[analyst74]

An interesting fact I learnt from the article is that both European and Chinese went backwards in terms of infrastructure at some point. So maybe dark age is not a singular historical event, and could re-occur in the future?

[wikwocket]

The idea of a massive, extremely long "dark age" in the future is one of the premises of Asimov's Foundation series. One of the early protagonists had an interesting approach to solving it, a sort of covert galactic Library of Alexandria.

I highly recommend the series if you find this idea interesting, enjoy Asimovian science fiction, or are a living human being.

[pgrote]

Interesting. Wouldn't having a lasting archive of previous knowledge and advancements prevent another dark age?

In the past, most knowledge was transferred among people verbally or located in geographically separate areas.

[potatolicious]

Preservation of knowledge itself is insufficient to prevent things from being lost.

It's something the US is dealing with, particularly in military and aerospace. You stop doing something long enough and, despite having schematics and documentation around, nobody is left that actually knows how to do it. See for example the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the resumption of classical capsule-based spacecraft, we're still in the process of re-learning a lot of knowledge we already gained during the Apollo era. And that's merely a few decades.

Not to mention "dark ages" aren't necessarily the loss of knowledge, but rather the loss of governance. Neither China or Europe ever lost the ability to build roads, but yet the infrastructure deteriorated and was not replaced. This suggests economic, political, and/or religious causes, not the loss of knowledge.

I don't think we've figured this governance thing out to the point where we're safe from regressing to a state where public infrastructure breaks down in a massive way.

[mikepurvis]

Coordination is huge, too—most things have a huge number of upstream dependencies. Knowing how to build advanced circuits is of little use if the chip foundries can't make semiconductors and ship them to you.

[antman]

It never was a singular event. In the late Bronze Age there was a darker age. Complex social structures collapsed, technologies forgotten for eight centuries and the population to some regions reduced to 1/9 of its former size.