if time travelers kidnapped a few thousand scientists, engineers, and so forth from the present and took them back thousands of years and dropped them naked in the post-glacial northern european steppes, the children and grandchildren of the very few who survived would quickly reinvent cave painting as the single best means of improving their productive capacity in the material conditions they find themselves. they certainly aren't building a chip manufacturing plant to start making computers.

downbear

This is just anti-intellectualism. Making shitty jokes about how modern people wouldn't be able to survive if they were dropped naked in the wild is some boomer level posting.

[–] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

Ye, how is this even wrong? It doesn't matter what level of expertise the people are you send back, they won't have the resources to create PCs. Even if they knew how to find and mine the materials, they won't have the global infrastructure to do so. How are you going to get cobalt from South Africa, lithium from Afghanistan, bismuth from China, and platinum from Montana when there are no ships, trains, cars, or planes? You going to spend 80 years walking to each place and then hope you can cross the arctic to make it from Asia to North America?

Our ancestors weren't stupid, they were limited by their conditions. Even if you sent back the best scientific minds alive with a unified goal, they'd run into all kinds of problems sourcing materials we take for granted. They'd end up re-doing what was already done at the time, like using cave paintings to record information.

One example from history is fish hooks in Australia. As you go further south and eventually make your way to Tasmania, the number of fish hooks used by ancient Aborigines dwindles and disappears. It's not that northern Aborigines were smarter, it's that people in the south had smaller and smaller groups as they broke off to form their own societies as humans migrated across the continent, starting from the north. This meant fewer experts, fewer people gathering/processing resources, and less labor power.

The same thing would happen in any scenario taking place today should the number of people drastically decrease.

[–] context@hexbear.net 2 points 3 days ago

fuck you, what shitty joke?