Suppose it happens some 250-300 years in the future.
There are some (medium-sized) cities on Mars, settlements throughout Solar System, an interplanetary communications network, many orbital space stations, etc. The population outside Earth is some 25-30 million people.
Yet the life on Earth unexpectedly dies of some disaster.
The most of industry is still located on Earth: microelectronics, most of the metallurgy capacities, especially advanced, chemical plants, etc.
The most of scientific knowledge is stored on Earth.
Mars (and other settlements) can download data from Earth's internet for some time before Earth's death, but their storage capacity, while big, is still limited, so they have to be picky on what data to store.
There is no microchip industry outside Earth. There is some iron metallurgy on Mars. They also can produce food. They have some 3Dprinters, power plants...
How can they rebuild the civilization? What's the best strategy?
For the purposes of this question, what happened with Earth is a kind of quick runaway greenhouse effect that made it look like Venus, with remaining on other celestial bodies people lacking equipment to launch rockets from Earth's surface or deploying robots there.
Essential constraints
- they have limited data storage (at the scale of exabytes - 10^18)
- cannot download anything after the disaster
- the Earth's infrastructure is destroyed, except some selected valuable bits could be evacuated in the last hours or days.
- In the span of a few months before the disaster they can download data and evacuate some equipment.
- They have 3D printers, for construction using Mars soil
- 3D printers for plastic, limited supply as that plastic was exported from Earth.
- Some limited stock/stash of advanced industrial alloys and metals.
- no technology for producing chips.
- a few data centers are in existence, on a plus XXL side, as it was used for cached internet access.
(ed. note.: some constraints a bit inconsistent, as a result of evolving of the idea of the premise, taken from the chat/comments)
