Assume everyone over 16 has vanished. Electronic records and videos are still around and available. Could that generation or the next be able to learn how to do everything we can with existing records, books, ect but no personal instruction? I’m thinking of things like flying planes, dentistry, nuclear plants, making a good omelette…
If everyone over 16 vanishes now, everything stops working tomorrow: no internet, no electricity, meltdown in the nuclear power stations, the ships currently not in port will not arrive, food will be scarce and so on and so forth. If the young ones survive all this, and some I guess will, there will be epic fights about what is still to be had. If they still have time to try to learn, it will not be easy. I guess they will never attain the same level we have today based only on paper books, but they will have got rid of a lot of bad hombres.
If everyone over 16 suddenly vanished, there would be a terrible immediate loss. Ignoring nuclear plants, how quickly could 16 year old people set up an run a coal-fired power plant? And learn to run a freight train to bring coal to the plant, etc.
And, there would be an expensive price to pay to relearn anything that requires coordination and judgement. Mentors often have a better sense of when the pupil is getting into danger, and can pull them back before things get out of hand. Specifically, flight students where the instructor grabs the stick.
Then there are things which are closely guarded secrets. I recall reading that one company, which made musical cymbals, kept the actual processes within the immediate family.
That’s true-I should have eliminated things like nuclear stations from my question. I guess I was more asking if there’s enough existing reference material and instruction to allow people to reach our own level without living experts to consult.
I guess based on your question you would like “The World Without Us”, by Alan Weisman. I did.
Kids would be fighting just for survival for several years, many of the very young would just die of starvation if the didn’t have family support. The strong ones would take charge and concentrate on hunting and gathering food while subjugating the weak into some form of slavery (sexual or fiefdoms). Thieves would be killed. We’d be thrown back into the middle ages where kingdoms sprung up and fought each other for limited resources.
At some point when things stabilized some may be smart enough to tap into the old knowledge, but much would be lost because they didn’t have first hand knowledge of how things worked on a system level. They may build boats to facilitate trade and fight in wars for their leaders but they would not develop new engines to run them. Weapons of war would be the first technologies to come back, gunpowder would be high on the list to bring back. Perhaps they would learn how to make alcohol for fuel.
Until society stabilized enough to allow for the pastime of learning we would be stuck in countless petty wars. People would give up on repairing the old crap after a generation came along that knew nothing of the past.
No, there isn’t. This is especially true in engineering. There’s a lot of good reference material out there for learning the basics of any engineering discipline, but once you get to the complicated stuff, engineers learn that from more experienced engineers or just through their own trial and error. There’s an awful lot that just isn’t in the books.
Where I work, even if we hire an engineer who has years and years of experience, they are going to spend at least six months learning stuff from our more senior engineers before they can even do anything useful for our company. A bunch of 16 year olds wouldn’t have a prayer.
For fuel?!?!? Nah, that is not how I remember my misspent youth 
Well there is fuel and then there is fuel! Wine is pretty easy to make, grain alcohol not so easy. But those 16 year olds will turn into 30 year olds that crave more power and remember the old days, getting old 4 wheelers and old military vehicles up and running again would benefit them.
Just addressing this point - no, I don’t think so, there’s a lot of stuff bound in lived experience and institutional knowledge that is just going to disappear. So “everything we know” is never going to happen.
Having said that, if the fundamental underlying question is whether there’s enough knowledge in various media to retain or quickly re-attain a complex technological civilization, I’d say yes, there is.
This is leaving aside all the questions about surviving and nukes and the like. Lets say Magic Space Bats poof all the adults but keep the kids alive, fed and free from mishap.
Well, there are probably a small set of 16-year-olds who know some of that (I have a nephew who is 14 and can fly, for instance…and you didn’t mention them, but I know a few kids in the range you are talking about who are fairly decent mechanics or electricians, something that would be critical), but the probably would be immediate societal collapse. Assuming many of those who know how to do some of this stuff survived, I suppose it’s possible they could get some things back up and working properly enough to save some of the data. But I think much of it would be lost in the collapse by the time they got their shit together enough to start to save the really important things. I don’t even know how many of those under 16 would survive such an event today…it would be a fairly low percentage, especially for younger kids.
Mostly, they would be in complete survival mode…and most without any clue how to survive except to scavenge for the basic necessities, not learning to be dentists or fly planes for the most part.
That next generation could not get us back to where we are, no. Now, after what would be a Bronze Age Collapse tier societal disaster settled down, I do think a lot of our archival/data from now would still exist in forms they’d be able to retrieve. There’s 16 year olds who are a lot smarter than people think, who would also probably be trying to preserve records into more permanent forms as well. This means that human society wouldn’t be starting from actual zero, but it would take generations to get back to where we were.
In my mind I think this is akin to the Bronze Age Collapse, it took about 200ish years for things to start getting better, and it took about five hundred years for some affected areas to get back to where they were. Now, in our case we have a lot further societal development to “get back to” than the Bronze Age peoples did, but we also will have better guidebooks in the form of current knowledge–Bronze Age people were rebuilding some of the first human highly organized human societies, so were almost reverted back to “scratch.”
I think much would be lost. I doubt there are many kids that age who work in, say, data centers where a lot of the data is stored, and I seriously doubt much of those data centers and the data they house would survive even a decade without maintenance. Certainly, they wouldn’t remain powered on for more than a few days or weeks at most (using UPS and generators). Most of the internet would be down in less than a week, even locally, which, again, isn’t much time to get much off of it before things collapse.
Certainly, books would still be around for a while, and there are places in the country where a lot of archival data and media are stored (Iron Mountain springs to mind), but not sure how long even they would last without anyone going in there and maintaining anything…and, again, I doubt there are many 16-year-old kids working there to even know about it.
I agree it would be much like the bronze age collapse, but perhaps worse as a lot of our knowledge is stored on electronic media of one kind or another and I doubt much of that would last while society rebuilds. That said, I agree we wouldn’t lose everything or have to start from actual zero…I think there is a good chance we’d be starting more from a mix of 19th and 20th-century tech and medicine, with some instances that leap to higher levels depending on how all this would actually play out.
Keep in mind we have repositories of physical information called libraries, that do still exist. The Library of Congress and the British Library are literally enormous. If Bronze Age man had the ability to walk through those libraries, with knowledge of how to read the language the collected items were written in, it’d be insane the level of development they’d have been able to achieve. They’d know advanced smelting techniques that would take many thousands of years to develop otherwise, they’d know about the germ theory of disease which by itself would revolutionize their populations.
I’d also keep in mind that these physical libraries would explain how digital information works and how it is stored. Those data centers that fall offline due to lack of maintenance do not disappear, and a good amount of information could be retrieved from hard drives with existing hardware that would still be good for years after the fact. Also the collected personal computers of the entire world, contain lots of data as well that would still be there, and you’d be able to transfer the most important stuff to hard copy.
One of the big issues with losing everyone over the age of 16 is just knowledge only gets you so far, there’s so many interrelated systems to make modern society work, that I think it’d take literally hundreds of years to get all of that stuff up and running again, and only then would we be able to easily reacquire some of the most advanced stuff that would be lost. Like practical engineering knowledge for example isn’t as simple as just reading a book, you need professional engineers working as engineers to develop it. Having the knowledge framework to create a new generation of engineers would certainly help vs not having that knowledge, but there would be a long period of trial and error to get things back to where we are.
Certainly, libraries still exist today, but they aren’t the main repositories for much of the world’s data, especially the cutting edge tech and science stuff. Also, just like data centers and other structures, libraries are susceptible to deterioration and damage due to low maintenance. I’d say that the 10 years I used earlier would probably hold for libraries as well since the books in them will be exposed to the elements and deteriorate pretty rapidly. Most certainly aren’t going to last your 200 years.
I’m sure you are thinking the same thing I am, which is that the survivors will certainly be grabbing up some of the books. That’s very true, they will be. But I’m guessing they are going to prioritize those that help them to survive, so there are going to be gaps. This was why I said I thought we’d be looking more at a mix of 19th and 20th-century tech, with some higher-tech also. Books will certainly be a huge part of that. But even if the entire Library of Congress survived (which I seriously doubt) those 200 years before society starts to come back…or even 50 years…much will be lost by that point as it simply isn’t there.
That said, I know that some long-term archival digital data is stored at various DR sites, even that afore mentioned Iron Moutain, and in theory, at least some of that should survive, assuming the tech to use it can be revived or rebuilt. So, again, we wouldn’t be starting from zero…but much would be lost and would certainly have to be rediscovered by future societies, not simply relearned.
Bronze age? When there is so much scrap metal just sitting around? I learned how to weld when I was 14, I’m not going to craft stuff out of bronze. That and there are many places that have working blacksmith shops, get some coal and figure out how to get it hot enough. I’m thinking that the kids could get us back to the 1810’s, just before the industrial revolution. There is literally aluminum, steel, gold, silver on the streets, already processed.
I’m sure that some 16 year olds could figure out how to make a still since it would be a high priority commodity for drinking and fueling what machines are left over. And there are lots of homes with gunsmith tools.
Books in libraries still exist today from over 1000 years ago. Those are exceptional, but your idea that in 10 years the books in the LOC would be gone is…just not accurate. Most books will easily last 100+ years without serious problems. The pages will yellow and the bindings will get weaker etc.
Keep in mind these 16 year olds have to go to college, metaphorically, to even have a chance at some of this stuff. The libraries absolutely contain enough data to replicate a college education, from which they will then have to use that education to build other things. I’m actually not really sure we’re disagreeing much, just nit picking particulars. To make it clear I said it would be hundreds of years before we were back to where we are today, I just noted that existing repositories of information would be significant boosters in getting us back, that previous societal collapses did not have going for them.
He’s not saying we’d go back to the bronze age, he’s saying it would be similar to the bronze age collapse, which I agree…it would be. Maybe even worse.
You may have misunderstood my post–I was not positing we would collapse to a similar state of development as found in the Late Bronze Age collapse. I was noting the “effects would be similar”, in that we would have a large, across the board collapse in society that would take hundreds of years to rectify. But due to our greater stores of knowledge than Bronze Age peoples had, we would not at all devolve to anything like that. I think the estimate that we’d have something approximating early 19th century tech within a generation to be fairly likely, with some mixtures in of easily implemented more modern technology.
One of the main inhibitors is just rebuilding society itself, the interconnected systems that allow people to specialize into various fields. It will likely be several generations getting people organized into stable societies, getting food production stabilized etc.
They exist because they have been maintained and supported, often at great expense and effort. Sorry, but look at how much (or how little) exists from even the Roman period wrt the millions of manuscripts they have. So much was lost, and that wasn’t even close to what we are talking about here. Books are not going to last 100 years…or even 50 years…today without constant care and maintenance. Not only that, the materials we use today aren’t nearly as durable as those used in the past.
Sure, in some cases the environment will be just right and they will last, but for the most part, anything that isn’t salvaged fairly soon and that someone is maintaining (and copying) is going to be lost. Fragments might and certainly will survive, but there will be huge gaps…and as noted, not everything is even put on paper these days.