[jrowen]

It's not even the perfect, it's the pointless. A new society that completely lost touch with ours is about as knowable as what's on the outside of the universe.

How does that even happen, by the way? Humans survived but somehow lost all knowledge/language and all artifacts they could have used to bootstrap? I've never really understood a realistic sequence of events that leads to that.

[threetonesun]

Plenty of hypothetical scenarios in our modern age which could certainly send us to a new "dark age": global pandemic with high mortality rate, nuclear war, space phenomena that wipes out electronics on Earth. Once you break the chain of knowledge from generation to generation and place to place each remaining group has to get back with what's left.

I do agree though, that if they could do this in the Dark Ages, we've left considerably more artifacts around to do it with today. Any moderately large town has a library with enough information to get things going.

[int_19h]

It's also worth keeping in mind just how many humans there are today compared to historical figures. If 90% of the population were to drop dead tomorrow for one reason or another - say, a combination of pandemic and side effects from the economic disruption that it would cause, like starvation - Earth would still have 800 million people alive. Last time there were that many was less than 300 years ago.

Now consider how fast it would rebound given that those remaining 800 million would rebound, given that they'd have vastly more knowledge and resources (even just having access to pre-mined materials alone is a massive boost!).

[rbanffy]

> global pandemic with high mortality rate, nuclear war,

As we have seen in the last couple years, just a couple poorly timed pandemics can set us back 50 years or so. Add a meteor impact or a nuclear war and we are in for major chaotic transformation whose results can't be easily predicted.

[potato3732842]

> just a couple poorly timed pandemics can set us back 50 years or so

On what metric? I can't think of anything. Medical outcomes, crime, wealth, none of that stuff has regressed nearly that far. Some social issues might have regressed to the early 90s if you take a pessimistic view of the situation.

[jrowen]

Agreed, and even "setting us back" any amount of time is still insanely far from the complete collapse and loss of society and language and it's all totally unrecoverable and we have to start over .... are people really this pessimistic that this just seems like a thing that could happen anytime?

[lisper]

> Add a meteor impact or a nuclear war

If either of those happens, radioactive waste will be the least of anyone's worries.

[rbanffy]

Immediately, yes. 10 thousand years later, probably not.

[nonameiguess]

It's extremely unlikely but at least conceivable that some kind of heretofore unseen global war kills off literally everyone except a few extremely remote uncontacted tribes and humanity eventually spreads back to the rest of the world from them.

It doesn't need to be humanity, I guess. It took humans what? 4 million years roughly to diverge from something like the great apes of today to anatomically modern humanity. Does nuclear waste stay dangerous for that long?

[jrowen]

For certain definitions of "conceivable" that all involve massive amounts of handwaving to get from big disaster to literally every human that speaks language died somehow and the handful left just can't put any of the pieces together from the bazillions of artifacts left over.

Sorry, I don't think there's any point in spending any time designing anything for that scenario (except as art or philosophy, but nothing practical). I feel like people are underestimating how resilient and embedded and redundant our society is at this point, and how very specific the scenario would have to be to lose everything yet humanity survives.

[kryogen1c]

Earth's path through the universe slaloms through asteroids. It is not a question of if humanity gets reset, it is a question of when.

[Retric]

A reset requires enough people to survive the event for humanity to bounce back, while also forgetting everything they know about science and technology.

Huge asteroid impact could kill us all, but it doesn’t seem obvious how it could cause a reset to zero.

[dustingetz]

broadly Jupiter is sheltering Earth from asteroids, to such great extent that it may be a prerequisite to life that habitable water planets share the system with a gas giant. Certainly you’re right that this solution is not perfect.

[vikingerik]

Bit of a nitpick - Jupiter tends to shield the inner solar system from comets that originate far out, but not necessarily asteroids. For bodies in the asteroid belt, there's some thought that Jupiter perturbs as many to a perihelion near Earth's orbit as it diverts away. And without Jupiter, the asteroid belt itself would have accreted into a terrestrial planet instead of remaining loose. Jupiter's overall effect on shielding Earth is uncertain.