@grey @Titanbreakerkun @dickflatteningenthusiast America forgot how to make a key ingredient for nuclear weapons (fogbank), and went absolutely nuts trying to reverse engineer it.

Maybe things won't be as bad as people imagine, in that the basic principles of how most things work is written down, but the problem is the more nuanced parts of how old tech actually works or how it was built will be lost, meaning that every few generations we're going to need to throw a lot of lot of stuff and start over. When we get sufficiently advanced, I wonder if that will lead to a stagnation, basically constantly reinventing the same tech with the same level of performance over and over.