Pretty good Solarpunk prompt with some medium-hard sci-fi thrown in.
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Forgot? Have you seen what’s needed to make CPUs? Clean Room Manufacturing is a fragile thing.
Developing countries often need a lot of help just getting to ISO Class 7, which is what’s needed to safely make cough syrup.
Injectable drugs are ISO Class 5. CPU manufacturing is ISO Class 1 and 2. In some post-apocalyptic scenario, depending on the scenario, it would be decades or generations of work to get semiconductor manufacturing back. Even if you have an abandoned factory sitting right there. It would potentially be decades to get back to making anything safely injectable. Supply chains involved with specific parts and inputs. shudder
On the other hand, we don’t need nanoscale transistors to achieve most of the usefulness of CPUs. Most of that high-tech performance is wasted on things of questionable usefulness for society. The C64 CPU had an 8 micrometer process that likely does not require ISO class 1 or 2.
…you say as we both use machines that used a planet’s worth of supply chains and resources to talk to each other.
I could post messages on FidoNet with my 8Mhz Atari ST in 1988 too
I would just install Linux on crabs, play Doom.
At one point we had a long back and forth with my cousin, a post-apo fan, about the credibility of various scenarios, various shortage, various technological regressions. My conclusion: if humanity loses the ability and the knowledge to make CPUs, then CPUs are not the first thing you will miss.
It would have meant that a generation-long obscurantist crusade would have purposefully destroyed that knowledge.
I don’t see anything natural nor a human-made disaster that could durably erase all knowledge and industries on a global scale. You would need an intelligence geared at destroying knowledge specifically.
I can’t imagine hobbyist forgetting how to do lithography. But it’s a lovely video. the electro migration stuff scares me
The “forgetting” isn’t individuals forgetting, it’s about institutional memory. Individually, there might be plenty of folks who can build chips, but they might live too far apart, or there’s no money in it, or whatever other mechanism which causes things to be built and the technology to continue. There’s a massive bootstrapping issue.
I don’t think I see it. If people need chips and no one makes em, a hobbyist becomes really valuable. And lithography touches on photography itself. We might not be able to get to the same precision as TSMC or the like but building an 8088 chip or the like should be doable. If we forgot how to make lenses, that would be worrying.
As a geriatric millennial I’d be ok with this
The only CPU I can make is Cheese Pizza, YOU!
Dies the Fire, by S.M. Stirling.
In case humanity forgets about how to make CPUs, some folks would still remember how to make stateful relays, magnetic core memory, punch cards and pneumatic logic valves.
It would take a bit of time from there back to a CPU.
Several people have hand-built 6502s.
That’s why it’s solarpunk. Slower computers which need different software.
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This is about institutional memory. Like we know how to make a cassette tape player, but we can’t actually do it.
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First, this is a great video and a thought provoking topic. While she touched on it in the last 45 seconds, I think the timeline at +10Y and +15Y would have more vacuum tube solutions for simple “computing” electronics. I also think that the ideal of social media would be too hard for modern society to abandon, and we’d revert to prior technologies for electronic social communication like “party line” telephones and HAM radio, neither of which require advanced semiconductors.
Analog broadcast television (also tube driven) would make a comeback and be well in place by +15y after so much of the spectrum was freed up from lack of digital devices consuming it. Larger use of shortwave radio would come back too.
Lastly, I’m embracing her premise as “the technology to create new semiconductors disappears”. Perhaps this is because the world’s single source of quartz crucibles in North Carolina needed for high end semiconductor manufacturing exhausts its supply. or some other reason. With that though, it doesn’t mean progress forward would stop. She touched on part of this in the last 60 seconds with video talking about groups trying to rediscover or restart semiconductor manufacturing, but she didn’t explore an alternative advanced computing medium: light. Optical Computing exists today as laboratory experiments and are far inferior to general purpose semiconductor based computing, but if semiconductors are off the table optical computing starts looking very attractive. Consider however, that this technology is the basis for most quantum computing implementations today. So we wouldn’t be starting from scratch technologically.
One note on automobiles too: I think many modern cars would be retrofit with simplier electronics to keep them on the road. Gone would be the days of advanced ECUs yeilding high performance and fuel efficient operation, but I’m betting much more simplified ECUs could be made with single mode operations that would make the car operational for general (and inefficient use). Mechanical timing would come back into play, fuel injection would be replaced with carburation again, and coilpacks with mechanical distributors.
I think I’d be okay with my Commodore 64 as my primary computing with a bit more evolved connectivity with something like Fidonet for global email communications to be maintained.
Still with my minor notes, I really enjoyed her idea and glad she did the video.
How I see it would be a massive investment into what would be previously e-waste. Even super low end hardware can be used as servers if given a lightweight Linux installation. Just yesterday I took an old budget Android phone out of the closet and factory reset it, debloated it, and installed a web server on it just for fun. Obviously I have much faster machines so I don’t need use it, but I could easily port forward my IP to it and host a website off of it if I needed to.
Well, if we forgot how to make CPUs, can’t we just repurpose or reprogram the GPUs, GPUs and npus to do a similar job until we remember how to make CPUs again?
