What event could push the entire human race into medieval times? [duplicate]

Question

Considering the state of human civilization to be what it is currently at this moment, complete with its technological advance, our mechanical and electrical equipment and its dependence on electricity, but with most of our knowledge gathered digitally rather than books. What event can send it hurtling into medieval times where none of the above would be of any use, all our knowledge would be wiped out and humans would not be able to re-develop them?

One of the things that i am thinking of is something like a very huge EMP (electromagnetic pulse) on a global level, which would not only fry everything currently but leave a very huge magnetic flux surrounding the globe that we would not be able to reinvent the above. But I am not sure of what effect this would have on the humans physically, constantly being exposed to large magnetic fields can’t be good. I have not yet thought the whole thing through.

You are free to take an alternate route but it has to be something caused by humans.

Answer 1

I think the only way to push humans to medieval times would be to push society to before that point in time and then let it rebuild.

The problem of knowledge

So long as their exists knowledge of the modern day, that knowledge can be used to progress technologically far faster than humans would otherwise be capable of. I personally could write down the basics of atomic theory, calculus, and gunpowder manufacture, as well describe how steam and internal combustion engines work. Especially given the huge amount of raw resources that the survivors would have in the form of old equipment that can be turned to scrap, humans could fairly quickly recover to an industrial revolution-era level of technology, even if there were no electronics or petroleum reserves.

To get people to really regress in terms of technology, you'd have to destroy everyone who has knowledge of technology, and either all records of modern technology or everyone who can access those records.

Medieval technology, of course, would be reliant on preserving the same sort of knowledge, just of a different variety. The problem with preserving this knowledge and eliminating modern knowledge, though, is that there isn't really any community on Earth that lives in this sort of manner. Most knowledge of medieval society is held by fairly educated people who have devoted their lives to studying it, while someone like a farmer is more likely to know how their tractor works.

So how do we do this?

Kill off everyone who lives in a modern city. I imagine that a well engineered supervirus, ideally with a few months of latency followed by rapid onset lethal symptoms, perhaps coupled with a world wide thermonuclear war, would do the trick. The only people left would be those with no contact with the rest of society. Basically, this would mean primitive uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers. These people exist in quite a few countries, like Brazil and Papua New Guinea. If they were the only ones left to repopulate, they'd spend a few thousand years spreading through the rest of the world, building civilizations and probably avoiding the irradiated wastelands of the former cities.

Eventually, these new people would arrive at something akin to what we view as a medieval society, a few thousand years after the initial war.

Answer 2

A pandemic killing majority of human population could do it, if it persisted more than a generation.

People would be forced into small self-sufficient settlements avoiding contact with each other. This would make the logistics and economies of scale industrial economy requires impractical. Mankind would be forced to revert to pre-industrial economies. Pre-industrial is very close to the desired renaissance level.

If the risk of contamination and pandemic persisted for more than one or two generations, and generations would presumably be shorter after the collapse of modern medicine, people would no longer have the level of education required to rebuild. Not that people would necessarily be ignorant or uneducated, but specialized training and education modern technology tends to require would not be available. It would not even be wanted as people would not have the population base to support high level of specialization anyway.

Given the drop in population, I expect that people would be able to get their weapons and machinery by scavenging and looting without any real need to rebuild manufacturing until all the people who still remember how would be dead. And even if people still remembered small settlements would be unlikely to have the resources and know-how to rebuild anything major. Or even need to. And if the pandemic was still a realistic threat, trading would be impractical and would not support any specialists.

A pandemic this bad would presumably destroy the police and military forces. Nation states would collapse. People in survival mode would be unlikely to be interested in any level of organization larger than a tribe. Tribes would actively, and possibly violently, compete for resources. Risk of contagion would make diplomacy and trade suicidal, thus a likely response to stranger moving anywhere near to your home would be to warn them off with gunshots. First gunshots might not be aimed at people, but scared people will shoot to kill.

Since most people have no real skill at low-tech survival, people would probably be too busy to teach their children anything that is not needed right now. So the skill base would be lost fairly fast. The one thing that children would be taught would be that contact with strangers and travel are taboo. Depending on the specifics of the pandemic they might even be taught to avoid old cities that might still be contaminated.

Obviously all this would make any rebuilding impractical.