Conversation

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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Good news if true, but I'm not sure where you get that estimate from. My own intuition is that you encounter a dependency hell that makes the stack extremely wide.
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That’s the toaster theory 🙂 Of course it wouldn’t be a full equivalent. For example maybe semiconductor fabs are beyond reach, but they could insure against that by buying a whole bunch and carefully storing them so they last a few generations.
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Anything up to early 20th century should be doable on a budget of millions and a population under 20K. The Wright Brothers built their own engine. It's when you start trying for semiconductors that you run into problems, and some things require a large resource base to achieve.