[fc417fc802]

Agreed, the food production analogy doesn't really work because the issue is the scale of the problem. On the one end there's the realm where you need a few specialists and a small group could potentially figure the entire thing out from scratch given a bit of time and effort. And then at the opposite extreme there's the realm where everything is built on a giant pyramid of artifacts that currently work, just keeping each individual piece running day to day requires a dedicated expert, and the combined stack took hundreds or thousands of lifetime equivalents to develop.

The idea being that once a toolchain becomes sufficiently complex if you ever have to bootstrap it again for whatever reason you won't be able to speedrun the process the way you might naively expect. I think modern chip production likely already reached this point several decades ago. As evidence I'll point out that China only recently achieved EUV and remains several nodes behind despite directing an obscene amount of resources towards the initiative.

[anthonyrstevens]

Speaking of pyramid (shapes), this reminds me of an idea in Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series - there's a 30-mile high mountain with populated cities all the way up to the top whose weather and temperature is controlled by 8,000-year-old-tech established by the original colonizers. My memory is that nobody at the time of the series' events knows how to operate the tech - it just works.