Quote:
Originally Posted by wind_magic
I've said before that I believe most of the technology that we are so proud of now has less to do with any new ability to innovate that we may feel we have learned and more to do with simple numbers. When you get billions of people working on things you end up with cellular telephones, simple as that, it isn't that we have over night (few thousand years) become exceptionally bright. But that can work in the opposite direction too, if the population decreases we can lose the ability to do things, lose the ability to fix technology that we still use, and all the rest. Just because we have at one time known how to make cellular telephones doesn't mean we'll always have the population to do it, things like that are inter-related in a huge network that has to work right in order to produce things like that.
Edit - Technology is not a one way street, or, said another way, can you fix a nuclear reactor ?
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An excellent point, Windy. We couldn't begin to build a clipper ship today that would equal one of the originals in quality of construction, even using modern tools. That is, build one as an exact replica that worked. The skill set is lost and the knowledge of why certain things were done "just so" is lost as well.