Timeline for Max tech level for society of 200,000
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| S Feb 25, 2023 at 3:13 | history | edited | JBH | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 1607 characters in body
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| Feb 25, 2023 at 0:33 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Feb 25, 2023 at 3:13 | |||||
| Feb 24, 2023 at 10:47 | comment | added | NotThatGuy | To advance AI technology, for example, you need people to actively build and maintain computers, and for that you need factories to produce electronic components, and for that you need mining to gather the resources needed for those components, and for that you need factories to develop mining equipment, and you need something to make factories. It's not much like digging a tunnel, because you can't advance the most advanced technology without also committing resources to less advanced things that that technology depends on. | |
| Feb 24, 2023 at 8:09 | comment | added | Luaan | Of course one guy couldn't dig that tunnel. Even if it was possible for a single person to actually dig a tunnel like that (already unlikely), the maintenance of such a tunnel would very rapidly exceed what one person could do. And that's before accounting for things like food and clothing. It's a problem that has been widely explored by serious researchers and sci-fi writers alike. There's definitely many traps along the way that can stop all progress indefinitely - our own civilisations have been stuck in many of those for centuries, only getting out through sheer dumb luck/misfortune. | |
| Feb 24, 2023 at 7:54 | comment | added | Rekesoft | @AustinHemmelgarn Oh, I know... A working scanner-printer could just solve most of those problems long term. I just didn't understand what Yakk meant. Now, after 48h I guess he meant that 200k provide a tiny market of readers to sustain a capitalistic model of proffessional writers and publishing companies. But that, of course, was not what this question was about. | |
| Feb 23, 2023 at 15:35 | comment | added | Austin Hemmelgarn | @Rekesoft Archival preservation of books is actually a lot more complicated than that unless you have ideal storage conditions, the books were made to last in the first place, and nobody is ever actually reading them. Paper (and parchment, and vellum, and most other options) is far from permanent even in the absence of things that want to eat it, most pigments do degrade over time, and simply reading a book puts stress on the bindings. | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 14:43 | comment | added | Rekesoft | "The amount of book this population of 200k can sustain is going to be insanely tiny" I absolutely don't understand this phrase. I am sure I could care of a library of a million books by myself. Books don't eat. They don't use power. The only thing you need to do is keeping rats away so they aren't eaten. | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 14:39 | comment | added | Yakk | @Rekesoft Book knowledge transfer isn't all that fast. And reproducing humans are lossy. The amount of book this population of 200,000k can sustain is going to be insanely tiny; they'll never reach wikipedia scales, let alone anything more advanced. | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 11:41 | comment | added | Rekesoft | @Michael We have both the technology for fast knowledge transfer, called books and even better, schools, and we have virtually inmortal humans, via reproduction. After a thousand years, this 200,000 original inhabitants could be millions, or, even in the case of a non-growing population, you would still have 200,000 people. Sure, not the same ones, but still the same number, with all the old knowledge and a lot of new knowledge they have acquired meanwhile. | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 9:54 | comment | added | Michael | I think the biggest problem is that you have to deal with maintenance issues and lack of specialized workers. Your approach only works if you had materials which allowed you to build machines which never require maintenance and never break down and you have an extremely long lived or fast learning population (or technology which allows fast knowledge transfer). A group of immortal humans in a completely static environment could probably build a modern city and everything in it from raw materials, given enough time. | |
| Feb 21, 2023 at 15:44 | history | answered | JBH | CC BY-SA 4.0 |