> They don't mine ore. Once they've scavenged all the scrap, they couldn't make nails.
All rusty metal is indistinguishable from high-quality ore. They'll only "run out" when all the rust finally washes into the oceans.
And even then, iron-rich bacteria are where John Plant (the Primitive Technology guy) gets his small quantities, and he starts many of his videos at the level of showing the stick he uses to dig the clay out of the ground to build the furnace in which he bakes the pot he uses to collect and concentrate the bacteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
Before that becomes necessary, current production of the metal (not just the ore) is around the gigaton/year level, so there's going to be a lot of scrap to get through.
> That probably wouldn't be the biggest disadvantage though... they couldn't make much of any manufactured good, and their lifestyle depends on it. Whatever institutional knowledge they had for how to live in the 18th century is long gone.
Even if there was a literally overnight displacement, which there won't be, libraries with printed texts still exist.
> And then they won't be able to feed large numbers.
What do you mean by "large numbers"? At a minimum, 791 million — because that's what we actually did feed in 1750.
That's not "extinction". That's not even close to extinction.
And that's without any assumptions about any modern knowledge that could be applied to low-industrial society, such as knowing how cholera is transmitted in order to prevent it.
All rusty metal is indistinguishable from high-quality ore. They'll only "run out" when all the rust finally washes into the oceans.
And even then, iron-rich bacteria are where John Plant (the Primitive Technology guy) gets his small quantities, and he starts many of his videos at the level of showing the stick he uses to dig the clay out of the ground to build the furnace in which he bakes the pot he uses to collect and concentrate the bacteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
Before that becomes necessary, current production of the metal (not just the ore) is around the gigaton/year level, so there's going to be a lot of scrap to get through.
> That probably wouldn't be the biggest disadvantage though... they couldn't make much of any manufactured good, and their lifestyle depends on it. Whatever institutional knowledge they had for how to live in the 18th century is long gone.
Even if there was a literally overnight displacement, which there won't be, libraries with printed texts still exist.
> And then they won't be able to feed large numbers.
What do you mean by "large numbers"? At a minimum, 791 million — because that's what we actually did feed in 1750.
That's not "extinction". That's not even close to extinction.
And that's without any assumptions about any modern knowledge that could be applied to low-industrial society, such as knowing how cholera is transmitted in order to prevent it.