged planet like Kevin Costner's character?
Last but not least - if you are destined to be the author of such a fateful book, how can you be sure to describe things both correctly and understandable for your reader?
Books, outside of proper context, contain no useful knowlege. They assume too much context and access which is not reasonable if the civilization changes significantly.
More realistic is having and supporting efforts like Open Source Ecology... i.e. having a network of people who have the knowledge and hope enough of them survive in a disaster scenario.
This topic is fun. There are lots of rabbit holes, but https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ is a glimpse into a valiant effort to figure out a path from minimal resources.
One of the comments is right: book or not book, if the global technology regresses too much, humanity is fucked because there are no easily accessible resources anymore. I'm not sure we can use cities and landfills as sources for metals, and for sure all the easily usable energies sources are gone.
(I still laughed at the comment being scared of Marx)
There's a lot of interest in this subject but most answers and books fall far short.
For example, no one talks about it but all our existing level of technology relies heavily on machines we've already built, without those machines we've got to resolve the chicken and egg problem. Most technologies rely in some part on chemistry being understood at an advanced level as well.
The last 50 years have seen chemistry fall out of the limelight because job growth has been largely non-existent, and introduction to chemistry is dangerous.
If you do any kind of research on this subject you'll eventually wind up being held back by the Malthusian trap until you have enough people producing a wide variety of resources.
You can only have a modern society after you've reached a critical point in development, prior to that its a struggle to survive and you need lots of people to do it, and people require food.
As for historical mistakes, that's impossible.
History is constantly re-written for the powers of the day, and everyone has their own opinions.
The only way to avoid historical mistakes is to have some technology that can transfer/implant memories from previous generations.
The historical context simply cannot be reliably transferred to future generations.
Without something like that, you end up having situations where a generation that didn't know the horror of war and the people in power brings the world to the brink of annihilation yet again within a generation or two all because no one remembers the important details, or lead up from the last Great War; only what is taught which has been revised multiple times to the point of being useless.
13 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 47.1 ms ] threadI fear that an attempt to rebuild civilization will lead us to the same mistakes we had made until now.
History has shown that nobody learns from it.
Was the reason of the collaps coming from military conflict? If yes, was that author a winning side of conflict or loosing one or he was enough lucky to stay neytral? Some things will be overexposed or overhidden in any branch.
Was that from global heating? Maybe from deadly virus? From AI? What has been braken, maybe something not important?
Maybe the reader is dealing with collaps of fossil energy industry (no cars, no warm houses and no bitcoin mining, but more important things like science is still there?). Maybe some kind of AI starts being our new government while the half-beaten previous one claims that we need to conquer the AI while in reality it is better government then previous?
Has the author finished his book or died on half-word? How much has the world recovered from the disaster on the moment the book went into right hands - is reader sitting in a bunker or is he is still able to grow foods on his land or is he drifting across a submerged planet like Kevin Costner's character?
Last but not least - if you are destined to be the author of such a fateful book, how can you be sure to describe things both correctly and understandable for your reader?
As for clarity, the Quora thread mentions How Things Work by Roger Jean Segalat, as a positive precedent, https://bibliohaven.com/products/how-things-work?variant=326...
More realistic is having and supporting efforts like Open Source Ecology... i.e. having a network of people who have the knowledge and hope enough of them survive in a disaster scenario.
(I still laughed at the comment being scared of Marx)
For example, no one talks about it but all our existing level of technology relies heavily on machines we've already built, without those machines we've got to resolve the chicken and egg problem. Most technologies rely in some part on chemistry being understood at an advanced level as well.
The last 50 years have seen chemistry fall out of the limelight because job growth has been largely non-existent, and introduction to chemistry is dangerous.
If you do any kind of research on this subject you'll eventually wind up being held back by the Malthusian trap until you have enough people producing a wide variety of resources.
You can only have a modern society after you've reached a critical point in development, prior to that its a struggle to survive and you need lots of people to do it, and people require food.
As for historical mistakes, that's impossible.
History is constantly re-written for the powers of the day, and everyone has their own opinions.
The only way to avoid historical mistakes is to have some technology that can transfer/implant memories from previous generations.
The historical context simply cannot be reliably transferred to future generations.
Without something like that, you end up having situations where a generation that didn't know the horror of war and the people in power brings the world to the brink of annihilation yet again within a generation or two all because no one remembers the important details, or lead up from the last Great War; only what is taught which has been revised multiple times to the point of being useless.