Actually, there's a good argument that the more advanced a society is, the *easier* it is for them to lose knowledge.
While the raw number of specialists in various fields is higher today then say 6-8 thousand years ago, I think specialization doesn't improve the odds of re-building after a collapse of some kind.
Think about what you do for work right now. How much of that could you reconstitute on your own. Let's ignore the whole "need to survive" bit first and just look at the feasibility. An electrical engineer might be wizbang at designing circuts, but would probably not be able to build an electrical generator if his life depended on it (and it might!). And he certainly couldn't build anything that would use that electricity anyway. The number of specialized trades involved before you get to anything remotely useful is staggering. You need metallurgists, but they probably don't know how to make anything by hand, so you'd need blacksmiths to make basic tools first. And would even a blacksmith in todays world know what iron ore looked like? You'd have an incredibly difficult time making anything much more complex then a wheelbarrel, much less things like cars and computers.
And that leads to the next problem. Our information today is far more transitory then it used to be. Sure. We've got gobs of it, but do you know the average time it takes for paper today to degrade? About a hundred years. So all those manuals with information on science will be totally gone in a few generations. And how much of our information is stored on electric media? Gone without computers. Sure. The ancient civilizations could lose their knowledge in a single flood or earthquake, but what they did write down was written on substances that can (and have!) survive for thousands of years. If we can't figure out how to get things working again in less then about a hundred years or so, we'll lose pretty much everything.
This assumes a truly massive disaster though. And I honestly can't really concieve of one of that magnitude that would leave anyone left alive to worry about it. Assuming we had even that first hundred years, and the books to read, and enough people left to try, we'd also have machines already built. Warehouses with equipment waiting to be used. Powerplants that just need to be repaired and not rebuilt from scratch. I suppose it's possible to have a cataclysm of such magnitude that 99.95 of the people are killed and forced to hide in say caves or something (dunno. Just kinda imagining here), such that by the time they could find anything left from the "old world", no one would know what they were. But if enough of the surface of the world were left intact, you'd find tons of stuff left over without even looking very hard.
And that's what's kinda silly about the "high tech ancients" theories. We *do* have acheological evidence from 10s of thousands of years ago. While some civilizations have been wiped out, buried under sand or ocean, most just died off or were replaced by later civilizations on the same sites. Why assume that the handful that were burried or fell into the ocean had some magical advanced technology, yet all of the ones that didn't show no such advancement? Where are the cars and TVs and radio towers if that was the case? You have any idea how long it takes a simple steel bar to totally rust away?
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King Nobby wrote:
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