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Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 10:55:30 UTC No. 16450300
Does civilization still actually retain the capacity to replicate itself? Like, do "ground zero knowledge" humans still exist? If a war or some strong solar flare destroyed all our repositories of knowledge, would we be able to rebuild from memory? If you dumped 5000 PhDs on an island, how long would it take them to produce a microchip?
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 11:06:24 UTC No. 16450304
>>16450300
> If you dumped 5000 PhDs on an island, how long would it take them to produce a microchip.
It depends on what the PhDs were in. If the only stem PhDs were mathematicians or statisticians you'd be pretty well fucked. If you had just the right latticework of mathematics, history of science, physics, EE, ME, ChemE and some agricultural sciences and medical doctors to keep people alive, probably within a decade or two. That's relying on a pretty unlikely case where we ask the stars to align.
Hyper-specialization works precisely bec we don't need to figure out how to align all of these niches together in reality because our social and economic infrastructure does it for us.
Anonymous at Sat, 26 Oct 2024 11:12:48 UTC No. 16450306
>>16450300
All of them would starve to death.