WHY THE TECHNOLOGICAL-SYSTEM COULD NOT REBUILD ITSELF AFTER THE COLLAPSE

Industrial technology is not a collection of isolated inventions that can simply be rediscovered. It is a vast, mutually dependent system requiring a whole network if infrastructure such as mines, refineries, factories, electrical grids, transportation networks, scientific institutions, skilled specialists, telecommunications, computerized coordination, and enormous amounts of energy, and the list goes on. Each layer depends on many others.

Once this infrastructure is sufficiently destroyed, knowledge itself would not be enough to kickstart the machine. Modern engineers might know how a semiconductor works, for example, but reproducing it requires thousands of different specialized machines, precision materials, and other technologies that already have disappeared. The loss of industrial specialization would create cascading losses of capability.

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