this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Forgot? Have you seen what's needed to make CPUs? Clean Room Manufacturing is a fragile thing.
Developing countries often need a lot of help just getting to ISO Class 7, which is what's needed to safely make cough syrup.
Injectable drugs are ISO Class 5. CPU manufacturing is ISO Class 1 and 2. In some post-apocalyptic scenario, depending on the scenario, it would be decades or generations of work to get semiconductor manufacturing back. Even if you have an abandoned factory sitting right there. It would potentially be decades to get back to making anything safely injectable. Supply chains involved with specific parts and inputs. shudder
No, it wouldn't. It'd take decades to get back to nano-scale modern CPUs, but not CPUs in general. The smaller the CPU the more it matters to be clean. If you could measure by atoms, then yeah, any stray atoms could matter. If you're measuring something that can be seen with the naked eye then you could probably do it in open air and not have an issue.
It's not just the manufacturing of that one thing that is under consideration. There's an entire supply chain that gets you to that point where you finally have the inputs needed to enter the lab and make the product. There's likewise a whole bunch of supply chain needed to get an ISO Class 5 clean room, which is what's needed for general microprocessors. Even if you're only talking about a clean work box on a bench top.
Who is mining the cobalt and aluminum and making the glass and plastic tools needed to stock the lab where you're making 1980's style microprocessors? Who is making a pure silicon ingot you'll slice to get a wafer? What will you use to slice the ingot for the wafer? How will you polish the wafer to microscopic levels of flatness? Who is making the oscilloscopes that test the processors to see if they work? Who is making the glass for the lenses for high-power microscopy you need to work? Where will you get the bulbs and needed for the photolithography stage? Where will you get the tiny tiny tiny wires that connect the pins to the chip? How will you purify and process refined silicon dioxide? Sure, the stuff is everywhere, but think through how you go from a piece of quartz on the ground to a material you need to layer on a wafer (where you gonna get the wafer??) and what machines and processes are needed for that. And on and on and on. One of those things missing means you can't move forward.
And depending on the scenario, each of those things needs to be local to you as well.
This is Carl Sagan "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you need to invent the universe" level picking the process apart. Everything is connected, and we don't always appreciate how much things are inextricably tied to what we use on a daily basis.
My favorite example: This guy figured it out when thinking through a cheeseburger.
There's also a book from 2016 called "When the Trucks Stop Running" that is fearmongering oil industry hype, all about how important oil is to fueling heavy machinery. (Spoiler, it's not as important as they make it out to be) But the real lesson of the book is how many rarely seen or talked about corners of the supply chain are fundamental to keeping huge numbers of industries running, and how fragile many advanced technologies are to supply chain interruption.
The scenario above was not a total sociatal collapse scenario. It was just we forgot how to make CPUs. The rest of the supply chain would still exist.
Right, and so I'm saying that forgetting how to make CPUs as a premise seems far-fetched when the actual fact of the matter than we can easily lose the ability to make CPUs with only a few significant supply chain losses. A total societal collapse isn't necessary. A single catastrophic natural disaster that only directly impacts one part of the world might be enough.