Why I am doing this.

If I am wrong this will have been in vain, and if I am right well, there is no guarantee that it will ever be found.

It comes down to this.

My parents escaped East Germany not long before the Wall went up. They left family behind and it seemed as though they were as far away as the Moon. Dad got a job with PanAm and eventually relations eased enough for travel back to East Germany.
When I was growing up we went back as often as we could. It was often our primary summer vacation.

Crossing the boarder was always interesting, because it was darker on the East German side, that might be dismissed as a cloud in front of the Sun but I could still see the Sun quite clearly through the window of the car. I have no idea what it meant, it was just one of the differences between East and West. I learned what it meant later.

Most of the differences were just odd, buildings still had bomb damage from WWII and a crater between them where the bomb had obviously fallen. Oma's toilet was indoors but rather then flusher it just had a hatch that dropped everything into the basement holding tank. It was also always cold in there, even if it did have a naked gas flame on a burner across from the toilet, I guess to burn off any gas buildup, but I was always very careful in there.

The town's downtown had a department store, the terms of the visas required us to spend a certain amount of money, though it always had a lot of open space where it seemed like it was waiting for more products. Their toy selection was rather limited I usually went with the die-cast military cars and tanks, mainly because there wasn't much else, and they tended to wobble. We do still have an orange wool blanket for the back of the car, and some old "china" that is in storage.

Getting a ride in a Trebant was "fun" not like a car today just turn the key and go. No, you have to prime it and fiddle with the choke and a bunch of other things. We had better lawn mower engines at the same time. And to get one had a 15 year waiting list. It was just 2 years to get a telephone line hooked up.

Many years later when I spent a couple of years in Germany still before the Wall came down, I found out why it was so dark there. I visited a place in the West: Dachau. That had the same kind of darkness as well.

We are moving toward totalitarianism, it doesn't really matter which version it is. While their idealism does them a credit they don't seem to realize the consequences even if they are successful. They may think they are protecting and defending the Constitution. They may think it can't happen to them. They may even think they have all the answers. They don't and it will.

They seem to want power and control and to have the best of the best. The problem comes in totalitarianism that the best of the best eventually die. And in coming to power the support structure for the best of the best is often destroyed along the way. A brilliant surgeon is nothing without the team of nurses, anesthesiologists, radiologist, doctors, administrators and janitors that make a hospital actually work.

Oma was so crippled with arthritis it was like nothing I'd ever seen in America. She was all hunched over and could only sort of use her thumbs and forefingers the rest of her hands were clenched into useless claws.

Without freedom- medicine, technology and many other things wither and fade away. Sure the elites may be able to have the best of the best for longer then anyone else, but their children won't have it not because they can't afford it but because it no longer exists.

How many generations would it take to forget how to do it?
How many generations would it take to forget that it had ever been done at all?

Not many.

That is why this project is important.

A global totalitarian government would be of necessity complex. Feeding, housing and employing billions of people is a tough job and someone has to do it. A little corruption here, population control there, a purge over there and an ill-placed disaster and a key capability is lost, forever.

Well, it doesn't have to be forever. With freedom and capitalism we jumped from cooking on open fires and driving horse carts to microwave ovens and space flight in less then 200 years. We went from outhouses and sail power to flush toilets and manned heavier then air flight in 125.

That is why it is worth it!

The Scope of the Problem

The basic idea I want to accomplish is a book that contain the core knowledge and principles for reestablishing a free and prosperous society after an extended dark age, where we have forgotten not only how we've done something but that we have ever done something.

Losing the technology for space flight is not hard and it would not take more then 3-4 generations before we would forget that we had ever landed men on the Moon.

While I am not sure we could ever lose semiconductor technology, it would be easy enough to lose the high-end. Semiconductor fabs cost billions of dollars and are giant clean rooms. It would not take too many incompetent people to reduce the yield to the point it is no longer profitable to run them. The tiny die sizes today are easily disrupted by dust, but the technologies of the '70's are more robust. Dropping back to that era in electronics would be annoying but for most things acceptable.

In general it is possible to lose the high end of any field pretty quickly followed by a long slow decline.

Consider I, Pencil an economist attempted to figure out how a simple pencil was made. Bottom line, it is a whole lot more difficult then it looks.

I just ran across someone trying to make his own toaster, from scratch. Getting ahold of the iron ore wasn't too hard, smelting into iron ingots, quite a bit more challenging.

One of my wife's favorite shows is 1900 House, their most important technology was the kitchen stove, it was heat and food and hot water from them. But the thing they missed most was good soap, detergent and shampoos. It presupposes a municipal water and gas supply and a sewage system.

Not only technology but a governmental and economic system to allow that to be built. The Romans built a great public water system that was not exceeded until the addition of chlorination and fluoridation.

The US Constitution is a great way to run a country but it needs some tweaking since I doubt the Founders had considered some of the changes we've seen over time. Professional politicians are a problem, term limits would be a really good place to start, but the real problem is the bureaucracy, I'm not sure how to deal with that.

So after all that rambling the things that seem important are:
A governmental system that allows for personal freedom and defense of property.
An economic system that allows for easy transactions.
A level of technology that allows for long life and an abundance of food and energy.

This is looking to be a big project.

From Impossible to Possible

The world economy and politics are doing things that are throwing red flags up for me.

The field is being shaped for a global reserve currency and obviously a global government to manage it. Look at Gordon Brown.
That would mean that there would be no place outside of that government. The economy around the world is burning down. Given that currently that Europe and Japan are socialist, China and Russia being communist and even the US is tending socialistic as well. Lots of other nations are socialist as well. So a global government would likely be socialist.

Unions are getting new support in the US Congress and so it would be possible for the unions to rebuild the guild system. The guilds kept their techniques under control by passing on death bed secrets. It didn't always work well, Damascus steel being the most obvious example.

There is also a strong anti-intellectual undercurrent out there and that isn't good for innovation either. With the heavy taxes in California Silicon Valley may not last maybe it will be recreated somewhere else, I don't know.

Then you also have the Democrats working on renewing the Fairness Doctrine, one way or another. It is funny that they are working so hard to shutdown the voices of three people on the least effective forms of communication. The lecture format, which is what talk radio is, lets you retain only about 10% after 24 hours, and people usually listen to it while doing something else which makes it even less effective. If you can't stand that little criticism you have problems. But what this boils down to is restriction of the sharing of ideas and that is very bad.

You know, 6 months ago the thought of another Dark Ages was ridiculous, I certainly wouldn't have believed it. But I have been thinking through some possible worst case scenarios, and excluding things such as nuclear war and asteroid impacts, this i about as bad as it could get. While I might think we have a even money on a Great Depression, a Dark Ages is still less then 5%, but that is way up from where it was before. It's like a swarm or earthquakes deep under Yellowstone, it could be nothing but it could be a supervolcano.