Well, we aren't entirely sure that people didn't have things like simple computers in the past. I'm still curious what they were using batteries for even if they were simple clunky batteries.
o.O Eh... what do you know that I don't know?
And look at what happened in europe during the dark ages. As advanced as people like the Romans and Greeks were, Europe lost a lot of ground. Not to mention the fall of civilizations lead to lost information as well. We still don't know how some structures were created with extreme precision since the cultures that built them are long gone and the ones that came after didn't have that tech.
Yeah, par for the course. I would expect progress to follow a jagged line. Look at the bigger picture. 10,000 years or so ago, we were in the stone age, 100 years ago, the victorian era. Look at the bizarre progress that's been made in just the last 50 years or so.
All you'd have to do set back current society is take out our electronic systems or wipe societies out with several really bad natural disasters and then we get set ridiculously far back very quickly.
Hurricane Sandy was a bit of an eye opener for me. One week without power and the threat of no gasoline made me think of just this.
In the course of a million years, the cycle of building, getting set back, and starting over has a lot of time to repeat.
Yes, we could reduce ourselves to a sad dystopian society. Technology of the past could be mistaken for magic xD
Given that humans don't learn as well as they ought it is likely it would happen a lot of times before anyone could successfully mount a working system to stop the cycle.
Hmm?
If nothing else there are bound to be greedy business people in the future who make good and sure that doesn't happen so they can try to sell you stuff that will "help you survive".
This scares me. This is what I mean by, "If we don't die for stupidity or greed"
On a more positive note, We've come this far in maybe 10,000 or so years time? A million years is a hundred times longer than that. In a million years, mankind could be reduced to cave dweller status several times with plenty of time remaining to get things right and succeed. Also, just because the US dies of sheer stupidity does not necessarily mean that other continents will too.