Einstein is quoted as saying "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." I sort of hate this quote because it implies that thousands of years of technological advancement will disappear with the mass death of a nuclear holocaust. This notion is visible in a ton of science fiction from the sixties on and while I liked parts of A Canticle for Leibowitz I just don't buy the core premise.
Let's pretend that ninety five percent of the population died one hundred years ago. Since then the remaining humans have had to try and function in a cold and unforgiving world just like our ancestors. What do they have going for them? A lot actually. Firstly, the sheer availability of processed resources. It takes four percent as much energy to recycle aluminum as mining it from scratch. Iron is not as generous but the resource advantage compared to building civilization the first time is overwhelming. They will also have millions of examples of machines to examine, a number of extremely lethal diseases like small pox will no longer exist, genetically modified high yield crops will be scattered around, and the number of languages spoken in a given region is likely to be significantly reduced relative to history allowing for easy cooperation and trade. All of this specifically pertains to the developed world but that is who we are expecting to get bombed.
But aren't modern people too stupid and soft from a life spent in front of TV? Yes, some would be. These are not the ones that I expect to have descendants in one hundred years. It's conceivable that nobody clears that bar but it doesn't strike me as particularly likely. Idiocracy was a fun movie but I never considered it prophetic. Same for cannibal raider tribal psychos. Yes, they could be a problem for the first generation but that's not a sustainable lifestyle. Their weapons, transport, and general equipment are going to be broken or out of gas/bullets/batteries while the people maintaining or advancing industrial society will have working equipment. The notion of barbarian hordes sweeping in and destroying civilization tends to ignore that the one major example of this was barbarians that Rome itself had armed and then failed to pay. It can happen but it almost never does. What mostly happens is that technologically, industrially, and logistically advanced group sweeps into a comparatively undeveloped area and enslaves or taxes the populace.
There are significant problems in the scenario I'm outlining apart from the mass death. Parts of the world are radioactive. The most accessible fossil fuel deposits have long since been stripped. Much really vital info is probably in lost servers. Some technology really doesn't keep well. I think the above points still hold. I have no idea what the timeline for recovering from Armageddon is but given the progress that occurred between 1800 and 2000 I think it's reasonable to suspect between seventy five and one hundred and fifty years. Recovery meaning that people are mostly using things their society made rather than what ever they could salvage. I don't know where they are on the tech ladder but if it was beneath 1890 I would be confused. All of this is just guessing but I feel confident that a millennia long dark age doesn't occur.
Mind you, all of this started with an Einstein quote. Einstein was a genius and one of the greatest physicists but he didn't know what he was talking about. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just pointing out that there are several holes in the general story when viewed from reasonable material and technical knowledge availability assumptions. There is no fact of the matter to settle this. I don't have a counterfactual timeline that I can scry to support or debunk this. What I do have is a sense that their are probably more things like this where a pithy quote spawned a whole genre and nobody actually thought to check the assumptions. Well, not at the time. At least half of my talking points are scavenged from an episode of Science and Futurism with Issac Arthur. Am I just parroting somebody else instead of doing years of research to come to my own conclusions? Yes. Does that matter for me being correct? I don't know.
My expectation for the future is mostly positive because the last two centuries have been mostly positive as measured by child mortality. I use that as a simple mono-dimensional measure of progress because I think it's compelling to both myself and others. It's entirely possible that the two century streak could end tomorrow in a nuclear exchange. I disagree that it's at all plausible that we spend another thousand years pulling ourselves back together. I wouldn't waste time putting the world back together, would you? Obviously, the two of us aren't the only people needed for that project but I don't see why I'd expect the rest of the world to be significantly more dysfunctional than myself under threat of starving next winter.
IRON NODER XVII: ALL'S FERROUS IN LOVE AND NODING