Fair warning for the uninitiated, Raised by Wolves gets dark. Ridley Scott directs. It's well done, but they definitely draw out raking you over the coals of human terribleness and force you contemplate some uncomfortable things. It's not a 'fun' show. I am going to keep watching.
Hm. Forgettable for me. But the intro sequence was great. Where a pale flat disc appears in space, and is then bent forward by the emerging ship, which races onward to the planet, while the disc vanishes.
An artificial womb that not only somehow grows a human for 9 months, but then exposes this infant to an environment with no caretakers, and somehow protects and trains them to survive to reproduce? And you're going to make enough of them to create a sustainable population? Seems pretty unlikely to me.
I've wanted to write a short story about this for a while, with this sort of technology. The story of Genesis before the truth is obfuscated by countless retellings, until it evolves into a supernatural origin story.
One of my favorite plays is "Mr Burns, a Post-Electric Play" -- it retells one of The Simpsons episodes at various points after the apocalypse, and somewhat highlights how stories can morph with retellings... you might find it interesting. There are some community theatre productions of the show on YouTube, or else a general description on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Burns,_a_Post-Electric_Pla...
That sounds really cool, I'll look for it on YouTube. Thanks for the recommendation. This play, in turn reminds me of a scene from a terrible (but at the same time fun) film Reign of Fire. Set in a post apocalyptic world, the adults are entertaining kids by staging a play version of Empire Strikes Back, based on their memories of seeing it when they themselves were children.
The author needs to familiarize himself with the concept of MTBF. It's surprisingly short for high order artifacts. Entropy will introduce errors and break down every single high order system out there. I am aware of two exceptions: the biosphere and, on a much much smaller scope, cloud storage. The core characteristic of both systems is redundancy and repair: every piece of the system is continuously monitored and replaced by a healthy clone before enough errors accumulate to render it inoperable.
Short of developing artificial life, the proposal will not work. Of course, developing artificial life is one of the big existential risks humanity faces. I'd rather we study gardening instead :)
If we were to have a mass extinction event today, the "survivors" would quickly find that all the readily accessible surface level fuel sources are long gone and have already been consumed. In the 1600's or 1700's it wouldn't have been that difficult, but today the challenge of getting access to power is going to make restarting civilization somewhere between difficult and impossible.
Try finding enough burnable wood near an emerging city/town to provide warmth and power while you restart civilization and I think you'll discover that humanity has already cut down the majority of the forests, tapped the majority of the oil Wells that can produce oil without lots of supporting tech, and mined most of the easily mineable coal. Sure, you can get a bit of power, but it's going to take a lot of both power and specialized skilled labor to restart our power sources civilization after a mass extinction event. The chances are extremely good that even if you can resume making babies you can't resume making the power those babies will need to achieve the goals we would have for them. On the surface of the Earth today it takes more power and skills to gain access to power than survivors are likely to have.
Trees grow back pretty quickly (they're talking timescales of thousands of years for this plan) and that's all humanity needs for energy to start.
The main reason we need all that power is for our creature comforts. We don't technically need them to survive but we don't know how to live without them anymore. There being billions of us doesn't help either. A rebooted humanity shouldn't have too much difficulty with that though.
If you have a mass extinction event and go more than a generation or two without restarting, all the skills and education will be gone which means you're restarting from zero. We needed readily available high grade energy sources to get to high grade renewables, and those trying to restart civilization will as well, but by the time the get there their forest will be consumed just as ours are, and they won't have oil and coal to discover to get them the bridge to solar or nuclear or high tech wind and tidal power.
> all the skills and education will be gone which means you're restarting from zero.
Not at all. There will be books containing most human knowledge. It would be hard work for the rebooters to reacquire those skills but much, much easier than redeveloping them from scratch. Plus in many cases there will be artifacts around that can either be reused directly or as models.
> those trying to restart civilization will as well
Rebooting doesn't have to follow the same development path that we took to get here.
It would be very interesting and potentially important to try to find shorter, easier paths to modern technology. It's not obvious to me that such paths can't exist. If they do exist we can record them to guide future generations.
I'm only personally familiar with the (current) high end of technology, but for example once you get to the point where you're building microprocessors we know that you should build something simple like RISC-V which lets you skip generations of mistakes. If you actually build RISC-V then we can arrange to have a whole lot of archived software ready for you to use.
Are you saying that in 100 years all the books in the world will be gone? Absolutely nothing will survive, and post apocalyptic man will not think at all about preserving this knowledge?
> Try finding enough burnable wood near an emerging city/town to provide warmth and power while you restart civilization and I think you'll discover that humanity has already cut down the majority of the forests
Tree cover is actually increasing. Your comment reads like you've only ever seen a forest on TV... I suggest you step away from your computer screen and go for a hike.
I'm pretty sure anywhere there is a functioning port or navigable water way the number of trees within a day's walk is insufficient to support the needs of the population that humanity would need in that location to restart civilization. The fact that you can get in your car and drive to a beautiful forest doesn't actually help much.
Nonsense. You really should go take a good look at Google Earth. I come from a major port city in a first world country and literally right outside the city's urban area start forests that stretch for hundreds of kilometres. I know for a fact that many other cities like this along coastlines exist.
Turning wind, sun, or water into a good source of electricity is fairly low-tech.
There's also still a ton of easily accessible lignite everywhere, which our present civilization doesn't really care about for its inefficiency and ecological concerns.
It takes a lot of tech to turn a River into a source of heat, and it takes still more tech to produce that tech that you need to pull it off. Water is an easy source of power for some things, but for most chemical processes what you need is heat (and most of the tech you're going to need to restart civilization is at some level going to be rooted in chemical processes)
You can turn work into heat with friction or turbulence. You don't need electrical thingamajigs. But even "small" amounts of heat involve huge amounts of energy. If I haven't just made a mistake, it takes 40 MJ to raise a bathtub full of water from room temperature to bathwater temperature.
Better to use trees and wood for heat: The original solar power system.
You're thinking like a modern resident, not like someone living a decade after a global extinction event. Turning water into electricity requires significant infrastructure for making motors and generators and bearings and permanent magnets and transmission lines and the like (even if in principle the math/physics is easy)
This process is incredibly difficult, made moreso by the lack of easily accessible surface ore/coal. Also, keep in mind that when agricultural productivity is in the pits (Due to a lack of tooling, chemical feedstock, massive infrasturcture projects), and when you don't have the ability to make synthetic clothing (Which leads you to working with natural fibers, which is an incredibly labour-intensive process[1]), you aren't going to have the spare calories, or the hours in your day to 'just bootstrap a smithy'.
Where do you get the copper ore in this scenario? Existing natural easy-to-access ores have been mined out already. Would it be possible to mine the detritus of our civilization to get these ores?
It's all well and good to be optimistic, I'm a MacGyver too, but when society only gets one roll of the dice to restart after a mass extinction event I don't think it's advisable to discount the difficulties and challenges society will face trying to restart, with access to accessible energy sources being a major component of those challenges.
Maybe my brain's groggy, but how are we achieving self-excitation in this scenario? (I'm assuming there's no magnet in your setup as it's not explicitly called out.)
No. Of course you need a magnet if you don't want to build a more complicated self-excitation design (building that would be quite the feat given the circumstances) or want to use a smaller dynamo to bootstrap an electromagnetic dynamo or even alternator.
But it's better to start with a magnet and stick to easy-to-debug stuff that can be eyeballed start to finish.
The most probable use of artificial wombs would not be for some extinction event, but rather to gradually make up for the population decline that is happening as the world develops. Technological, economic, and retirement factors require a certain level of population growth, and so does meaningful space exploration.
in the sf novel earthseed by pamela sargent a seed ship is sent out, when it encounters a habitable planet after a very long journey the AI of the ship would fertilize human eggs and raise and teach a diverse group of children for restarting civilization
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_T...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Mother