> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.
Wow... there are probably several ways we could lose the ability to fab semiconductors. We can look back through history at other periods where they "forgot" how to do various things. Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral was the first major dome built in Europe in over a thousand years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. They lost the knowledge of dome building. Should they have considered doing themselves in because they found themselves in the Dark Ages? We might forget how to do various very involved technical things like fab'ing chips, or we might lose the knowledge/and or ability to even build a fab, for example (just consider the supply-chain required to build a fab and consider how fragile some of those chains are). Yeah, it will mean that something really bad has likely happened, but that doesn't mean that it's the end and we should just go and kill ourselves. It will mean that there's been some kind of discontinuity, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of humanity. People will still be able to grow crops, hunt, fish, etc (given a reasonable climate remains in enough places). Likely the population under these conditions will be much smaller but it doesn't mean that we can never recover as a species - sure, it might take 1000 years. That's ok, we go on just like ancestors before us who endured great hardship.
There are no Dark Ages. People in the Byzantine Empire (capitale in Europe) and the Abbasid Caliphate very much knew how to build domes and where actually busy advancing the state of the art.
The fact that the Franks were more interested in warring against each others than building great things is no evidence of a dark age. They started building again once peace came back and didn’t restart from where they left off but from the new state of the art as translations started pouring over from the Arabic empires.
The idea that humanity somehow went back is a fantasy pushed forward by catholic commentators.
The 'dark ages' weren't even the dark ages in Europe. The idea was invented by guys in the Renaissance who pined for the Greco-Roman world and pretended everything since then was a slide downhill. Anyone who seriously trots out this trope as 'proof' of anything should be taken about as seriously as a flat-earther.
> The idea that humanity somehow went back is a fantasy pushed forward by catholic commentators.
A tangential aside: Wouldn't that make the catholics look bad and as such why would they spread it? ("We had all this great tech before the catholic/christians came along and ruined everything and now we don't have nice things" seems like another way to look at it)
> "We had all this great tech before the catholic/christians came along and ruined everything and now we don't have nice things" seems like another way to look at it
The way it was framed (and often still is with a dash of 19th century nationalism added) is:
The unwashed barbarian from the east came pouring tearing apart the beautiful christian roman empire before one of their chief saw the light and converted. Guided by faith, the franks unified once again the warring provinces which sadly were broken apart again through inheritences - but such is the law - before their god annointed kings heroically pushed away the unfaithful from the south. The properous Italian cities, whose families gave us more Pope than any others, rediscovered the brightness of the Antiquity especially the best of them, Aristotle, who turns out to be the easiest to reframe in a way compatible with catholicism, propelling the world into the Age of Enlightnment which had to be spread out to the furthest shores.
Because through racist-enough eyes, Arabic discoveries or knowledge don't exist until they are whitewashed. That's the whole pretense, that there was some Dark Age that did something to the whole world. For values of "whole" meaning "the parts we care about".
There are many domes that were built in the Middle East and Asia while Europe was trying to figure out how to fund expensive vanity projects (large domes).
Nor are they a requirement for survival. We didn't have computers until about the 1930s and somehow we survived as a species.
> The world is more than Europe.
Yes, very true. But under the conditions of some kind of serious disaster such as we're discussing we wouldn't have visibility into what's going on on the other side of the world either, just as they didn't. The Dark Ages in Europe weren't dark in places like China, but that didn't help you if you were living in Europe. (and even in Europe the "darkness" wasn't evenly distributed)
> Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral was the first major dome built in Europe in over a thousand years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
I don't think it necessarily means they forgot how to do it, though. Or does it? We too stopped building domes made of big stones, it doesn't mean we don't know how to do it.
For whatever reason they weren't building domes anymore in Europe where they had been (the fall of the Western Roman empire sort of changed priorities for a while). And after a generation of not building domes the artisans (in Europe) lost the ability to do it.
There's a much closer example: The US spent the 60s developing the capability to land humans on the moon. And they were successful. They did it about, what, 7 or 8 times? But then they stopped doing it. And now some 60 years later they're having a hard time doing it again (see the woes of NASA's Artemis and Boeing's Starliner). Imagine if the pause wasn't 60 years, but several hundred years.
I only want to add that's not something that we have a hard time doing because it suddenly became hard, but because it came out of fashion.
We had a really good time thanks to cold war and flexing between both sides, but now it's a just a enormous investment with no return. It's really sad to see NASA running on a shoe string budget, and Ingenuity being nothing more than a glorified student project that happened at the right time in the right place.
Wow... there are probably several ways we could lose the ability to fab semiconductors. We can look back through history at other periods where they "forgot" how to do various things. Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral was the first major dome built in Europe in over a thousand years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. They lost the knowledge of dome building. Should they have considered doing themselves in because they found themselves in the Dark Ages? We might forget how to do various very involved technical things like fab'ing chips, or we might lose the knowledge/and or ability to even build a fab, for example (just consider the supply-chain required to build a fab and consider how fragile some of those chains are). Yeah, it will mean that something really bad has likely happened, but that doesn't mean that it's the end and we should just go and kill ourselves. It will mean that there's been some kind of discontinuity, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of humanity. People will still be able to grow crops, hunt, fish, etc (given a reasonable climate remains in enough places). Likely the population under these conditions will be much smaller but it doesn't mean that we can never recover as a species - sure, it might take 1000 years. That's ok, we go on just like ancestors before us who endured great hardship.