Pretty good Solarpunk prompt with some medium-hard sci-fi thrown in.
So much interesting stuff on there, holy moly
If CPUs go, things could get dark…
My bad, thats if we lose STCs.
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One of the reasons why a solarpunk way of thinking is so appealing to me is that it challenges me to think about what we could do to subvert a dystopian scenario and build something better. After all, climate change is going to cause tremendous upheaval, even if the world collectively stopped making things worse. It’s a more humble way of thinking about a problem, because it isn’t built on the idea that we can be masters of the world, but instead need to learn how to understand ourselves as intra-acting within ecosystems
Depends on if you believe that using biodegradable plastics on your chip packet is dystopia because ruffling it around sounds different.
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 gotta admit my first thought while watching this was older CPUs, always had an affinity for the Motorola 68k family (see if you can guess my first computer).
But I also wonder how much we would be using those CPUs to provide control planes and interfaces for Industrial gear running 8051 variants. I imagine that a lot of those microcontrollers, which are already in use across a frightening amount of Industrial equipment will likely have enormously longer operational lifespans than the computers used to program them. Plus a cursory search shows I can buy hundreds of thousands of them without resorting to scavenging and repurposing.
Plus when suddenly everything in a DIL DIP package is seen as desirable again my soldering skills will only be seen as deficient not a heinous abomination.
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.
I would just install Linux on crabs, play Doom.
Dies the Fire, by S.M. Stirling.
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.
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That’s why it’s solarpunk. Slower computers which need different software.
