[Serious] The Post-Technological World.

[Anomalocaris]

I think in reality, it is highly likely technology will re-emerge if urban civilization survives.   Survival of urban civilization means likely survival of corporate memory.   When the true gridding misery of lack of technology becomes the universal human condition, the worst depredations of technology will been seen through a glowing mist as the heights of a golden age.   It will steer and channel intellectual pursuit towards the reattainmemt of some semblance of the golden age.  In such a case it seem probable technological age will re-emerge after a few centuries.

On the other hand, if hunting becomes the main means of subsistence, then that implies the essential collapse of urban civilization and dispersal of popukation.   In such a case corporate memory of the past technological age would be more susceptible to loss and such distortion as to make it either unrecognizable or so changed as to become impossible to work towards to.   In that case technological age may indeed require near complete rebuilding from scratch, which may take thousands to tens of thousands of years.

If the ground isn't poison, the climate isn't inhospitable, and animals are healthy, why on earth would it take a few centuries for a technological age to re-emerge? What caused the technological collapse in the first place? I can't think of anything that would prevent a technological re-emergence from happening pretty much immediately, provided that we haven't run out of some vital resource. We went from the industrial revolution to the transistor age in about one century. It basically took that long because we didn't yet know what a transistor was. Aliens could sweep down from outer space and cart off every bit of our technology, and we would be back up and running again in a few decades.

And what could possibly knock us so far back that we would have to subsist on hunting? If the land isn't poisoned, the climate isn't inhospitable, and animals are healthy, then I'm farming. I'm not going to do that hunting bullshit very much. I'm going to farm and keep livestock.

If there is not a very high social or demographic barrier to the maintenance of technological society for 100+ years, then I think the original technological society would not have completely collapsed globally and would have survived in isolated parts at least. If it survive somewhere, then it’s advantages would be such that it will reimpose technological order upon the rest of the world through diffusion, coercion and conquest within short order.

So the very stipulation that technological society has collapsed implies condition would exist to prevent its reemergence immediately after the collapse, and time would be required for these conditions to fade.

As to what these conditions might be, it is difficult to imagine. But whatever it is it might be safe to say it would need be very complex. I don’t think any simple factor is likely to be so finely tuned that it will completely topple the technological civilization without causing mankind’s extinction.