Right, and so I’m saying that forgetting how to make CPUs as a premise seems far-fetched when the actual fact of the matter than we can easily lose the ability to make CPUs with only a few significant supply chain losses. A total societal collapse isn’t necessary. A single catastrophic natural disaster that only directly impacts one part of the world might be enough.
It’s not just the manufacturing of that one thing that is under consideration. There’s an entire supply chain that gets you to that point where you finally have the inputs needed to enter the lab and make the product. There’s likewise a whole bunch of supply chain needed to get an ISO Class 5 clean room, which is what’s needed for general microprocessors. Even if you’re only talking about a clean work box on a bench top.
Who is mining the cobalt and aluminum and making the glass and plastic tools needed to stock the lab where you’re making 1980’s style microprocessors? Who is making a pure silicon ingot you’ll slice to get a wafer? What will you use to slice the ingot for the wafer? How will you polish the wafer to microscopic levels of flatness? Who is making the oscilloscopes that test the processors to see if they work? Who is making the glass for the lenses for high-power microscopy you need to work? Where will you get the bulbs and needed for the photolithography stage? Where will you get the tiny tiny tiny wires that connect the pins to the chip? How will you purify and process refined silicon dioxide? Sure, the stuff is everywhere, but think through how you go from a piece of quartz on the ground to a material you need to layer on a wafer (where you gonna get the wafer??) and what machines and processes are needed for that. And on and on and on. One of those things missing means you can’t move forward.
And depending on the scenario, each of those things needs to be local to you as well.
This is Carl Sagan “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you need to invent the universe” level picking the process apart. Everything is connected, and we don’t always appreciate how much things are inextricably tied to what we use on a daily basis.
My favorite example: This guy figured it out when thinking through a cheeseburger.
There’s also a book from 2016 called “When the Trucks Stop Running” that is fearmongering oil industry hype, all about how important oil is to fueling heavy machinery. (Spoiler, it’s not as important as they make it out to be) But the real lesson of the book is how many rarely seen or talked about corners of the supply chain are fundamental to keeping huge numbers of industries running, and how fragile many advanced technologies are to supply chain interruption.
I was thinking of modern CPUs the whole time and then people are trying to “What-if” their way into whatever they want it to be.
Fine, it’s whatever you want it to be. We’ll be making modern CPUs in a bucket next to the bucket where we recycle paper.
Yeah, but look at how much other stuff that is highly-manufactured goes into that process? It’s not about just the end product, it’s about the entire supply chain needed to get the stuff to make the 1 product.
You can make vacuum tubes all day. You can even make transistors and integrated circuits at home.
But the definition of “computer” here is a glorified calculator.
A TI-81, the graphing calculator from the 1980’s, used a chip that had 8500 transistors. So if you’re planning to, say, build a dam and need to know how thick the cement should be to account for the pressure from the volume of water when the lake is full - unless you want to do all that engineering calculus yourself (I promise, it sucks) then you might want some more advanced computational power. Sure, dams were built when this was all done by hand. Dams also collapsed and washed towns away sometimes. Something I haven’t heard of happening in a while.
As nice as it is to think about going back to an analog world, things like knowing what the climate is doing, medical advancements, sharing video and images, etc. save lives and advance medicine. No one is making a COVID vaccine without sequencing the genome of a virus. Pacemakers, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, cars with increased fuel efficiency, electric vehicles, solar panels - all perfectly good reasons to enjoy modern microprocessors.
…you say as we both use machines that used a planet’s worth of supply chains and resources to talk to each other.
Forgot? Have you seen what’s needed to make CPUs? Clean Room Manufacturing is a fragile thing.
Developing countries often need a lot of help just getting to ISO Class 7, which is what’s needed to safely make cough syrup.
Injectable drugs are ISO Class 5. CPU manufacturing is ISO Class 1 and 2. In some post-apocalyptic scenario, depending on the scenario, it would be decades or generations of work to get semiconductor manufacturing back. Even if you have an abandoned factory sitting right there. It would potentially be decades to get back to making anything safely injectable. Supply chains involved with specific parts and inputs. shudder
I grew up outside a large town, and I lived in a village of about 300 people for a few years. Mud hut, water from the well, farming millet to survive. It’s hard work to be sedentary dirtscratchers, and it’s a simple and exhausting life. I liked it when I had energy for it, but I liked it when I was able to escape from it sometimes as well.
The thing about village life is it’s rarely interesting, and it’s very insular. It’s simple life because things rarely happen that deviate from the norm. Changes are slow and often points of friction because once people settle into a groove, dealing with change takes energy. Gossip is the news and the news is gossip. Even in larger villages, modern villages a 20 minute drive from a highway, humans require a lot of work to get to a point where a resilient community can run on autopilot to some degree. Someone is always pissed about something, or paranoid about something. If you don’t spend time and energy to get along with everyone, and you’re not already cool with everyone else, then you quickly become the outcast, untrusted, uncared for, and unable to participate in regular community building.
But when shit hits the fan, everyone is up to help everyone else. The pent up energy of 2 months of monotony being released through ritual and music and dance is amazing.
You can try looking for 50+ inch monitors and avoiding the smart TV market aspect altogether. They’re expensive, but only because smart TV prices are subsidized by the expectation of selling your data.