how much technology requires bootstrapping (metallurgy is
a great example of this)
I would love to see a reality TV show about a metallurgy
expert making a knife or other metal tool from scratch. The
expert would be provided food and shelter but would have no
equipment or materials for making metal, and so would have
to find and dig up the ore themselves, build their own oven,
and whatever else you would have to do to make metal if you
were transported to the stone age.
Yes, this is in fact connected to a general problem that Nick Bostrom has pointed out, each time you try to go back from stone age tech to modern tech you use resources up that you won’t have the next time. However, for purposes of actually getting back to high levels of technology rather than having a fun reality show, we’ve got a few advantages. One can use the remaining metal that is in all the left over objects from modern civilization (cars being one common easy source of a number of metals). Some metals are actually very difficult to extract from ore (aluminum is the primary example of this. Until the technologies for extraction were developed, it was expensive and had almost no uses) whereas the ruins of civilization will have those metals in near pure forms if one knows where to look.
I would love to see a reality TV show about a metallurgy expert making a knife or other metal tool from scratch. The expert would be provided food and shelter but would have no equipment or materials for making metal, and so would have to find and dig up the ore themselves, build their own oven, and whatever else you would have to do to make metal if you were transported to the stone age.
One problem you would face with such a show is if the easily-available ore is gone.
Yes, this is in fact connected to a general problem that Nick Bostrom has pointed out, each time you try to go back from stone age tech to modern tech you use resources up that you won’t have the next time. However, for purposes of actually getting back to high levels of technology rather than having a fun reality show, we’ve got a few advantages. One can use the remaining metal that is in all the left over objects from modern civilization (cars being one common easy source of a number of metals). Some metals are actually very difficult to extract from ore (aluminum is the primary example of this. Until the technologies for extraction were developed, it was expensive and had almost no uses) whereas the ruins of civilization will have those metals in near pure forms if one knows where to look.
The argument that no one person in the face of Earth knows how to build a mouse from scratch is plausible.
Matt Ridley
A person buys ore, builds a smelter out of cement, and makes a sword.
Terry Pratchett digs up ore near his house, smelts it in “a makeshift kiln built from clay and hay and fuelled with damp sheep manure”, and makes a sword. Also included: meteorites!
Thank you Hacker News.
He [pratchett] has to hide it from the authorities.