Not one big enough to cause another great extinction, but small enough to just turn a whole small country and parts of neighboring ones into a huge crater. Will the people who was evacuated out after NASA stated a warning try to rebuild the country after everything has settled down or do they’d become citizens of another country?

Edit: after reading the comments, maybe turning a small country into a crater is too much, what about just level the place, or in any way that make it uninhabitable for a period of time?

  • noisefree@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    !If any humans survive at this point, we’ll probably be starting over from the bronze age. !<

    Eh, if there are human survivors then data (digital and analog) and technology will survive, as well as localized means of generating power. Between that and knowledge of post-bronze age technology existing in the minds of survivors (it doesn’t have to be an understanding of how technology works, merely the idea that it exists is a huge head start since initially imagining a thing is the first huge hurdle towards creating it), I would bet on survivors not needing to reinvent so many wheels if we are also assuming the basic conditions necessary for a small number of humans to survive and reproduce indefinitely exist in this post-apocalyptic scenario. Bonus points if any of the survivors happen to be experts in a modern domain or two, but even the knowledge of basic maths that many people retain from adolescent education is a huge advantage over our distant ancestors. Just knowing that something is possible is enough to drive humans to figure out how to do it, and there would be scraps of all sorts of materials and things around to remind/inspire survivors.

    That all isn’t to say that I think day to day life would be at all functionally similar to life as it is now. Technology aside, just the sheer loss of population and infrastructure would mean modern convenience would be gone and life would initially be a brutal hands-on echo of the 19th century in many regards.

    • PeterPoopshit@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I don’t really subscribe to the whole if civilization collaspes there will be no technology in anyone’s lifetime again thing. You aren’t going to go back to ordering shit off amazon from your smartphone or anything. However the knowledge that things like refrigeration, radio transmission, internal combustion engines, water treatment and such are possible is going to drive people to eventually find out how to get it by any means necessary.

      How quickly this happens is a question of whether the majority of people adopt a “technology is too dangerous/a sin against God” idealogy or not.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        One of the things missing from this step are all the incremental progress that is the best we can do at given levels of technology. I know LED lights exist and will help us extend our limited energy - but how does that help us with the necessary materials science, integrated circuits, fabs, or even how to build a reliable incandescent light in the meantime

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Bonus points if any of the survivors happen to be experts in a modern domain or two

      Ok, I’m a programmer. What now? I will starve and die of dysentery long before I could help reinvent computers