I guess I meant that coming up with new ideas is hard. Invention is hard.
In the hypothetical case that everything is gone tomorrow, the ideas still exist. All we need to do is implement them.
I'll explain it in CS terms. What would happen if all copies of the quicksort algorithm were destroyed overnight? Someone would spend a few hours and write another one because he/she knows about the algorithm. It would take about an hour.
Consider the further case that no one on earth knew that the quicksort algorithm even existed. How long would it take to be duplicated? Months? Years?
How did someone get the idea to smelt metal? It took thousands of years. Now that we know that smelting exists, all that is left is finding a way to do it. Many people in modern society will have the knowledge to rebuild technology. I would argue that expanding technology is much harder than rebuilding technology.
As to pouring molten metal, sure it is scary at first, just like driving a car. After much practice, like most things, it ceases being scary.
> I'll explain it in CS terms. What would happen if all copies of the quicksort algorithm were destroyed overnight? Someone would spend a few hours and write another one because he/she knows about the algorithm. It would take about an hour.
That's like saying you just woke up in a Blacksmith's shop, with the anvil and fire ready. That's the last mile, which isn't the hard part. Compare it to destroying all traces of CPUs and computer hardware/software. Okay, now go fabricate a processor.
What I mean to say is that once you know about an invention, reproducing it is much less difficult than actually inventing it. Do you disagree?
In high school, I was obsessed with metalworking and built several forges. I played around with melting metal and forging blades. I created charcoal. I read everything I could get my hands on about blacksmithing. I read a lot of fiction books about rebuilding post-apocalyptic societies.
I understand where you are going. If we lost it all tomorrow, it would be quite hard to reproduce tools, machinery, high precision equipment, etc. to get back to where we are. For new inventions, you need both to do all the building of the machinery that builds that machine that will build the new invention, but you also need the novel new idea that is the invention to be made. 2 hard (and quite different) problems to solve, instead of just the first (which, as mentioned, is ridiculously hard in and of itself).
In the hypothetical case that everything is gone tomorrow, the ideas still exist. All we need to do is implement them.
I'll explain it in CS terms. What would happen if all copies of the quicksort algorithm were destroyed overnight? Someone would spend a few hours and write another one because he/she knows about the algorithm. It would take about an hour.
Consider the further case that no one on earth knew that the quicksort algorithm even existed. How long would it take to be duplicated? Months? Years?
How did someone get the idea to smelt metal? It took thousands of years. Now that we know that smelting exists, all that is left is finding a way to do it. Many people in modern society will have the knowledge to rebuild technology. I would argue that expanding technology is much harder than rebuilding technology.
As to pouring molten metal, sure it is scary at first, just like driving a car. After much practice, like most things, it ceases being scary.