It would be hard enough indeed if there wasn't a cheap way to produce at least some electricity to bootstrap the process.
And electricity is easy to bootstrap, thanks to hydro and wind turbines.
Re:The Scariest, Most Boring Armageddon
by JoeAltmaier on Sunday January 31, 2016 @01:26PM
(#11007318)
Sure, if you have wire, and magnets, and cement, and electronic controls, and pipe (for hydro). And the tools and processes to make those things.
If we imagine there's some infrastructure remaining, then there'd be a small window of opportunity to rebuild using that, before it decayed. A couple of years maybe.
And civil engineers qualified for hydro dam design, and diesel powered bulldozers and cranes, and their operators, and the mechanics and and and...
The bigger picture is not just binary today or 50000 BC, but somewhat more likely getting stuck in weird local minima / local maxima. A lot of peculiarity of USA vs euro lifestyle boils down to just the luck of the draw that we're at one local minima of public transit where they happened to fall into a local maxima, or a zillion other variables.
John Michael Greer's blog has a lot of commentary about realistic lifestyle on the downslope. One common theme is something like the secular Amish.
To drill for oil, you need drill bits. They require exotic steel. That requires high-temperature furnaces. Which requires 100 other things - ceramics, high-density fuels (not oil!), presses and breaks and grinders etc that in turn require other exotic machines to make and ingredients to find or make.
The chain of dominoes can be hundreds long. And there you are, standing in the rubble with a rock and some sticks. And you're hungry. And so is everybody else, and they want your food.
I can imagine another thousand years to get anywhere near where we are now. And it'd look completely different - combining photolithography for circuits with steam engines and slavery. All the inventions of history combined in ways that the new reality required.