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wedrifid comments on Rationality Quotes: November 2010 - Less Wrong
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Christianity would not come back. Not with that name and not with those details.
Science would not come back either, not with that name and not with those details. It would actually be fascinating to see how we built up our understanding a second time around. Much of how we carve reality into human sized pieces is an artifact of how it was discovered as well as mere chance. Rediscovering the mechanisms behind natural phenomena may well produce systems of knowledge that take considerable effort to understand.
I think that human sized pieces will always be human sized pieces. Important discoveries may be made in a different order, but if we turned back the clock I'm pretty sure we'd rediscover fire, positional numeral systems (though not necessarily base 10), metallurgy, and electromagnetism, assuming humanity doesn't go extinct too fast. On the other hand, achievements like space travel and the nuclear bomb depended heavily on the geopolitics of the time, and I wouldn't expect them to be replicated.
I'm just wondering if we would end up breaking the pieces up in different ways, ways that are unintuitive to us.