What a coincidence, I had that discussion with my friends yesterday.
We came to conclusions that the scenarios of rebuilding society back up are based on the type of collapse. The greater drop (destruction events) and greater time gap before rebuilding can start anew the harder it would get.
A dark age collapse - worst case scenario - where people slowly loose knowledge over generations - due to lack of institutions to protect the knowledge, sounds like a game over scenario. Small clusters of agrarian people would not have resources to support an engineering department tasked with preserving knowledge that is useless for time being.
Slowly the tech that could have been re-used or restarted would deteriorate beyond usability, and then beyond repeatability.
Its a scary scenario, probably good basis for a book series... there is probably plenty of novels written with that scenario already ;)
I think slow collapse would be the best case. It would give time for technologies like blacksmithing to flourish. It would also mean that advanced technology could be used if couldn’t be produced. It would also mean civilization that could have reason to save books. Finally, there is an advantage to knowledge, technology, and science. We forget that pre-industrial technology can be produced on small scale, and that musket and steel armor is a huge advantage.
In a hard collapse, all of that would be lost trying to survive. Books would be burned for heat, electronics forgotten, and blacksmiths killed accidentally.
A Canticle for Leibowitz comes to mind, though while the preservation of knowledge after collapse is a central premise it is not what the novel is about, exactly. Worth reading in any case.
We came to conclusions that the scenarios of rebuilding society back up are based on the type of collapse. The greater drop (destruction events) and greater time gap before rebuilding can start anew the harder it would get.
A dark age collapse - worst case scenario - where people slowly loose knowledge over generations - due to lack of institutions to protect the knowledge, sounds like a game over scenario. Small clusters of agrarian people would not have resources to support an engineering department tasked with preserving knowledge that is useless for time being.
Slowly the tech that could have been re-used or restarted would deteriorate beyond usability, and then beyond repeatability.
Its a scary scenario, probably good basis for a book series... there is probably plenty of novels written with that scenario already ;)