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.
Conversation
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.
3
13
68
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.
6
12
64
Replying to
I don't see this as credible. Your entire budget won't buy a single 7nm semiconductor plant, and you'll have nothing left over to make the raw materials that plant requires. That leaves out everything else, too, from steel to ink.
2
3
Replying to
There are workarounds. I didn’t say an exact miniature civilization isomorphic to the one we have. I said narrow/deep. A sustainable high-functioning deep tech capability that can survive a collapse. I’d expect a deep hoarding component for example, for certain things.
1
Replying to
I think you don't appreciate quite how many things it would take even to sustain 1900 level technology. Where are your specialists in metrology in all of this (you need gauge blocks). Where are your specialists in high volume specialty chemicals and their infrastructure?
2
Anyway, having not seen such an explanation yet: I direct everyone to a video version of Reed's famous essay "I, Pencil": youtube.com/watch?v=IYO3tO
2
1
Show replies

