[Serious] The Post-Technological World.

[The Grand Nudger]

We can -already- support the current population in the absence of those things.  It's methodologically possible, just not economically viable.   The extensive development of production under cover and integrated systems can make transportation, irrigation infrastructure, pesticides and synthetic fertilizers obsolete in the present.  It would be prudent to do so today, but in a world without those four things it would be a practical necessity.  Just a minor aside and excuse to offer up a disturbing tidbit.  The same is true of conventionals today, as well.  We produce more food than all of us could eat.   

Technological ability, even in the absence of conventional methodology, isn't the reason that people starve or a barrier to population.  Not today, likely not in the future either.  Don;t get me wrong, in the "post tech" world we're proposing I strongly doubt that we'd meet the upper range of our ability any better than we do now, ofc....it's just not for any reason to do with what really ought to be legacy tech in ag.

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I;d be far more concerned about a lack of necessary skills, btw, when it comes to ag.  Most of our tech is used to reduce the amount of people doing the work.  Without that stuff and those products the trouble isn't really that there wouldn't be a way to grow food so much as there wouldn't be enough people who knew how. The sorts of alternatives I was referencing above are cleanroom setups where a person has to be on the ball with water management.

[Yonadav]

I don't think hunting will be as important as farming, simply because we're better at farming. The "all natural" farmers will be at a premium. This will be in countries where lo-techs already do that.

Whether hunting or farming dominates depends on the extent to which population collapses.  

Post technological farming society requires a global population collapse of maybe 90% from its current technological level.  Post technological hunting society requires a global population collapse of maybe 99%.

Without widespread post 1900 transportation and irrigation infrastructure, or pesticide and synthetic fertilizer technology, but with still reasonable stable and peaceful social order, farming might support 1 billion people world wide, tops.  Towns can still be numerous, and Cities of up to ~1 million would still be possible, long distance trade can still be voluminous, and reemergence of technological society within a couple of centuries still has a shot.

But hunt might only support a few tens of millions world wide tops.  Periodic gatherings of at most a few thousand people would be the apex of social and economic exchange.  Long distance trade will be for token goods only.  We will be tens of centuries of reemergence of technology as we know it, if at all.

The key element that is missing in this discussion is what causes the collapse. Without that information, we can't really say anything about how far technology would be reduced and how many people can be supported. I can't imagine anything causing a collapse of 90%, short of a nuclear war or meteor impact. Or weaponized prions. The things that would be so cataclysmic that our society would collapse to such an extent would also change nature, and what we do to survive and how many can survive to a pretty unknowable extent. Maybe no one can survive a collapse from those things.

A long period collapse has to be either from a cataclysmic event that makes both farming and hunting highly problematic, since the game has died off, the ground is poisoned, or the climate won't support agriculture; or it has to be from us running out of some resource that we need to sustain techology. I don't know what resource we will run out of.

If we don't run out of a resource, and the ground is fertile, the climate allows agriculture, and animals are healthy, I think that we would rebound quite rapidly. What's going to cause our society to collapse so severely if we have fertile ground, a climate that permits ag, and healthy animals? A solar flare? That could cause massive technological failure, but we would likely rebound from that pretty quickly.

[The Grand Nudger]

We'd have to suddenly run out of plastic in order to seriously curb our agricultural potential.  Thankfully, that shit sticks around for a long while. 

A poisoned climate isn't really all that much of an issue, it's an issue for conventionals but not an issue for ag broadly..the most productive forms of ag are already those models that disconnect production from the local climate. We don't wait for the rain to fall, we don't wait for the ground to heat up, etc. The production of cereal grains is the most vulnerable to climate, in that the regions will shift (not disappear, as many imagine) - but it's not as if we're not massively overproducing cereal grains already.

[Anomalocaris]

Ah, but will technology (as we know it) re-emerge?

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.  After a few generation of the direct and indirect effects of the lack of technology being 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 we go back to hunting age, it also implies rolling back of metal tool technology.  In this situation, it seems reemergence if agriculture will be be favored on time span of hundreds to thousands of years.  Settled Agriculture may do nothing for health and quality of life, but it will permit all conquering concentration of numbers in time of conflict.  Over thousands of years agriculture and settled way of life will likely prevail through violence.

Once settled agricultural life becomes the norm, ascension through copper, bronze and Iron Age, and literacy will seem likely to follow.  

So collapse if technological age and reverting back to hunting will ultimately end in agriculture, it will just take longer, and with greater loss of corporate memory of our current age when our descendants get there, compared to if we directly went to agriculture.

[Yonadav]

Ah, but will technology (as we know it) re-emerge?

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.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

So take a cause and run with it.

[Yonadav]

So take a cause and run with it.

I did and you shot it down. I went with a voluntary draw down of technology for environmental reasons. You didn't like that.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I challenged it, because people are selfish and greedy.

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I challenged it, because people are selfish and greedy.

And I didn't realize you were that fluttery.

[The Grand Nudger]

There are selfish and greedy reasons to do just about any good thing.  I sometimes amuse myself with the realization that some of histories most terrible motherfuckers accidentally did the rest of us a solid and got shit on for their trouble.

That was the undercurrent to my previous remarks about how, even in the event of villainous technocratic dystopia, the baddies would have a very strong incentive to adopt appropriate technologies...you know, to better fuck with other people. The end result of that is a net good in spite of the motivations of the actors who enforce it. The reason that bad things™ ultimately fail is the fundamental incompetence of the actors more than anything else. Their inability to see how their actions result in their end and through that (and their end) our betterment.

So, a fun example. Elon Musk might actually be a mustache twirling villain...Lex fuckin Luther, but if so, we got a crew capsule out of him all the same. He could be defrauding his investors (and we the people through contracts), but if so..we still got EVs and panels and batteries out of him.

[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.