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by dependsontheq
1306 days ago
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It's not a reasonable argument because the total printed volume is still going up. So this is not something easy to prove because the International statistics are very weird, but there are more book readers now than at any time in history, more schools and more libraries, so it's reasonable that there are more new books than at any time in history. We also have the books of the last two centuries very well preserved, so yes some High Tech Processes are very hard to duplicate or even to archive. But these processes are hard to rebuild anyway as soon as organization and key people are lost. Do I have a enough stuff in the local libraries to rebuild the civilization from scratch into the 80s? It's a university town, it shouldn't be a problem... and that's just one town. |
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The issue with this type of thinking is that it assumes some level of material surplus before those books are both physically and intellectually lost to future generations.
A societal collapse already implies a critical level of material scarcity that would make information or industrial preservation low on the totem pole. Where are you going to get the raw and human resources to maintain what remains let alone rebuild industrial processes? And what if those "human resources" don't want to rebuild?
The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart has a pretty candid take on what would happen if an academic survived a systemic collapse of the United States and tried to rebuild the Old World from what was left of the survivors. I think Stewart's vision is extremely plausible, even with the advent of the Internet and digital storage, possibly more so.