Our civilization is built on an intricate web of international supply chains, commerce, and collaboration. I just wrote down my grocery list on a piece of paper (yes, because I am gen X). The paper is made from wood from Finland, at a paper mill in Sweden. The pen is assembled in China. The plastic ink reservoir tube is made in India, from petroleum extracted in Venezuela. The ink is made in Germany. The tip of the pen is precision milled in Japan, using tungsten mined in Rwanda. The spring is made in Thailand, using iron from Australia. Break down those supply chains, and I would be using a quill on parchment.

“But surely we can recover from that, and rebuild technology. After all, it only took us 300 years or so to become an industrial civilization, right?”

Wrong, and don’t call me Shirley. Let’s look at how we got where we are. When we started out, we had access to concentrated energy sources - coal seams that could easily be dug up. Those are gone now. Now we need to mine deep underground to get to coal deposits. Oil was oozing out of the ground in Saudi Arabia. That’s gone too. Now, we are drilling at the bottom of the ocean floor.

To build an industrial civilization, we must have easily accessible, concentrated energy sources. The survivors wouldn’t have the tools to build the tools to build the tools that… you get where this is heading.

But what about the huge reserves of oil sitting in storage tanks? Assuming those tanks survived, the oil contained within them would oxidize within 6-12 months. Preppers who are hoarding gasoline know that - that’s why they use up and replace their cannisters regularly.

When you (hopefully) read my book, did you read it on paper, or on an eReader?

eReaders would be useless without power and internet. Books will rapidly deteriorate unless they are in an environment with 18-22 degrees Celsius and 45-60% relative humidity. By the time people recover enough to start looking for that one undamaged library with miraculously still-functioning climate control, it would be decades - because scavenging for food and simply surviving takes priority. Even under the best of conditions, the acid in the ink and fungus in the environment eat through the books.

Modern paperbacks would probably last 40-100 years if kept in ideal conditions. So if you bought my book on paperback, you should probably start reading it now.

In a global catastrophe wiping out civilization, where only a few million humans scattered all over the world survive, knowledge would be gone before we even realized it. We would need to start from scratch, without easily accessible energy. Any civilization coming after us is doomed to be stuck at pre-industrial levels. A shard of mirror scavenged from the ruins would fetch three sheep at the market.