Space Age to Bronze Age

Question

I was wondering on others people's ideas on how to take a Space Age civilization and send it back to the stone or bronze age. My own idea was that war and disease broke out, crippling the nation as cities became destroyed, emp's wiped out electronics, and disease forced the survivors to spread out and form smaller tribes.

What are your ideas? How would you send a space civilization back to the stone or bronze age?

Edit: Space Age being a civilization that has achieved colonization outside of its home system.

Edit 2: Wasn't sure how to choose an answer since I was just wanting to see how people would do it. I decided to choose one that I think might help others the best if they were looking at how to or if they could do it

Answer 1

The only way you can send us back to the bronze age is to eradicate knowledge. The main difference between the bronze age as it was and now is that now we know things that we did not know before.

And even though quite a bit of our knowledge is on computer storage today, and even if you could through some magic EMP destroy all electronics, enough of it survive on paper in the form of books to effectively make sure that we never get back to the bronze age again. A simple junior high school book on physics or chemistry contains so much knowledge that at the most you could fall back to the 1800's.

So on Earth... forget it. You cannot succeed. Even if you wipe out, say, 99% of the world's population and destroyed all computers... books and mouth-to-mouth will still contain so much knowledge that it will keep us firmly in the 1900's, at the very worst.

To create this sort of scenario, you need to go to another planet. Have a bunch of unschooled colonists crash land on some unknown, strange planet. Like the B-Ark of Golgafrincham. Only then have you made enough knowledge unavailable that you have people revert into the equivalent of a bronze age.

Answer 2

The space age civilisation has heavily computerized systems. That is, all important aspects of the space ships, factories, and whatever else advanced technology they use is completely controlled by software. People don't know how to make things because they don't need to; "the system" provides them with everything they need.

One day, an artificial intelligence goes bad, usurps control over all systems and declares war on the humans. After the AI gets control over space stations or any systems on a planet not supporting human life on its own, people there have no chance: The AI simply disables all life support, and the people are doomed. However on earth (and possibly other life-supporting planets, maybe terraformed ones) people manage to survive and fight the machines controlled by the AI. Of course the AI itself destroys all factories that produce stuff only needed by humans (like food, medicine, and so on), and the humans can only win against the AI by destroying as much of the technology as possible (especially anything mobile or able to create mobile objects), and then hiding somewhere where the AI won't find them; thanks to the complete computerization of technology, this is a place where no technology exists. But people lack any knowledge how to make stuff without that advanced technology; they cannot even read about that in books, as all books are long electronic, and any access to electronic books would be visible to the AI.

So the humans are thrown back to stone age because they no longer have access to the advanced technology, and no longer know how to make anything without that advanced technology. Indeed, even making fire is something they have to figure out on their own again.

Answer 3

If the civilization has advanced to the point of having colonies in other star systems there are likely several in-system colonies.

For example by the time humanity would spread to nearby systems you would expect colonies on the Moon, Mars, the Moons of Jupiter and/or Saturn, and multiple asteroids or space stations. Most or all of these in system colonies would require high technology to exist (lose technology and you don't have air to breath). Whatever cataclysm brings down your worlds technology level would have to wipe out these in system colonies or set up a reason why they wouldn't help reestablish civilization on the home world.

Large scale war seems to be a likely possibility, either between groups of people, or possibly an AI machine war, or even an outside alien attack. The attacks would need to destroy or severely damage the off world high tech colonies and cause severe damage to the home world technological infrastructure.

Plague, either nanotechnology or biological. This could allow your in system colonies to stay functional with the home world devastated and quarantined.

Some natural disaster that effects technology. Massive solar flares, local star going nova flooding the system with radiation or other radiation based near extinction event. Scientific experiment gone wrong or naturally occurring change to the local laws of physics that make electrical technology cease functioning.

These were just a few of my first thoughts there could be a number of possible reasons for technological regression.

Answer 4

Something like that could happen if humans would colonize most of the Solar System, with colonies on the Moon, and Mars. Technology would probably evolve to the level of ubiquitous computing, with very little people knowing exactly how technology works, kind of like today. Computers would be at the nano level and present in all objects, making everyday life appear magical with inanimate objects responding to the requests of the people. If for instance, a natural or artificial disaster would happen on Earth, such as a planetary pole shift knocking out all the electronics and causing climate change such as a rapid global warming or ice age, the people on Earth would not be able to rebuild their civilization again. Science would be degraded into religion or perhaps a cult. Scientists would be like priests or shamans. If climate change happens most of the cities would be flooded, like Atlantis. The only thing that would remain would probably be perhaps some scattered hi-tech artifacts or rusted machinery, and nobody would know who built it. Perhaps the off-world colonies would survive. They would land on Earth once in a while to check on the people of the mother civilization. The Earth people would think that they are UFO's or aliens. On various ufology and/or alternate history websites there is a suggestion that this scenario could have happened in the distant past. There would have been an ancient advanced civilization before Noah's flood, or orally told distorted legends of the catastrophic end of a magical civilization. Perhaps the alleged "alien" ruins on the Moon and Mars were built by us.

http://listverse.com/2013/04/12/10-mysteries-that-hint-at-forgotten-advanced-civilizations/ http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_alien/esp_vida_alien_66.htm

Answer 5

In Russia, there may be a fully automated nuclear launch system known as the dead hand. (source) Assuming this system was hijacked, a nuclear winter could occur, If this took place 20 years from now most information would be stored digitally, causing us to lose access to it. If we came out of bomb shelters in five years, there would still be plenty of documentation for society to rebuild its self, but after multiple generations not only would the paper degrade but we could lose the capacity to understand the information(try giving a high school textbook to a kindergartener.) However, this probably could not happen to a civilisation as advanced as you described.

Answer 6

Hunger. Hungry people kill eaxb other. They wouldn't help each other until that's solve. A plausible option is to make a nuclear winter. These are the steps. 1) Make a huge nuclear war (even a small one would fit). It would destroy all electronics around the hlobe almost at once. Even if some survive the things to come... well, you'll see. 2) After the nuclear war, only a few hours or days after, the ash would block out all sunlight. This would last from one to ten or even a hundred years. (It's really unclear because of the atomic arsenal at the beggining of the war). Even if it is only one year, we would be back to the bronce age, and after a few years nothing would last. Someone say that books would last. That aint true. Maybs a few would, but nobody sould ne ther to read them or even care. You need to think this: Would you really care reading books after seeing everyone murdered and eaten up, and you have done the same to others (if you choose not to eat anyone congratulations, you are still civilized human, just a dead one.) Aaaannnnddd that all. Everyone would forget there was even a before. It would take at least many thousands years to the enviorenmente to recover tottally (and human kind with it), and just a thousand years after the bombs explode there wouldnt be a single rock of human history standing.

See: The Road by Cormac McCarthy Threads (1984) UK documentary When the Wind Blows After Humans

Answer 7

Apocalypse cleanup gone wrong

First, there is a thermonuclear war that destroys most of the planet and poisons the rest. The remaining scientists come up with a plan:

They create a nanotech swarm to clean up all the pollution and robots to restore the ecosystem from seed banks. That's going to take several hundred years or more, so the remnants of humanity will wait that out in hibernation, using tech from space travel.

Fast forward some 200 years and a large group of humans is rudely awoken by the failure of their hibernation system. It's being broken down by the nannite swarm. The pods housing the scientists failed in a more dramatic way: they were flooded when the nannites broke down the water pumps housed on the same level, drowning them all the moment they were defrosted.

The humans make their way to the exit, to find that the great cleanup has gone for beyond its intended scope. The nannites have broken down all ferrous metals and most plastics in order to fertilize the land and especially the oceans. The deeply buried bunkers were among the last sources of metal, but everything on the surface is gone. Even the robots that replanted parts of the land are gone, recycled by the nannites.

There simply isn't anything left but copper and tin to work with and even when a few of the smarter survivors try to mine for iron, the nannites detect it in short order and take it away.

With all that knowledge now useless, it is not passed on to the next generations, whose lives are taken up by the struggle obtain enough food.

Soon, only stories remain about beings that resided in the heavens, could create whatever they wanted, fly, cure diseases and even revive the dead.

Answer 8

Well, if you don't want to bend physics, per se, I think you need some boogeyman/boogeyIntervention to knock electronics out. One frightful way of doing this is via a techno weapon/sabotage, as in John Barnes' Directive 51 series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_51_(novel) -- in which zealots release self-reproducing nanomachines that seek out alternating electrical fields and synthesize nitric acid there, out of the air.
Yes, there are workarounds -- if one has the time and resources. But if it happens suddenly and massively, back to the steam age!

Hope this helps!