Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I think your phone must be smarter than mine 
More seriously, a lot of the high tech stuff that we rely on requires many levels of extreme specialisation. Anyone here setup to start manufacturing computer chips? What about batteries? Batteries have a limited life, even sitting on the shelf. Who's going to start making new ones to replace them? Then you have to get them into all these devices that are currently being manufactured to be thrown away before their battery die. This is a consumer society, our technology is not made to be used for 20 or 50 years while it waits for our technological capability grows to be able to manufacture new ones. So the more difficult question may be how long would it take to gain a population large enough to once again support that level of specialised knowledge and experience so that we can once again have production of our mod-cons in the brave new world. |
I dont think that will be much of a problem... most of what would be required to get society back up to a "modern level" , cars, planes, etc is relatively simple to understand. Sure we might not be staffing the ISS again for a while, but we could easily get to mid 1900's very fast. There will be LOTS of computers, and other devices in surplus around the planet. If a large chunk of the population was removed we would a ton of surplus spare parts/etc to get things working again.
I think the biggest key is power. Get power plants back online and we would quickly regain ground.