[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