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GeneralRe: That's interesting Pin
k505426-Feb-20 3:33
mvek505426-Feb-20 3:33 
GeneralRe: That's interesting Pin
Mike Hankey26-Feb-20 5:44
mveMike Hankey26-Feb-20 5:44 
GeneralI know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
Mark_Wallace25-Feb-20 23:14
Mark_Wallace25-Feb-20 23:14 
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
Nelek25-Feb-20 23:29
protectorNelek25-Feb-20 23:29 
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
den2k8825-Feb-20 23:36
professionalden2k8825-Feb-20 23:36 
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
Nelek25-Feb-20 23:56
protectorNelek25-Feb-20 23:56 
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
den2k8826-Feb-20 0:11
professionalden2k8826-Feb-20 0:11 
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
kalberts26-Feb-20 3:00
kalberts26-Feb-20 3:00 
After the Black Death, the survivors (and their grandchildren) could still look up a lot of previous knowledge in pre-Black-Death writings. Later, when the printing press had become a household item, almost all knowledge could survive, in the form of books, a thirty year long closedown of society caused by an epidemic.

Today, you can't just pick that .pdf down from your bookshelf and thumb through it to find what you need. Your PC must be operational, your screen still working, "someone" must be able to start up the power plant. Someone must provide the oil, coal or whatever fires the power plant. The great majority of the information is not on your local harddisk, so someone must keep up the network - every single node between your PC and the database you want to access ...

An epidemic comparable to the Black Death would certainly affect both power plant workers, PC service men, DevOps personell at the data centers, fuel oil vendors and lots of other people that must be around to ensure your access to Wikipedia. Or to the schematics and construction drawings for that motor. Or to the service manual for the failing power generator.

That is what worries me: The number of people and professions required to ensure access to almost any piece of information. Or rather, how few deaths - a far lower percentage than the Black Death - it would take to paralyze all information access. How little of modern technology and knowledge is accessible in non-electronic form.

If we expericence anything like the Black Death, we must cross our fingers for society to be able to recover before optical fibers are all glass crumbles, before power generators have corroded away, before the hard disk bearings have deformed due to not being activated, ... A generation after the Black Death, society was essentially still in limbo. I very much doubt that we would be able to recover much info from the internet databases thirty years after they were last accessed. (Alan Weisman: "The World Without Us" is rather scary, when considering the effects of a pandemic.)

The best we can hope for, is to find scraps of old books in what remains of classical libraries. Most likely, we will find very little that is more recent than 1960s-70s technology, and even though we can read e.g. about transistors and vacuum tubes, we probably cannot make more of them; the library books do not tell much about how to build a semiconductor factory.

So for all practical purposes, in a restart from the ground, the ground is not much above stone age technology. Even though we will be sitting on piles of technological scraps, our chances of utilizing those scraps is very close to zero.
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
  Forogar  26-Feb-20 5:15
professional  Forogar  26-Feb-20 5:15 
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
Mark_Wallace26-Feb-20 0:06
Mark_Wallace26-Feb-20 0:06 
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
den2k8826-Feb-20 0:10
professionalden2k8826-Feb-20 0:10 
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
Mark_Wallace26-Feb-20 1:14
Mark_Wallace26-Feb-20 1:14 
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
Jörgen Andersson26-Feb-20 0:22
professionalJörgen Andersson26-Feb-20 0:22 
GeneralRe: I know that lock-down is the only available way to handle it, but... Pin
den2k8826-Feb-20 0:51
professionalden2k8826-Feb-20 0:51 
GeneralCCC- 26/2/20 Pin
super25-Feb-20 22:02
professionalsuper25-Feb-20 22:02 
GeneralRe: CCC- 26/2/20 Pin
musefan25-Feb-20 22:06
musefan25-Feb-20 22:06 
GeneralRe: CCC- 26/2/20 we have a winner Pin
super25-Feb-20 22:10
professionalsuper25-Feb-20 22:10 
GeneralRe: CCC- 26/2/20 we have a winner Pin
musefan25-Feb-20 22:17
musefan25-Feb-20 22:17 
GeneralRe: CCC- 26/2/20 we have a winner Pin
super25-Feb-20 22:25
professionalsuper25-Feb-20 22:25 
GeneralRe: CCC- 26/2/20 we have a winner Pin
musefan25-Feb-20 22:31
musefan25-Feb-20 22:31 
GeneralRe: CCC- 26/2/20 we have a winner Pin
OriginalGriff25-Feb-20 22:23
mveOriginalGriff25-Feb-20 22:23 
GeneralRe: CCC- 26/2/20 we have a winner Pin
musefan25-Feb-20 22:26
musefan25-Feb-20 22:26 
GeneralRe: CCC- 26/2/20 we have a winner Pin
super25-Feb-20 22:28
professionalsuper25-Feb-20 22:28 
GeneralRe: CCC- 26/2/20 we have a winner Pin
Daniel Pfeffer25-Feb-20 22:35
professionalDaniel Pfeffer25-Feb-20 22:35 
GeneralRe: CCC- 26/2/20 we have a winner Pin
musefan25-Feb-20 22:44
musefan25-Feb-20 22:44 

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