How could "technological civilization" collapse, at this point? We have extremely well-distributed records—spoken, written, digital, and more—of all of our technology and how to use it. "We forgot how" worlds are just impossible at this point, unless we all get a disease that renders us incapable of tool-usage, reading, and speech. (At which point we're not human anyway.)
One good solid exchange of nuclear weapons would do it. Once the manufacturing chains are broken and international commerce is halted, the collapse of civilization would occur pretty quickly. Even among the survivors bent on preserving knowledge, most digital records are on ephemeral media and the components of most electronic devices have a rated operating lifespan of only a decade or less.
Though somewhat dated, James Burke covers this quite well in the first episode of his classic "Connections" documentary. If anything, the situation is far worse now.
To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Because that's the only case where humans not being capable of non-technologically-assisted reproduction would matter.
† See the book The Knowledge, and then consider a world where you have access to not only that, but also hard copies of the US Patent filing database, and 6 billion people to parallelize the bootstrapping process across. (And even that ignores the amount of "skipping ahead" that just the existing knowledge already loaded into people's heads would enable.)
Unless we all got amnesia at once, and all lost the ability to read (and those who can, to read braille), we'd be back to civilization before the generation was over—and back to simple longevity-extending practices like freezing sperm and ova long before that.
> To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Because that's the only case where humans not being capable of non-technologically-assisted reproduction would matter.
In this case, any disaster that prevents the regular maintenance and operation of something like an advanced hospital for at least a few decades. This includes various types of war, energy crises, or the classic SF theme of a society stagnating to point where it can no longer build certain necessary technologies but only operate them.
There's also the related threat to societies/nations that require technology to reproduce. If they get in a war with rivals that can reproduce unassisted, they have extra weak points that can be attacked.
> † See the book The Knowledge, and then consider a world where you have access to not only that, but also hard copies of the US Patent filing database, and 6 billion people to parallelize the bootstrapping process across.
Any scenario where you have to reconstruct knowledge like that will likely be accompanied by strife that will prevent the reconstruction for a time (of decades or more).
>To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself?
Technology onset: Grey-goo type scenario
Human onset: massive cultural shift to demonize knowledge.
It's happened before. It didn't wipe all technology away, but it slowed progress to a stand-still.
Do you think it'd be possible to choose to "demonize knowledge", in a world where we know that the only way to reproduce requires technology? I would expect our biological imperative to reproduce would get the better of that attempted social more quite quickly.
