Last time we had a really big depression back in the twenties, industry and agriculture wasn't nearly as interdependent as it is now. Is it possible to have a depression so bad that we fall _through_ the floor and just keep falling? Because you can't plough the fields because the plough making factory can't operate because it can't get the parts for its robots and the robot manafacturer's workers are on strike because there's no food in the shops because... and so on. One hundred years ago it may still have been possible to do things from scratch, but now we've lost that kind of basic knowledge. How many of us would be able to create steel from iron ore? Given a crisis so bad there's no electricity so you can't look it up on the Web!
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Last time we had a really big depression back in the twenties, industry and agriculture wasn't nearly as interdependent as it is now. Is it possible to have a depression so bad that we fall _through_ the floor and just keep falling? Because you can't plough the fields because the plough making factory can't operate because it can't get the parts for its robots and the robot manafacturer's workers are on strike because there's no food in the shops because... and so on. One hundred years ago it may still have been possible to do things from scratch, but now we've lost that kind of basic knowledge. How many of us would be able to create steel from iron ore? Given a crisis so bad there's no electricity so you can't look it up on the Web!