It's funny how people think a post-apocalyptic landscape will be relatively flat socioeconomically. At most they think there will be small-scale warlords or Dunbar-scale anarchist communes. No. There will be deathstar billionaires with private armies and narrow-deep tech stacks.
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The industrial age has made us (falsely) believe that an "industrial base" has to necessarily be a nation-state scale at minimum. No. A complete industrial tech stack can be built as a fairly narrow single-billionaire pillar.
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A traditional "industrial base" has steel, sulphuric acid, power plants etc. at the bottom, and space programs and aircraft carriers at the top. This kind of stack can now be replicated with a *very* narrow footprint. I think you could do it for $3-4 billion in a small city.
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Replying to @vgr
I did *not* expect to hear this take from you. Details???
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Replying to @vgr
Like, do you have links to estimates of what’s necessary for an “industrial base” & how much they cost? Have costs come down recently?
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @vgr
Musk is *sort of* a case in terms of getting to space without national mobilization & backing it took a few decades ago... don't think it would be possible to evolve such a world unless it WAS a sudden post-asteroid apocalypse & also think it's not inevitable or indestructible...
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Doesn’t count, I don’t think. (Does he make his own steel?)
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @vgr
Yeah, I think right now it is impossible, but the idea of a narrow, walled-in, tech-ahead (if not advanced), billionaire city vs tech-deprived hinterland is possible, if not sustainable.
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