I think there are two questions that are being answered in this thread: how deep a technological collapse might be, and how long lasting / difficult to recover from it would be.
I think the latter question is easier IMO: not very. There’s far too much of our junk, and information sources around, for it all to be lost for long enough for humanity to forget. Yes, re-learning science and tech is hard, but not as hard as doing it from scratch. Heck, things might rocket along for a while without things like IP and safety laws.
The harder question (and yes, the one the OP intended), is the tougher one. While our society is an absurdly complex web stacked atop cheap energy and digital tech, I don’t buy any realistic scenario bringing that down entirely. Don’t get me wrong – billions could die in scenarios like a nuclear winter. I just think there would still be smaller internets and pockets of high tech continuing.
I guess this makes me an optimist. But I am less sure on this than the other question.
A major EMP-like event could basically wipe out all of our delicate digital tech. Our utilities are heavily computerized, so just the basics for day-to-day getting by would become problematic. All the food in your fridge, as well as all the grocery store refrigerators becomes garbage rather quickly. 99% of our motor vehicles are dead in the water when their electronics gets fried. And a huge fraction of our knowledge base, committed to digital media, is lost or inaccessible, along with trillions of dollars of abstract money.
This could be an event that is caused by a hostile action (NEMP) or precipated by a natural event (massive CME), but the end result is that modern civilization becomes dead in the water. People will not be able to travel more than 20 or 30 miles in a day, nor ship freight any significant distance. Phones are all bricked.
We have to learn to deal with a 19th century, at best, way of life, and pulling ourselves up from that is a big struggle. Almost without question, new civilization, if we get to it, is not going to resemble contemporary civilization.
I’m aware of Carrington events and their effects. The point is not that we are well protected, or that there won’t be absolute chaos, but that such an event will not literally “wipe out” all digital tech.
One whole side of the planet will only really be affected indirectly. Not to say that these indirect effects are not significant – the whole internet will go down.
But with much of the world’s tech stubbornly un-fried, much of the digital ecosystem will be up, at least locally, within mere years if not months.
Sorry haven’t read all the posts. I’m just responding to the OP.
Let’s assume first that we don’t face a real climate change disaster and end up with four hundred degree temperatures and a sterile planet. Let’s assume we “only” get substantial environmental damage but still have an environment.
The next big factor is fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have been a massive yet finite windfall of energy that we have been using to build up our civilization. But the key factor is we are not producing fossil fuels; it’s not an ongoing source of energy. At some point in the not-too-distant future we will begin using up the supply.
When that happens, we will have to adjust our civilization to operate on a lower level of energy production. This is possible; we were not using fossil fuels as a significant energy source as recently as a couple of hundred years ago. We could go back to a civilization we had back around 1800.
But the big problem is getting from here to there. The world population in 1800 was around one billion people and food supplies were not reliable for even that number. World population is now over eight billion and most people have reliable food sources. And the difference is due to fossil fuels, which we use to produce fertilizer and indirectly food.
When we start running out of fossil fuels, we go from being a civilization that can feed eight billion people to being one which can feed one billion people. And the transition is going to be the worst event in human history. It’s not like we can do a Thanos snap and eighty-eight percent of the people in the world will drop dread. We will be fighting the biggest war in history where everyone is intentionally trying to kill off everyone else; we will be declaring people are a threat to us because they’re alive and competing with us for food.
I’ve seen some people postulate this is a possibility but I don’t feel there’s any consensus that this is the case. I’ll admit I’m not a scientist who can offer opinions on this subject.
The 1859 Carrington Event—a massive geomagnetic storm caused by a coronal mass ejection (CME)—was not an instantaneous event but occurred over many hours across 1-2 September, disrupting telegraph systems (the only major ‘grid level’ electrical distribution systems at the time) around the world. CMEs are not like high altitude nuclear electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) as they consist of almost exclusively charged protons, and so do not produce the E1 and E2 components that are destructive to delicate and unprotected microelectronics; they produce the lower frequency E3 component that overloads electrical grids and creates artificial Van Allen-type belts in the magnetosphere of the Earth which can damage spacecraft that pass through them.
Climate change (which is real and which many of the impacts are baked into the heating of the ocean, loss of glacial and sea ice mass, release of concentrated methane sequestered in permafrost, wetlands, and seafloor substrates) will not “end up with four hundred degree temperatures and a sterile planet” but even the more modest 4 ℃ to 6 ℃ anomaly from the pre-industrial baseline will impact the ability to engage in staple agriculture and limit the effective habitable zones on the planet. Natural climate change has been implicated in numerous civilizational collapses including the massive Late (Eurasian) Bronze Age Collapse.
As for loss of knowledge, it is certainly true that most of our modern technologies require a command of detailed information in a multitude of scientific and engineering disciplines which no one person, however talented, could master sufficient to reproduce materials, processes, and analytical methods from unprocessed minerals notwithstanding the lack of concentrated energy stored in easily accessed hydrocarbon fuels. An alternative source using alcohols or other synfuels could be possible but collecting and processing raw material for this energy infrastructure would be immensely labor intensive. A fall of modern industrial civilization would have a steep climb back up from basic metalworking, sustenance agriculture, and limits to sustainable population and ability to support the leisure of doing basic science without the advantages of coal, petroleum, and other readily extractable energy resources.
I would add that coal is far more abundant than petroleum or natural gas. Coal reserves are expected to remain on a timescale of centuries, although how much might not be accessible without advanced technology I don’t know. Even today steel production is almost entirely based on coal, and if the opportunity was there to retrench to a steam-based economy it might be possible to keep a toe-hold in an industrial society.
I said the whole internet would go down. I’m sure there are many network affects that will affect the whole world.
However, half of the world will still have functioning, non burned out equipment. And it’s not human nature to run around doing the Home Alone scream for decades; national power and data networks will be restored certainly within years, but personally I think we’re just talking months.
I’m happy to hear conflicting views, but at the moment people are just saying what the Carrington event is, which is the context in which I made my original point.
I thought the EMP effect was due to the interaction of a coronal mass ejection with the Earth’s magnetosphere, and thus not a directional effect limited to the sunward side of the Earth.
A large coronal mass ejection is not a discrete event with a small time interval; the flow of charged particles from the Sun gets stretched out as is passes through the interplanetary medium until by the time it reaches Earth orbit it would take several hours for the Earth to pass through the core of the CME, creating waves of intense transient electromagnetic flux from interaction of solar energetic particles (SEP) with the magnetosphere of the Earth that would interact with large scale electrical and communication grids around the world producing powerful and damaging voltage spikes and surge currents, as well as exposing the satellites that we have become highly dependent upon to be subjected to powerful charged particle interactions.
The JASON Group produced a report (JSR-11-320 “Impacts of Severe Space Weather on the Electric Grid”, Nov 2011, JASON Group/The MITRE Corporation) about fifteen years ago addressing concerns specific to resilience and repair of the North American electrical grid system. Virtually none of their recommendations have been implemented other than the launch of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite in 2015 and some limited computer modeling efforts, and the United States (and frankly the rest of the world) is in no way prepared to recover from a massive CME-induced geomagnetic storm damage to electrical grids. With the recent budgetary cuts to NWS/NOAA and NASA, even future capability to observe and predict CMEs in time to protectively isolate and shut down critical parts of grid infrastructure are in doubt.
It seems rather unlikely, in the near-foreseeable future at least.
The average temperature of the Earth seems to have fluctuated quite a bit even over recorded historical times. Though over geological time, there seems to be evidence that much larger variations have happened: the snowball Earth period, for example…?
That one at least is unlikely to reoccur if only because the solar constant is slowly going up over billions of years, so the Earth receives more heat now and in the future than it did back then. Of course if humans apply their ingenuity stupidly ala’ Snowpiercer, then all bets are off.
Most of Earth’s history has been spent in a warmer “greenhouse” state; it’s our present “icehouse” climate that is the anomaly. Most likely we are headed to an effectively permanent warmer climate, one that humans have never existed in and thus have little knowledge of what it will be like for us.
Several hours is insufficient to fry all electronics worldwide.
Once again: I don’t dispute that a carrington event will be absolutely devastating worldwide. My position is only that the tech on the dark side of the earth will at least not be fatally damaged, so, in the context of this thread, it’s not sufficient to end modern semiconductor tech, let alone turn out all the lights.
There is no “dark side of the Earth” with regard to a CME. It is more like the Earth passing through a cloud of charged particles which then get captured by the magnetosphere and ‘pumped’ into releasing a long, slow pulse. A geomagnetic event from a large CME will won’t generally affect microelectronics directly because the wavelength of the pulse is too large to cause charge differentials in small electronics but it can collapse the electrical grid through cascade failures and destroy expensive and difficult to manufacture components for which there are not enough stockpiles to quickly replace.
Are you saying that the solar flare effect is the same worldwide, and we’d measure approximately the same induced currents everywhere? Because the cites I’m seeing are saying that absolutely there’s a big difference between the day and night side.
It really depends on the timing. Looking at the “forward” motion of the Earth, the ejected plasma is moving left-to-right. If the leading end of the plasma stream crosses the Earth’s orbit a bit ahead of Earth, that will amount to a direct hit as we fly into the bulkiest part of the stream, pulling the leading end around over us and the trailing stream up behind. More or less like that. “Light” and “dark” side are not very meaningful.
If we’re talking natural disasters, an asteroid impact could cause damage up to and including the extinction of all life. But even barring extinction, a big enough impact could certainly cause so much damage as to essentially cause a reset of human society. Handfuls of scattered survivors aren’t going to be in a position to maintain scientific knowledge; in fact I suspect most of them would be those groups that make little use of modern technology in the first place and so survive its loss. Some uncontacted hunter-gatherer tribe obviously isn’t going to be rebuilding technological civilization.
