Pretty good Solarpunk prompt with some medium-hard sci-fi thrown in.
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As a geriatric millennial I’d be ok with this
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That’s why it’s solarpunk. Slower computers which need different software.
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.
@dillekant That’s a dystopian scenario, not solarpunk…
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.
Well to forget, hundreds of books would need to be destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people killed.
And the work of Sam Zeelof showed that with a projector and some standard chemicals that we could resume 1978 lithography https://sam.zeloof.xyz/ and it would only take 2-3 smart people to get it to 300nm. At which point we would have 87% of current CPU performance in a higher energy envelope. (Think the first generation K8 processors in the 940 pin packages (80w, 3ghz))
So in effect, not much will happen.
I think the bigger issue is all the parts that we make currently for the production environment of cpus that use cpus in their production now. The cleanroom and robotic parts and such that would have to be made in old fashion ways and the whole process of finer and finer components that meet very specific tolerances and such. Like how advanced of parts can we make before we need vaccum tubes or such to make some machines to automate to a level to get an advanced enough part to make and integrated circuit.
Well the precision these days is about mask alignment, wavelength and timing how long things etch or deposit.
We are currently making UV LEDs which will last for centuries (so no problem for wavelength at 200nm lithography), mask alignment uses techniques that are over 200 years old and atomic clocks are still readily available.
So no
Im talking precision of things like the screws in the hvac system. Manufacturing relies on other manufacturing that relies in the first manufacturing type of thing. So like how good a clean room can we cobble together to make how decent a cpu today. I certainly know the clean rooms of the past allowed in much to high a size particle to be used with our latest chips today.
Oh, then we just use 1000:1 reduction techniques that are over 200 years old. We would only need a single long screw to bootstrap modern manufacturing without any other machine tools.
All the details required to get to 0.1mm precision can be found in this book series
This is about institutional memory. Like we know how to make a cassette tape player, but we can’t actually do it.
There are a half dozen people on YouTube today that literally made their own cassette encoding and decoding circuits for the Kansas City Standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_standard
Which is good enough to bootstrap 1990s grade computers.
Never underestimate the power librarians protect in their hallowed walls.
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.
First, this is a great video and a thought provoking topic. While she touched on it in the last 45 seconds, I think the timeline at +10Y and +15Y would have more vacuum tube solutions for simple “computing” electronics. I also think that the ideal of social media would be too hard for modern society to abandon, and we’d revert to prior technologies for electronic social communication like “party line” telephones and HAM radio, neither of which require advanced semiconductors.
Analog broadcast television (also tube driven) would make a comeback and be well in place by +15y after so much of the spectrum was freed up from lack of digital devices consuming it. Larger use of shortwave radio would come back too.
Lastly, I’m embracing her premise as “the technology to create new semiconductors disappears”. Perhaps this is because the world’s single source of quartz crucibles in North Carolina needed for high end semiconductor manufacturing exhausts its supply. or some other reason. With that though, it doesn’t mean progress forward would stop. She touched on part of this in the last 60 seconds with video talking about groups trying to rediscover or restart semiconductor manufacturing, but she didn’t explore an alternative advanced computing medium: light. Optical Computing exists today as laboratory experiments and are far inferior to general purpose semiconductor based computing, but if semiconductors are off the table optical computing starts looking very attractive. Consider however, that this technology is the basis for most quantum computing implementations today. So we wouldn’t be starting from scratch technologically.
One note on automobiles too: I think many modern cars would be retrofit with simplier electronics to keep them on the road. Gone would be the days of advanced ECUs yeilding high performance and fuel efficient operation, but I’m betting much more simplified ECUs could be made with single mode operations that would make the car operational for general (and inefficient use). Mechanical timing would come back into play, fuel injection would be replaced with carburation again, and coilpacks with mechanical distributors.
I think I’d be okay with my Commodore 64 as my primary computing with a bit more evolved connectivity with something like Fidonet for global email communications to be maintained.
Still with my minor notes, I really enjoyed her idea and glad she did the video.
What if we forgot capitalism and rewarding greedy self absorbed narcissists tho
That’s why it’s solarpunk.
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 you 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.
The only CPU I can make is Cheese Pizza, YOU!
If CPUs go, things could get dark…
My bad, thats if we lose STCs.
I would just install Linux on crabs, play Doom.
Well, if we forgot how to make CPUs, can’t we just repurpose or reprogram the GPUs, GPUs and npus to do a similar job until we remember how to make CPUs again?
Dies the Fire, by S.M. Stirling.
So much interesting stuff on there, holy moly
