Math would be easy to restore, at least the basic stuff.
History is more problematic. It would be much easier for Neo-Nazis or other historically revisionist people to push fake or heavily-modified history agendas in this new world than in the current world.
Without any of the backing work mapping is gonna really take a long time to come back. So many of those surveys and base maps were done in the 1800s and took years to complete. I know in my office there would be no one around really that would understand how to the base maps from scratch. There’s only a handful of people who would remember how to do anything by hand at all.
Commercial air traffic would come to a halt trying to bring back all the charts, and doing all the work to recreate one landing chart would take a few weeks at least, and that’s only if we are able to use computer programs.
I’ve no doubt that math and a lot of the science could come back quickly, but being able to use a lot of that information is going to take a lot longer. But does it really matter that much if a lot of the literature is gone? We can write new stories. Does it really matter if the art work is gone? Again, we can create new art. I do understand getting history back, that’s something we do need to remember.
If we don’t lose the computers, wouldn’t satellite photography help?
The complete loss of pop culture would be quite a shock to people. Star Wars? Gone. We can talk about it, but the original video would vanish, and its impact on the culture would become confused and mythic. There would be people whose musical tastes have been fixed to prefer music that doesn’t exist anymore. Plus of course “we can create new art” describes a process of months or years and in the meantime there would be nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to listen to. Rebuilding our culture, into any culture, would take decades on the short end.
#MeToo. Like, could you re-create a map of London just from the memories of a bunch of cabbies?
(I took a sociology class in 10th grade. Our teacher had us all sketch maps of our city as we knew it, then collaborate on combining them into one giant “master” map on a piece of butcher paper. The result of 20ish kids collaborating on a map of our city was an incoherent mess. To be fair, few of us were driving yet.)
With things like “Star Wars”, you could do a shot by shot, line by line remake just out of people’s memories, like Gus Van Zant’s “Psycho” remake. You’d have to recast it, unless you wanted to try for an all-animated cast, like Zombie Peter Cushing in “Rogue One”, but you could have the exact same line readings, exact same reaction shots, exact same sets, exact same effects.
For less well known movies you’d have to do a more conventional remake that just swipe the story and characters and some classic lines, but with rewritten dialog. If you’re going to remake “Predator” you don’t need a shot by shot remake.
To a degree yes, but think of all of the contour lines that are on one map. Think of all the buildings, the roadways, the rivers… All that would take time to redraw, not to mention I don’t know of anyone who could actually do a real projection. Of course keeping the computer programs would help out quite a lot, at least for part of it.
Just for the hell of it one day I tried to redo the contour lines on one US Quad near a smallish, 50,000 people town. After a few hours when I zoomed out I really hadn’t done much, and that’s with the lines already there. Someone would have to go through the process of redoing each line from scratch, even using satellite photos. In reality though, that would only been good for maps covering larger sized areas, for larger scales we’d have to have new aerial photos done with planes. I’d say coast lines and roads and such would be a lot easier then other parts.
As for pop culture, I do get that it’s important, but does it matter if we don’t have the original Star Wars? People are cranking out stuff all the time now, I’d think we’d have new pop culture rather quickly, it would be different, but there would be something. It would be interesting to see what musicians could do, I’ll bet there are enough professional orchestra players that we could get a lot of the major classical music back.
Imagine what Taylor Swift would sound like if she tried to go back and rerecord some of her older stuff, I’ll bet it would sound different now. And then imagine some of the much older bands trying to rerecord stuff. If someone asked the Rolling Stones to pull some obscure song from their third album that they never played live I’d bet they’d have a hard time even remembering what it sounded like.
Likely to be remembered wrong:
“Play it again, Sam”
“Beam me up, Scotty”
“Smokey The Bear”
“Luke-I am your father”
The Berenstein Bears
No one has any money. The entire stock market goes to zero instantly.
Banks can’t operate. Do all loans go poof? There aren’t any taxes to be collected. Employers can’t pay employees, even if there are jobs which the employees could be doing.
We have a couple of days of food on hand. What do we do when that runs out? Can the local supermarket sell food? What would they take as payment? Can they order more food from distributors? Same thing for gas and other necessities.
Most manufacturing now is dependent on a long supply chain. Logistics would be crazy.
The legal situation would be insane. No deeds. No written contracts. No records of patents. No written regulations. Who is a citizen of which country?
Yes, the world would clearly be screwed in dozens of ways. I kind of get the impression that the OP is couching their question in a theoretical world where that (somehow) doesn’t matter though. It’s not a very interesting question if the answer to “could humanity reconstruct human knowledge and culture from memory?” is “no, because everybody’d be dead within a week.”
I will say though that it didn’t cross my mind that literally all money would vanish - printed bills and cast coins could both be considered “printed word”, leaving us with literally nothing but ash and whatever happens to metal coins when they burst into flame.
Pretty much. The practical implications are interesting, but not really the point I trying to get at.