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Comment by RomP | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder how long would it take for the civilization to re-create the current level of technology, if all the material artifacts disappear one day: books, computers, robots, factories, even hammers. If all that remains is the current level of knowledge in the heads of 7bln people, how long would it take from the stone age to Core i7, heart transplants and Boeing 787s? And how much different the world would be if we had to re-create this from scratch without the legacy of previous technological generations?

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A question I've had about this is where are the ready supplies of materials that could be used in the recreation? Could we spread across the hills and still find iron and copper deposits? Aren't these all played out by now? We would need to shift to another economic base from new materials I think rather than recreate what we had before, because that's gone.

According to http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/11/building-a-telegrap... the materials still exist, at least in sufficient amounts to build a simple telegraph.

Well, if the artifacts actually disappeared, yes. But if they just got buried somewhere until they rusted into unusability, we could dig up the rust and smelt it.

Technology is also a sociological concept, it is in the minds of the people, it is not merely the products such as blades and core i7s. All those products of technology are the result of a specific culture, it is the result of specific societies and the interaction and relationships that people have with each other. For technology to happen a society requires permanent hierarchical organization (enslavement where the earliest examples) and strict divison of labor. Resources are merely a by-factor, which a society can workaround, when you dont have X to do Y, you make Z from A and do Y.

Its an interesting question, if you removed the artifacts, and kept the same organizations and relationships, my guess is that would mean almost no change. Instead of doing calculations with computers you would do computations with computers. (The first computers where human). If you removed the books and tax-software, still the tax people would walk around collecting their taxes and "inventing" bookkeeping. And we, fellow programmers, would still ponder of nice mind tricks and think of their solutions then apply them in society.

I'd say the biggest problem would be the lack of modern argicultural chemicals and fertiliser. Without them we can't feed 7 billion people. There'd be famine quickly and within a gereration the population would be down to middle ages levels

I wonder the same. I like to imagine the current population being transposed to an alternate Earth where humans never existed.

I guess the first most important step is for everyone to start documenting everything they know of science, creating a kind of ad-hoc paper Wikipedia (once we make paper, of course). If the current generations die before their knowledge is recorded or passed down, we're going to be held back hundreds of unnecessary years.

I imagine with some excellent leadership and coordination, we could be back to computers, complex medicine, and aircrafts within a century. Maybe even decades, if the culture shock doesn't trigger famine, disease, wars, and depression.

And provided a good number of people who can organise / lead the reconstruction, so it doesn't just get sidetracked and forgotten. Reminds me of the story from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where the wheel could not be invented, because marketing people couldn't agree on the colour...

I suspect progress would be really fast. Even if you can't find someone who has the right knowledge to do X, simply know that X can be done would make all the difference.

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