Re:Ask HN: If we woke up tomorrow and...
by radu_floricica on Saturday March 21, 2009 @07:17PM
(#526750)
If the population would remain the same, then all the effort will have to go into feeding it. And most likely will fail.
The next hurdle is organizational. You have to get the engineers together and working.
Once you cleared both, I'd guess not so long. Furnaces aren't really high tech, if you don't go for volume. Simple machine tools could probably be made out of wood, with only the essential parts of metal and using alternative power (animal, water, wind...).
In the end it'd still be a matter of administration (market?). If you get a group of knowledgeable people do one thing only (a furnace, a machine shop, an assembly line) it wouldn't take more then 1-2 years per step and many can be done in parallel.
The next hurdle is organizational. You have to get the engineers together and working.
Once you cleared both, I'd guess not so long. Furnaces aren't really high tech, if you don't go for volume. Simple machine tools could probably be made out of wood, with only the essential parts of metal and using alternative power (animal, water, wind...).
In the end it'd still be a matter of administration (market?). If you get a group of knowledgeable people do one thing only (a furnace, a machine shop, an assembly line) it wouldn't take more then 1-2 years per step and many can be done in parallel.