Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #75 - "It Never Came Back"

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is a nice topical one - "It Never Came Back"

We had a near-miss at the end of last week, with the largest internet outage in history, mostly affecting corporate users. It was only down for a day, but imagine if the internet had gone down and they weren't able to fix the problem ?

It wouldn't be the first time in human history that some essential piece of knowledge or technology has been lost. When the Mycenaean palace civilisation collapsed, writing was lost in Greece for several hundred years. When the Roman Empire fell, knowledge of pozzolan cement was lost until 1414, and the use of concrete as a building material fell out of use until the Industrial Revolution.

Tell me about some key piece of lost knowledge or technology in your setting ! What was lost, why or how ? What impact did it have on society ? Was it rediscovered, or did some alternative evolve ? If it was rediscovered, how did it happen, how long did it take, and who did it ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.