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I think the level of scientific knowledge we have accumulated would be a tremendous short cut.

Even without books, the myths and obvious ruins of previous technological success would be a huge cultural guidepost for recovery.

Perhaps we would go through a 1000 year energy poor "dark age", and recovered populations wouldn't peak as high as ours, but I would expect that to be the worst case if an awareness of our history was not lost.

And maybe 10,000 years, after a complete cultural breakdown to hunter gathering with little functional memory of the past.

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Given rewrites of first versions are often much improved for having seen previous failure modes, it would be interesting to pop into the future of a recreated civilization and see how they might do things better!



Even having this written knowledge available to us it might still be impossible to recreate the technologies; so much knowledge exists in an active state only.

Like the F1 engines on Saturn V. We couldn't just "recreate them" because all of the know-how was lost.


Written info is useless without the right sort of culture where the necessary experimentation and problem solving can occur to work out those undocumented details. That is all that matters.

However, that is also true today and the effects are visible through the variations in technological progress of different populations currently on earth.




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