While hunter-gathering is no Garden of Eden, I don't think it's as bad as you describe for the simple fact that evolution has molded us to it specifically. Earth isn't designed for human life, but human life most certainly is designed for Earth.
There's nothing guaranteeing you don't starve. There is no design.
Genes are just "random reproductive bets" with fairly high probabilities of failure over the long-run. The environment is basically guaranteed to change faster than your species can evolve, including via meteor.
I dont think the rabbits who die alive eaten by foxes, and the foxes which starve from eating all the rabbits regard that cycle as "designed for them".
Nor likewise, were the dinosaurs that impressed by the sky going dark.
This idea that "we had a home" or "there was once Eden" in any respect is wrong. The life which we were evolved for is one in which if you survived 10, then you might not survive the lion, and if you survive that, not the volcano, and so on.
Your body is just a bet made over millions of years, and not one any conservative gambler would take.
You're correct in your regard for exceedingly high child mortality, though it bears no weight on the survival of humanity as a whole in a technology-breaking event. The human body is indeed a bet, and one that has paid off for ~300,000 years and about 12,000 generations, if we start counting from Homo Sapiens. I'd very much take that bet any day.
Globally, The max distance to a road is something like 250km, in the middle of the Sahara. In the lower US, it's more like 40 miles. Entire ecosystems are gone (e.g. tallgrass prairie), or are only present in chunks that are only a few square miles. There are basically no old growth landscapes in Ireland/England. All the old trees were harvested, and sheep were farmed in the high places. Biomass of land mammals is heavily skewed to Humans and their livestock.
Apex predators are mostly gone over large parts of their former range. The species of trees in the forests that we had in UK/Ireland just aren't there any more. It will probably be taken over by hedge laurels. Deer have been introduced where they used to not be. Florida is going to be a hellscape of escaped pets, like the pythons. The old growth forests of the PNW aren't going to come back for 1000 years or more, if they even can at all due to the extinction of some species and the addition of invasives.
Almost all of past human history has been spent dealing with mass death, and it isnt clear almost that won't be the case for future history, until we're extinct.
The world isnt made for us, and there's no reason to suppose we won't go faster than the dinos
Soon enough, we'd be at each other's throats.
Without electricity, we would be back to 200 years ago. That's still like 10,000 years after most humans were hunter-gathering.
Did we forget that for most of civilization's time, we had technology to help us do stuff, just not electricity-based technology? For example vapor engines would work just fine without electricity. Agriculture would require a lot (really a lot) more people, but would still be possible with manpower and animalpowered machines, like it was for thousands of years.
Also, it's not like our knowledge of electricity would just disappear... we would just have to repair and make new machines, which may take a while but most people would probably survive that.
It's one thing to know that a steam engine is possible. It's another to build steam engines at scale when you're starting from iron ore or perhaps recycled scrap metal, and the most sophisticated available practical skill - and exceptionally rare at that - is blacksmithing.
> Because almost no one today has the tools, skills, experience, and supply chains needed to recreate the Industrial Revolution.
The Powder River Basin would like a word...
Edit: Like Trains 12/2022, Cover story: 24 Hours on Logan Hill
Follow along for a day's worth of action in Wyoming's Powder River Basin
But if we're rebuilding civilization, well, the iron ore mine that supplied US Steel's Geneva Works is also in Wyoming, not that far away. And once you get an industrial revolution up and running, among other things you get railroads, which are useful for transporting coal longer distances.
Beg to differ. We have millions of engineers with extremely relevant skill sets to these problems. If all of electronics was destroyed tomorrow, by next week you'd have a metric shit ton of people learning steam engine technology and how to build/work with analog systems. There would be a lot of growing pains and a lot of death, but it wouldn't be like starting in the year 800 all over again.
Bucket chains?
Praimfaya!
The Amish would likely be fine. Farmers with land and skill would likely survive, but would be able to provide crops for large numbers of people.
People in cities would die.
The word "designed" isn't correct here, unless you believe in a designer. I think it's more correct to say humans are adapted to life on Earth.