The other problem is this: if there is a disaster that wipes out such a large percentage of the Earth’s population, the few people who did survive it would probably be in very isolated areas and might not have access to any of the knowledge we’ve been talking about anyway.
Still, it is interesting to look at what knowledge our civilization rest on. It seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure we rely on in our day-to-day lives is “irreducibly complex”—for example, we know how to make computers, but this is not a necessary skill in a disaster scenario (or our ancestral environment).
The other problem is this: if there is a disaster that wipes out such a large percentage of the Earth’s population, the few people who did survive it would probably be in very isolated areas and might not have access to any of the knowledge we’ve been talking about anyway.
Still, it is interesting to look at what knowledge our civilization rest on. It seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure we rely on in our day-to-day lives is “irreducibly complex”—for example, we know how to make computers, but this is not a necessary skill in a disaster scenario (or our ancestral environment).