But we have all the blueprints and know how - we don't have to build everything from scratch (most of the time is spent on R&D, building the stuff is actually the easy part). Organize the military and the civilians to start rebuilding everything and we're back on track in several months for sure (except for the satellites, maybe)...
Firstly a lot of information today is on hard drives.
We are talking of a massive solar flare. Electronic equipment down, hard disks fried, access to energy limited, communication equipment down. Information in books is safe, but how much of modern information today is in printed books?
If you look at the whole equation. There are going to chained failures of systems. Each depending on other to recover. While none can at the moment.
Hard drives sit in their own Faraday Cage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage. So they are a lot more protected than you might think. Induction in long power cables is a problem, but things have to get ridiculous before surge protectors become useless.
