Thought Exercise 1: Could our world relapse from being knocked back to pre-modern times?

[Ban]

Having completed the Daily Worldbuilding Prompt (Last installation found here: The "Daily" Worldbuilding Prompt. Chapter 3), I've decided to try something new yet similar in the form of thought exercises. The idea is that I present a hypothetical situation on our and other worlds, which all of you can try to tackle by flexing your worldbuilding muscles. I hope you enjoy and if people like this new series, I will post a new exercise next week.
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If civilisation were to collapse today to a degree where we are knocked back to pre-modern times, do you believe it would be possible for us to return to our modern stage? With mass depletion of easily accessible oil, gas, coal and other resources, do you believe it would be possible for us to undergo another industrial revolution, or would we be forced to stagnate in pre-modern times? Can you imagine an alternative route of progress we might take in the absence of mass industry regarding the previously mentioned resources? What do you believe would be the absolute latest time period we might be able to relapse from, if any?

Note 1: The term 'pre-modern' is deliberately left vague for your own interpretation. As indicated in the thought exercise, the equivalent past age to which we'd compare this future occurs at least before the late industrial revolution, but likely earlier.
Note 2: There's no need to answer everything. This is a thought exercise, not an essay question. You will not be graded
Note 3: Feel free to stray from the question and let your mind wander.

 

[skip.knox]

This is a pre-wandering post. Altearth is solidly pre-modern. The first thing the OP sparked was this thought: what would a "collapse of civilization" mean in, say, Europe in 1300?

My first thought is, when moderns talk about the collapse of civilization what they really mean is a loss of technology. I think that has a different flavor from Spenser's "decline of western civilization" which was more about a loss of values and learning.

Second thought, Europe has a civilization collapse to look at: Rome. Except it never did collapse, it transformed. Transformation still involves loss, though. We can point to the loss of certain techniques (though others were gained). I guess we can point to a loss of values--certain Roman customs that atrophied or exterminated by Christianity. Certainly a loss of learning as state-funded schools disappeared for quite a long time.

Third thought, what aspects of medieval Europe would have to be "transformed" to call it a collapse of that civilization? Pursuing an answer to that question might help me identify core values (for lack of a better phrase). It also forces me to figure out how to fold magic and the presence of non-human intelligence into those core values.

Off I go to wander into wonder.

 

[Aldarion]

No, it could not. At least not the modern technological civilization. Fact is, we have already spent all of the easily-accessible fossil fuel sources, and are drawing upon those that are close to being physically inaccessible even with modern technology (fracking etc.). If world collapses into preindustrial state again, it will stay that way for the next few million years - by which time humans will have gone extinct.

Unless, of course, we figure out how to utilize renewable resources in the same way we historically did with fossil fuels. In that regard, perhaps the most important question is whether there exists a renewable fuel source(s) which could replace stone coal in its myriad applications. Oil can be easily replaced with alternative fuels - fact that we are burning it at all shows how we as a civilization are mentally retarded, it has many much better uses than being spent as fuel for machines (many of which are completely worthless) - but can stone coal?

 

[skip.knox]

As for the original question, whatever happened, it would certainly not be the same path we took the first time. History never repeats itself because time never repeats itself. So, *something* would happen. We wouldn't remain forever unchanging. But we wouldn't wind up with Twitter. Or Kylie Minogue. Or KMFDM, alas.

 

[ThinkerX]

ugh. In times past, I spent substantial time at entire forums dedicated to variations of this topic.

Put bluntly, we (aka the civilized world) are already in the midst of a slow motion collapse, brought on by a changing climate and dwindling fossil fuels. Way, way back, in the 80's, I ran some back of the envelope type calculations...

At the time, I'd been laid off from yet another oil field job because of a supposed 'glut.' Curious, and still attending college part time, I gathered together various source books, magazines, whatever I could find (this was before Al Gore invented the internet), tallied (oil) reserves up, and plugged in the consumption numbers. Then I went 'oh shit, that can't be right' - according to those numbers, we'd be in dire straits with regards to oil circa 2025, give or take a couple years. Thought about it. Flipped through a couple more magazine articles. Hmmm...Alberta has these gargantuan oil/tar sands. Shale oil in the western states might be doable in another couple decades. Still seems to be plenty of natural gas. Then, I went and threw in the discovery of ten big new oil fields. Reran the numbers. Catastrophe still hit circa 2040-2045. Thought about it some more. Went, ok, 'what of all this energy conservation stuff? supplies start getting low, that might become a thing - effectively changing the consumption rate.' Reran the numbers again, taking that into account about 2025-ish. And still hit a catastrophe circa 2050. At that point, I decided either I'd screwed up big time, or there were a whole bunch of very smart people working on a grand plan. Set it aside - but followed the relevant news where I could.

I did make a couple of big mistakes in that calculation. The consumption numbers were just for the US - I didn't anticipate China and India, among others, getting into major industry. I also way underestimated the whole 'energy efficiency' / 'green energy' thing taking off the way it did. (the 80's, remember - NOBODY gave much thought to things like that). Together, very, very roughly, those mistakes canceled each other out. So...impending 'crunch,' or rather 'unpleasant transition' circa 2040 - 2050 on those counts.

Climate end was a bit different. I attended the local community college during the 80's when not doing oil field work. One of the classes I took - actually most of the sequence - was geology. Much of that dealt with climate changes over time. One of the things we looked at was the shrinking arctic sea ice - the bold explorers of old (18th-19th centuries) contended with pack ice 20+ feet thick...in summer. Yet, in the 1960's, barges ferrying supplies to the northern oil fields through those same waters contested with ice a mere 4 feet thick...in those same regions. We ran some numbers, made some projections. Calculated the arctic ocean would be pretty much ice free (during summers) circa 2005-2007. Went a little into the implications of that, which mostly translated to ungodly severe winter weather for NE north America, and a sort of flood/drought situation for the Midwest. Anymore...well, we got the 'Green New Deal,' which despite lots of sometimes serious issues is, well...

So, basically, civilization is looking at a near/intermediate future 'double whammy.'

On the positive side...

Civilization is extremely durable. Way, way too many people with a vested interest in keeping it going for it just go away.

Innovation - alternative energy, energy efficiency, agricultural developments, those count for a great deal.

Or to answer the OP...

...assuming the collapse is not complete - that a lot of tech savvy and dedicated people survive - then yes, something resembling modern civilization would arise from the ashes. But - it would not be our civilization.

 

[ThinkerX]

for what little it might be worth, my 'back burner' writing project attempts in part to grapple with near future civilizations dealing with climate change, oil depletion, and a 'Lovecraftian sideswipe apocalypse.'

 

[Vaporo]

Narrows eyes suspiciously. Ban, have you been watching Dr. Stone? If you haven't, it's an anime entirely about this very question. I'd highly recommend it,

 

[Ban]

Vaporo I haven't heard of it, but I'll put it on the list of things to watch sometime someday.

skip.knox and ThinkerX I think the most important factor we must establish to tackle this question is whether or not knowledge of the relevant resources and their positioning underground is retained. If people survive the catastrophic event with the knowledge that oil and gas still lies deep underground and can be utilized to kickstart industrialisation along the same general path that we achieved it through, and they still retain knowledge of how to build oil drills and more, then they would likely succeed at it.

Even if we assume for the sake of the argument that all surface-level oil and gas has been fully exploited, then these people would still be able to create machinery to reach it through modern means. The issue would be one of energy sources, which could (I presume) be replaced by solar, hydropower or other forms of energy. While this would have a deviously ironic bend to it (using renewable energy to find fossil fuels), I think it would happen nonetheless and society would rebound to a degree that we'd find familiar. The main question in this scenario is whether or not people in this world would believe the fossil fuels to be worth the hassle after finding it again. These operations are expensive, and by this time nuclear and renewable energy might have already fully conquered the market share of fossil fuels.

If on the other hand society lost its knowledge of fossil fuels being situated underground, which could happen during an extended apocalypse through a variety of means (hell, if the apocalypse is long enough our languages might shift so much from our modern-day ones that we wouldn't even be able to read any manuals on relevant subjects if we'd recover them). In this situation I would doubt whether or not humanity would ever have the means of figuring out the presence of fossil fuels underground. Without any surface-level oil and gas left to indicate the existence of either, we might develop a society completely oblivious to them. This society would still be entirely in its means (I assume) to discover and use renewable energy and plant-based oil, but their conception of the world would be radically different.

As a wider question, I wonder how these people's perspective on the past would change as a result of having to sift through our ravaged grounds for answers. Archaeology in a post-apocalypse after our own civilisations collapsed, would likely be one marked by an intense amount of information collectable from one time period (ours), but almost nothing of any others. If they found roman artifacts for example, they would likely find most of them in the same layers as the ones they'd find information of us in, possibly they'd find most caches of roman artifacts in what would be left over from our museums. Would there still be enough roman artifacts to be found beneath our respective layers for them to realize that we also did archaeological research on the romans, or would they simply assume these artifacts would belong to our civilisations? Perhaps I am overestimating how much we've actually recovered. Perhaps the grounds are still filled to the brim with treasures of the past.

 

[CupofJoe]

As to the last Paragraph. A Librarian [and Archeologist] I am friendly with, was postiting that there would be almost NO Record of the 21C if there was a significant lost of technology. They were decrying the fact that everything is Digital now so once the power goes or the reader breaks then the information is lost [any one had a hard disk crash or forgot a password?]. A book or Photograph can last for decades even hundreds of years giving time for a recovery process to take place. The information would still be there and waiting to be discovered and evaluated.
I will admit we were talking about half way through a very nice bottle of Port...

 

[Devor]

I'm going to second the reference to Dr. Stone. The show postulates that all of humanity turned to stone for three thousand years, until one guy woke up and has to bring it all back through science. The plot loses a little steam after a while, but the show demonstrates how you'd make everything from glass to electricity to anti biotics in the stone age.

The answer to the question is that it entirely depends on how many "knowledge keepers," so to speak, survive and are given the chance to rebuild.

 

[skip.knox]

This thread also raises the question of what we mean by civilization and what we mean by collapse.

 

[ThinkerX]

skip.knox and ThinkerX I think the most important factor we must establish to tackle this question is whether or not knowledge of the relevant resources and their positioning underground is retained. If people survive the catastrophic event with the knowledge that oil and gas still lies deep underground and can be utilized to kickstart industrialization along the same general path that we achieved it through, and they still retain knowledge of how to build oil drills and more, then they would likely succeed at it.

any rebuilt civilization would have to be non-dependent on fossil fuels. Solar forges instead of coal for smelting metal; solar heat pumps instead of gas/oil heating. Bio-fuel - ethanol/diesel made from plants or algae is a possibility.

As to written records...these abound even now, in the onset of the digital age. Libraries, magazines, manuals that come with the green energy items being sold now. I have come across repeated successful 'amateur hour' efforts to turn old car parts into fully functional wind turbines - that's mostly straight up mechanics. Solar focusing devices are scary easy to build (and damn dangerous if you lack common sense). Solar panels gets into chemistry and metallurgy, but simple, not so great ones are doable.

I had to grapple with these issues to an extent with the primary world (and the secondary one, for that matter.) Reason being, these worlds were terraformed from basically dead rocks about 30,000-40,000 years before the stories - life topped out at the pond scum level. Now, that does allow for petroleum...but coal is basically trees that have been dead for a long, long time (millions of years.) So, coal - essential to most low tech metalworking - wasn't going to exist on those worlds. Yet, the described societies had metal in abundance.

First solution was solar forges, a concept that goes back to antiquity. I made this something handed down within clans who'd been taught the techniques by the ancient aliens who terraformed the worlds.

Second solution also stemmed from the aliens, but given enough geniuses and sufficient resources is probably duplicate-able here on earth - fast growing trees with a hard, pulpy interior that burn hot enough to melt iron.

The stories take place in a time of forced industrial and social transformation - lots of bright artisans and natural philosophers messing around with everything from simple steam engines to crude batteries. A century or so from the present story time, these experiments form the basis of a...different sort of fantasy technological civilization (those stories are on the 'someday list' and at the moment amount to nothing more than some ideas and character sketches)

 

[Prince of Spires]

It's an interesting thought experiment. There's two options I see

1. civilization collapses, but some people remain who remember the present day and we can start rebuilding within 1 or 2 generations at most. This means that people will know the value of electricity and what to build. You can start with some very basic tools to get stuff up and running again. Books are still readily available and the languages are not lost. This would lead to a fairly fast recovery (as in 100 years or so).

Electricity is easy to create in small amounts, which will lead you to places where you can generate more electricity. Metals and similar will not be much of an issue for a long time, since everything is lying around. As for resources, oil might be tricky (though I've been hearing peak-oil is 20 years away for the past 20 odd years...), but there's more then enough coal lying around to supply our current energy needs for 150 odd years. Not all of that is easy to get to, but you don't need much to start out with. Remember, to start civilization again, you don't need our level of energy use, just some energy. And once you have the basics up and running, getting renewables going is not that hard. Biomass is also a good alternative if you're not supplying a city of 1 million but just 5.000 - 10.000 people.

2. If it takes longer for civilization to recover, then it will take longer. We'd basically have to reinvent everything again. The industrial revolution wouldn't happen as fast again, since that depended on readily available coal (initially) and oil (later on). But, and this is a big but, the first industrial revolution kicked off before coal and oil had become widespread. We take them as ubiquitous today. But in 1760, no one had a reason to dig them up. Only the invention of the steam engine and the cotton mills they were used in that people started looking for energy efficient ways to power them. Same with electricity. It was discovered before anyone knew what to do with it. But once you get the basics then an electrical engine and thus wind power is just waiting to be discovered.

So it will happen again, simply because the technologies don't depend on oil and coal to be discovered and we have coal enough to get started. However, because it's harder to get to a source of energy it will take longer. How much longer will I think mainly depend on how much knowledge is still around about the usefulness of electricity. If people still know this is a thing you can use for everything then it will move relatively fast. If not, then it will take longer.

And of course, we might see a lot more nuclear power being used. Since that's not really a rare resource and it is sort of renewable.

 

[Riva]

Interesting thread Ban,

I think that rather than looking at humanity as a whole it would be better to consider the effects of this global transformation on smaller social scales.
By this I mean that in my opinion there would be a strong differentiation in technological development and social organization in the world. Think of the differentiation of wealth that occurred in the ex third world countries, ranging from NICs like India and Brazil to low income african countries like Ethiopia, after the 70s oil crisis. Although this would be a reverse scenario, with most countries dropping to a low production state.

Let's assume that most of the world goes on with the same consumistic neoliberal market model that is prevalent today until oil, coal and gas run out (completely or almost). More or less gradually, depending on how fast the lack of resources will impact the industries, production will drop. The production drop will be accompained by a massive rate of unemployment in industrialized countries (By industrialized countries I mean those with the most employment rate in the secondary sector, so China, India, Turkey, most of eastern Europe, ecc.. I consider countries like the USA and Japan to be post industrial, becasue in fact they are, since most of the industries are delocalized and most of the population is involved in the tertiary). The unemployment wave will naturally hit other countries but to a lesser degree.
This will cause lots of discontent in the population, the economy of those countries relying on oil, gas ecc will crash (unless they have access to those natural resource on their soil, like Russia). Mass starving (may be a bit extreme, but it really depends on the context), lack of healthcare on national level and even uprisings may be possible. On the other hand those countries who will hold oil monopoly will experience a relative period of welfare: they'll be able, I believe, to bring out another OPEC style thing and raise the barrel price to the stars. They'll become the new fordist-industry powerhouses and occupy a central role in global politics and economy. Until their resources also run out, then either they will collapse or they'll have switched to a renewable source of energy (Dubai's already working on it I heard).
As for post industrial countries I think some of them (or, why not, maybe all of them) will focus even more on precision industry and mechanization to produce goods, the population will be mostly employed in the tertiary or primary sectors. I think there will be a shift to sustainable agriculture with possible bans on intensive meat production (law of the tenth), this would also require the state intervent in economy and the deprivatization of (some) companies.
If the means are available there will be attempts on planetary scale to consistently produce renewable energy, I think the new industrial powers and today's post-industrial states could pull this off, it could be also possible for less wealthy countries too, given they can still mass produce. This part however would be tricky, because to produce the infrastructures and the means to produce renewable enrgy on national scales would require much factory work, and given that more than half of the energy sources used to power factories (it think today's we're in this situation but I'm not so sure, correct me if I'm wrong) is no more it would be a bit of a bottleneck, if you get what I mean.
Anyways globally we would see a drop in demographic growth or even a decrease in population. Transports would be massively less frequent and more limited, hence the different part of the world would become more isolated, thus also limiting potential material help and support from country to country. I'm not sure regarding the internet, probybly some servers will have to be cut off, depending on the severity of the situation, but I don't really have idea.

Now, for the other countries, I assume they will turn back to mostly rural societies (I'm imagining China's economy and society will return to being centered around the rice fields, same for India and southeast Asia, and other parts of the world I will not list) with maybe some weak reattempts to industrialize again.
A grimmer scenario would be coutries ravaged by revolts setting back to a chaotic and almost barbaric state, that would make for a neat story setting.

Populations that already have a rural or hunting-gathering lifestyle will be those less touched by the global crisis.



Ok, I'm getting tired of typing, imma head out, hope you'll post other threads like this. I like this.

 

[ShadeZ]

Yes, although my answer looks WAY to short compared to the others. We would easily find alternative methods for energy even if it is some kind of peddle energy like a huge mouse wheel for horses.