Russian lawmakers authorize Putin to use military force outside the country

[Labster]

I've said for years we're about due for another major war, to teach the generations that didn't live through one or at least have a parent who did and can tell them directly how horrible it is. At this point I'm just hoping there will be enough of us left to learn before its over, and still maintain something like a modern level of technology. We don't have magic to fill in the gaps for a distant society of sword-and-boarders exploring the wonders of a millennia-lost golden age so a crash long enough to have the current infrastructure completely break down would be unlikely to ever recover, with the easily accessible deposits of metals and important minerals exhausted the first time.

This is a comment I agree with wholeheartedly on a surface level and disagree with at every other level.

Like, we have plenty of Syrians to talk about how terrible their war is, right?  Before the modern era, Europeans got in wars with each other all the time, and it's always been terrible.

Maintaining what we know is historically the easy part.  An incredible amount of Roman knowledge is preserved today through the efforts of centuries of scribes, largely from the Church.  The infrastructure and the standard of living are much harder.

The easiest deposits of minerals are indeed gone, but do you have any idea how much coal there is?  Enough to supply energy to our whole civilization for another millennium.  And sure, the placer deposits will take forever to recover, but what about the middens?  Our garbage dumps have tons of raw materials easily accessible.  Humans have a proud tradition of taking materials from old buildings to make new ones after societal collapse.

And magic isn't enough to rebuild the modern era.  Maoyuu Maoh Yuusha deals with this pretty directly -- you need the social structures more than anything else, and then the infrastructure.  Plus, the fact that foods are well-distributed around the world.  The advantage to rebuilding civilization when you have access to corn, wheat, beans, potatoes, carrots, and onions is enormous compared to what medieval people had to do to get a complete protein.

Finally, if someone else claws back up to where we are, the principles of nuclear deterrence are going to be the same shitty ones we have today.  So long as the physics remains the same, the Nash equilibrium will remain: the only winning move is not to play.  Basically, it's all Moloch's fault.