I think there’s a pretty large range between blacksmith levels and modern society. I’m pretty sure I could be happy living with 50s era technology. I don’t know what strides have been made in medicine and agriculture since than that might be contingent on having 6 billion people instead of 3.
On the other hand, 50s era technology depended heavily on nonrenewable resources. (Not just the obvious fossil fuels either, e.g. I’ve seen it claimed, can’t verify or refute of my own knowledge, that agriculture is going to start running into trouble after another few decades of depletion of phosphate deposits unless we find a solution.)
We have good reason to believe resource depletion problems can be solved if we continue to make progress rapidly enough. But how long a window of time we have, and how long things could be kept ticking along at industrial era tech level, nobody knows, and I’d rather not find out the hard way.
I think there’s a pretty large range between blacksmith levels and modern society. I’m pretty sure I could be happy living with 50s era technology. I don’t know what strides have been made in medicine and agriculture since than that might be contingent on having 6 billion people instead of 3.
On the other hand, 50s era technology depended heavily on nonrenewable resources. (Not just the obvious fossil fuels either, e.g. I’ve seen it claimed, can’t verify or refute of my own knowledge, that agriculture is going to start running into trouble after another few decades of depletion of phosphate deposits unless we find a solution.)
We have good reason to believe resource depletion problems can be solved if we continue to make progress rapidly enough. But how long a window of time we have, and how long things could be kept ticking along at industrial era tech level, nobody knows, and I’d rather not find out the hard way.