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KingVolsung t1_ixaqek0 wrote

Reply to comment by InfernalCorg in TIL that in 2003, scientists "resurrected" an extinct species of Ibex, bringing back one living specimen, only for it go extinct again seven minutes later when the specimen died of a lung defect by mausoliam95

If human population crashes too far, we will lose the majority of the skills, technologies and knowledge we've developed.

If we've fucked up the environment too much (like we're in the midst of doing), we're gonna die off with the rest of the planet.

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InfernalCorg t1_ixavmj7 wrote

Hardly. A particularly bad catastrophe might take is back as far as 1970s tech, but a single decent library'd be enough for us to rebuild from more-or-less scratch.

And even if we went full "atmosphere not oxygenated enough to sustain human life" we'd still have holdouts in bunkers with life support. There are eight billion of us and we're remarkably hard to eradicate.

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KingVolsung t1_ixax8rn wrote

Those bunkers would need sufficient access to new materials for indefinite use (particularly energy production). You could not produce a full supply chain to produce the necessary tech to replace aging components in the bunkers, from inside the bunkers, within a few decades. At which point, your motors, batteries, ICs, etc would all start to die, and with them, us.

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InfernalCorg t1_ixaxouy wrote

Or you'd operate in low-oxygen environments via rebreathers, yeah. I'm not suggesting it'd be trivial, only that even drastic changes to our environment are unlikely to wipe us out.

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KingVolsung t1_ixayqro wrote

Rebreathers are not sustainable, they require a supply chain to be able to keep using them. The scale of the supply chains required to keep humanity alive in such a situation is far beyond what can be achieved through bunkers.

The only way we could survive such a situation is where the environment will become survivable within decades, which in evolutionary/geological timescales is a blink of an eye.

No one is building and preparing bunkers for surviving centuries to millennia, because it's not feasible.

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