If technological/environmental collapse reduces our capabilities back a full millenium, the world population will contract drastically, because technology is a large part of what allows pushing ten billion humans to live on this planet. When the population drops below a billion, I would expect signifcant changes in the nature of social order.
Whether humanity can get through that change depends on how the social change is managed. Attempting to preserve our valued traditions, which are part of why the collapse transpired, would probably be folly. Humanity’s fight against extinction will depend on a level of wisdom that seems to conflict with our instinctive behavior patterns.
Social change is most likely to occur as:
Step One: Give a leader absolute power to crush all dissent.
Step Two: wise, benevolent leader then fixes problems spends his reign securing and expanding his power.
The surviving society will be more local and in the long run more traditional than current society. People won’t have access to travel and media and will have to get along with locals more than some of them do now.
Yeah, assuming there is a decline in population (or maybe even if there isn’t), metal for making hand tools isn’t going to be in short supply for quite a while because there is a lot of re/upcyclable steel just lying around in the form of cars, warehouse racking, railway tracks, etc.
And copper and aluminum too. Society may not have a practical means of producing more aluminum for a long time but there will be plenty around to use for a while.
I suppose that in itself could present problems later on - if the knowledge of how to extract and refine the metals is lost, because there is a period in which scrap is plentiful.
In terms of knowledge retention, I would say we’re in a slightly worse position now than we maybe were 10 to 20 years ago - of course a lot of new knowledge has come into our grasp in that time, but a lot of what might before have been printed in books doesn’t ever make it to hard copy form, because it’s online in some form - and because people have become somewhat reliant on being able to look things up very quickly online.
That is an interesting secondary aspect. We may retain some knowledge of many subjects like medicines but without the possibility of applying that knowledge it could fade away. I’m reminded that civilization has lost the understanding of the dangers of lead several times.
That looks like a typical pattern, but it relies on several mechanisms than may not be valid for the situation. To begin with, dissent against what? A dictator needs to have a sufficient power base to wield power (even autocracies are ultimately democratic) and some sort of principle upon which to rule. Is that notion supportable in the context of the collapse?
What is interesting to explore is the a-cathartic apocalypse, which is more likely than the “Hot Fudge Tuesday” described in the aforementioned Lucifer’s Hammer. The apocalypse will almost certainly takes years, perhaps even decades, to play out (assuming we are not already started into it).
As stuff fails discretely over time, rather than all of it at once, we will gradually have to adapt to using other methods. It will be like a receding tide, and what gets left behind may be some of our innate habits, because I believe that we will start to learn what was impractical. Part of that will relate to social structure.
I don’t think most people realize that if ‘civilization’ collapses, there won’t be a knowledge base. The vast majority of humans know at best one tiny piece of how to make civilization again. And that tiny piece is useless without all the other pieces. How are you going to communicate with one another? There’s not just no internet. There’s no phones. There’s no postal service. Library? How will they be maintained?
Travel will be on foot, or on a horse or donkey. That’s about 20 miles a day, if brisk.
There’s not even going to be knowledge of who lives over where that smoke is coming from and if I go find out, will I come back alive? The darkest of the Dark Ages will be unattainable for us, for many centuries if at all.
I don’t believe humans will die out, because we are extremely clever and adaptable given a barest minimum of resources. But the idea that anyone is even going to remember what it is like right now, much less attaining a similar standard of life, is perfectly ludicrous. The stone age cultures we destroyed had upwards of thirty thousand years of accumulated knowledge about how to survive in that place. Almost anyone of that place not a child could reconstruct much of it because almost no one specialized in anything. We don’t know how to survive where we live right now, much less in the degraded chaotic environments we are creating.
As for dictators and despots, that would be a later development; first, they’d have to have an army, which means arms, and if there’s a collapse as deep as I am imagining, there won’t be guns. There won’t even be swords. Sticks with rocks lashed to them, perhaps. But armies have to be paid in something, and if there’s nothing much to loot and pillage, I don’t see that happening. Much of what we think of as wealth, including gold, will be useless. There will certainly be violence of course, humans are an extremely violent species, at least the males are. But I don’t think power could be amassed for a long time.
I agree you could probably repair most pre-WW1 machinery, but that doesn’t really help as how many pieces of pre WW1 machinery are around in working order?
I have serious doubts you could recreate pre WW1 machinery from scratch. Even in 1910 no one was building complicated industrial machines from scratch in small shops. Even if they seem quaint and trivial from 21st century standards circa 1910 machinery was the product of complex supply chains that would be really hard to recreate from scratch
Just the germ theory of disease and the basics of aseptic surgical procedures would put us well above the medical abilities of previous centuries. Every highschool in North America has microscopes that are good enough to show the microbes in a drop of water, and things like “Boil your bandages and scalpels” aren’t that hard to remember. We’ve had the basics of many types of surgery for thousands of years, so that kind of knowledge would last.
Making drugs and anesthetics would be a bigger challenge.
More the opposite; being more localized means you can just kill anyone who doesn’t conform and be done with it. Isolation breeds intolerance and tyranny.
The first microscope with enough magnification to show the “animalcules” in a drop of water was Leeuwenhoek’s, a clear glass bead set in a holder. And in fact there are tutorials on making a working microscope out of a piece of cardboard and a drop of water.
If germ theory is remembered at all it won’t take a microscope to convince people. If not, it will take a long time to convince people just like the first time.
Hell, plenty of people still believe in medical nonsense, including the current US Secretary of Health and Human Services. Do you think we’ll do better after a technological collapse?
Apocalyptic Homeopathy.
And that’s leaving out the real possibility of any successor society having a deliberately anti-intellectual bias, which is, as pointed out, not unknown in our current society, and is a common trope in much PA fiction.
Various flavors of “XYZ destroyed the world that was, ABC, EFG, HIJ are all forbidden, any found doing so will be burned at the stake”.
Did they? Or, like the Romans, were they aware yet downplayed it for various reasons?
I wonder what happens if our modern world gets hit with another Carrington event…
Or beyond Carrington-level event:
I don’t recall the details. There may have been some reason to think it was known and forgotten before the Romans found out the hard way, or decided they didn’t care as you suggest. Knowing the danger full well didn’t prevent us from the dangerous use of lead in recent times. That was due to a combination of ignorance and disregard.