alt Hacker NewsBefore opening the article, I thought it's about a shirt buttons and it reminded me one of my favourite thought experiments:
Imagine everything man-made suddenly disappears but not the knowledge individuals carry. How long until we have an iPhone (or a plastic shirt button)? Would it even be any faster than the first time around?
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It's surprising how relatively recent shirt buttons are. 1000s of years no one thought (or couldn't?) sew a hole and put button through it.
John Plant has been working to get to the Iron Age for eleven years, but he's doing it for the lulz.
I've always wanted to write a "How to make a peanut butter and jelly" cookbook that starts with "okay, first you're going to need to find a stalk of wheat that's ready to seed, but don't worry about germinating it because we'll do that in the next chapter.
It's hard to say if we ever would. We used up a lot of the very easy to access sources of many resources - minerals, oil, etc.
Without having access to the advanced techniques, I think it's unlikely we'd even reach the industrial revolution again.
Almost certainly. I can go out into the woods behind my house and get into the iron age in a few days (most of that time would be waiting for clay to dry and charcoal pits to cool). That cuts out ~300k years of anatomically modern human history. Whether or not it would be possible to bootstrap the industrial revolution without easily accessible coal and petroleum is a bigger question.
We might lose electricity for a while. There's not a lot of utility for electricity in pre-industrial society. Like, given enough copper, I could make a wind turbine, but I can't casually make a useful lightbulb. Maybe a ceiling fan, but it would almost certainly be easier to run that off of mechanical power directly via a series of gears and belts. Electrochemistry would be a neat party trick, but I don't think my shoddily built wind turbine would generate enough juice to process aluminum.
Firearms would probably continue to exist. I could make a musket, and its utility for hunting and defense would make it immediately worth it. Black powder's not terribly difficult to manufacture from base ingredients.
Are we including domesticated crops as "man-made"? Because that would complicate matters. A lot of knowledge could be lost in the time it takes to rebreed the kinds of grains that allow for stable settlement.
We wouldn't need to re-invent writing, since that's just knowledge, and that would give a pretty big leg up in not losing a bunch of knowledge every time someone dies.
On the whole, if we keep selectively bred crops, I'd say we'd be bumped back to about the Middle Ages at the most. If we're losing the crops, then it would come down to whether we could preserve our more advanced knowledge long enough for agriculture to redevelop.