[thegrimmest]

Humanity as a whole has never gone back an age. Once we learned to cultivate plants, domesticate animals, smelt iron, we've never unlearned. We'll similarly never unlearn how to build nuclear reactors or microprocessors. I'm happy to entertain such a suggestion, but I don't see a mechanism by which climate change can destroy enough people and infrastructure to create such an effect. Our knowledge is too distributed and resilient.

[BLKNSLVR]

I understand your point, but the scale of the potential effects of climate change combined with all the societal structures in place, and the number of people required to keep that structure "fed", that allow for the knowledge to be passed down makes me feel that even one generation worth of a significantly depleted humanity (something like 10% of current, spread around the world) who are largely occupied with just ensuring enough food and shelter to survive, will see those societal structures need to be rebuilt from scratch.

[M95D]

> We'll similarly never unlearn how to build nuclear reactors or microprocessors.

Who's "we"? I don't know about you, but:

- I did learn a bit of agriculture and I could probably teach that to the future generation.

- I never learned how to build a nuclear reactor or microprocessor. Did you? Could you teach that?

[thegrimmest]

A kid famously built a neutron emitter in his suburban shed in the 90s[1]. His goal was to build a breeder reactor.

I don't personally know how to do these things either. I know how to program computers, and could teach that. My point is that I am a small component of a vast, distributed system of knowledge that is very hard to destroy. It doesn't seem practical to kill every nuclear physicist and destroy every copy of every document that describes nuclear physics. I don't see how climate change could do this.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

[M95D]

> It doesn't seem practical to kill every nuclear physicist and destroy every copy of every document that describes nuclear physics. I don't see how climate change could do this.

It's actually very simple: climate change destroys crops and then people kill each other for food. I don't expect physicists to survive. Thugs will. And thugs can't read physics books.

PS: Microprocessors and nuclear physiscs knowlegdge is not that well distributed. I expect there are only a few hundred people in the world who know how it's done and each knows a tiny piece of it. For example one knows MCU design, but knows absolutely nothing about silicon waffers manufacturing. If they don't meet - no complete complete knowledge to build a microprocessor.

[thegrimmest]

It seems you're suggesting that every structure resembling a nation state will be destroyed and we'll end up in a Max Max style dystopia where books are used exclusively to start fires. This is a bit reductionist and simplistic. I'm failing to see how food shortages and displacement, even significant enough to affect a billion people, will destroy all of global civilization. There are estimated to be close to a million nuclear physics PhDs, and millions more non-PhD experts. Nuclear reactors are being constructed on every major continent. And while there is a global bottleneck for current-generation silicon, there are hobbyists who produce previous-generation microprocessors[1].

I've never disagreed that these events will be disruptive to supply chains, create shortages, stall innovation, or force us to reconstruct lost cutting-edge expertise or infrastructure. All of these seem like relatively small hiccoughs, not civilization-ending catastrophes. Recall that the Black Death, which killed nearly half of Europe, was shortly followed by the Renaissance.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg