alt text
First panel: [blank white space with black text] Jogging from the perspective of animals
Second panel: Wolf by a tree looking at a man jogging. "What are you running from, apex predator"
Third panel: Wolf: "Are you chasing prey?" "You need to conserve energy"
Last panel: [second wolf peeking in] "The hell is that guy doing" [first wolf] "I don't know. I don't understand"
(alt text by @cypnk@mastodon.social)
Unless we get fucked spectacularly we probably wont devolve back to the iron age. At worst maybe the age of sails but even then it'd be rather scattershot on what tech would survive. You might have a scenario where most tech is at 1700s level but with radio and modern firearms or atleast ww1-gulf war level.
Yeah it'll definitely be a mish mash of technology but a very large part of humanity will be left alone to their own devices having to find any way to survive
We've witnessed societal collapse before and came out of it for the better. We'll be reunited as a whole within a hundred years of such an event.
The main difference though was those were just societal not ecological.
People were able to bounce back easily because resources were still plentiful and food was everywhere. With climate change a lot of resources are going to become unavailable.
Maybe so, but humans are also clever. Just cause we're fucked doesnt mean we're out of the game.
Oh I have no doubt. Honestly it would take planet wide devastation to completely wipe us out.
But mass extinctions have happened multiple times and the species that survive are mainly just lucky.
I don't think humanity has anymore luck to spare.
With the level of technical knowledge we've achieved, there's no way we're going back to doing things exactly the way they used to. One example that jumps out at me is the method this primitive technology guy on youtube uses to stoke his furnace. He's basically made a little manual turbine out of leaves and vines to push his air rather than one of those little squeeze box things.
Obviously I'm not a blacksmith or historian so I don't actually know how common something like that might have been, but I'm guessing it's not super old. In any case, I'm sure there are other ways that we'd apply our more advanced knowledge to tackling the sorts of problems we'd be looking at with a collapse of manufacturing and shipping infrastructure.
Honestly, a technologically adept but non-industrial society of artisans sounds kind of cool.