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asciilifeform comments on Why safety is not safe - Less Wrong
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Do you actually believe that 10% of the population are capable of doing meaningful science? Or that post-collapse authority figures will see value in anything we would recognize as science?
This addresses the wrong issue: the question I answered was about capability of the pre-industrial society to produce enough surplus for enough people to think professionally, while your nitpick is about a number clearly intended to serve as a feasible upper bound being too high.
See also: Least convenient possible world.
Thank you for the link.
I concede that a post-collapse society might successfully organize and attempt to resurrect civilization. However, what I have read regarding surface-mineral depletion and the mining industry's forced reliance on modern energy sources leads me to believe that if our attempt at civilization sinks, the game may be permanently over.
Why would we need to mine for minerals? It's not as though iron or copper permanently stop being usable as such when they're alloyed into structural steel or semiconductors. The wreckage of an industrial civilization would make better ore than any natural stratum.
No, once a technological civilization has used the minerals, they're too scattered and worn to be efficiently gathered. When the minerals are still in the planet, you can use geological knowledge to predict where they are and find them in concentrated form. Once Sentients start using them for various purposes, they lose the order and usefulness they once had.
In short, the entropy of the minerals massively increases, because the information about its distribution is destroyed. Therefore, it requires greater energy to convert back into useful form, almost certainly needing a higher energy expenditure per unit useful mineral obtained (otherwise, humans would be currently mining modern middens (aka landfills) for metals).
OTOH, when large concentrations of metal (buildings, vehicles) are disposed of, they're almost always recycled. Many such large concentrations would survive a collapse. I'm not sure how long it would take for iron/steel buildings to mostly rust away, or how much steel would be buried safe from rust.
We do. It's called "recycling".
You should recycle.
I do. So do a lot of other people. Because it is, in fact, a good idea. IIRC, it's more efficient than mining, what with all the easily-accessible minerals already mined out.