If I were to take one book with me "down into the bunker," as Dartnell puts it, I'd hands-down take with me the Bosch Automotive Handbook[0], a phenomenally dense and thorough text covering not just cars, but their constituent parts--and their constituent parts' constituent parts--all the way down to the materials. It has wonderful tables of data on the properties of various materials (from advanced plastics and alloys to leather, paper, and common fluids) accompanied by clear and precise mechanical diagrams. It's precisely the kind of book that would secure a time-traveller's position as court wizard, all geared (ha) toward the eminently practical domain of moving across the surface of the earth.
Yes! That's it. That's the same book, that's the German name (which I couldn't remember). I know there are at least 2 of them, maybe more, and they are wonderful, it's so concise, they don't bullshit around at all. Hundreds of machines (and other things?) all explained with shocking clarity.
How did punch card readers work before optical reading was possible? They've got you covered. Want to know how tank gun stabilization works? Also covered. It really has everything.
Oh, I had a different book by that name How Things Work by David Macaulay. I loved it as a kid and a couple of years ago bought two used versions so that my son can experience it ;)
Macaulay's book was titled "The Way Things Work". I too loved it as a kid - what an incredible piece of art. I firmly believe every child should have a copy. One wonders how many STEM careers it provoked.
Your name confusion is understandable, as "How Things Work" was a popular book title - I had at least two books by that name concurrently with my ownership with "The Way Things Work", and I too was always getting them confused.
For how long would cars really be practical in a "down in the bunker"-scenario, though? There wouldn't be any more fuel produced, probably, and cars require a fairly high standard of roads which also would be lost after not too long.
Personally, I would probably bring the equivalent book on bicycles, which I speculate would be the vehicle of choice for the end of the world. If anyone knows the name of such a book, I would be happy to hear it!
Just looking through the table of contents [1] - this is not just for cars. It's basically a textbook on mechanical engineering, applied to something that will be common and very scavengable in a post-apocalyptic world. The first 159 pages is basically a quick-reference for applied physics; the next 50 pages is mathematics; the next 100 pages is material science. They don't get to anything car-specific until page 460.
Thank you for the link; yes, I laughed when I first paged across the book's reiteration of physical constants, the laws of thermo-dynamics etc. but in retrospect, it's helpful to have even elementary references when learning new concepts.
Engines can be modified to run on a lot of thing you can grow and
process on a small farm. Maintenance would be an ongoing skill needed,
so the role of mechanics and electro-mechanical knowledge would be
highly valued again.
A harder challenge would be stripping out all the ECUs, computers and
security crap to make things "just work" again.
All civilisations have been able to maintain their technology, but I
think we are in an unusual and tremendously precarious point in
history in the early 21st century. It seems far more likely that a loss
of control over our technology will cause an apocalypse than that an
apocalypse will cause us to lose technology.
>Engines can be modified to run on a lot of thing you can grow and process on a small farm. Maintenance would be an ongoing skill needed, so the role of mechanics and electro-mechanical knowledge would be highly valued again.
You could also drive things directly using a modified bicycle - see the Bicimáquinas-project from Guatemala: http://www.mayapedal.org/index.en
The idea is not to build a car just after you are out of the bunker. But it seems like this book would be helpful for a ton of useful things:
> thorough text covering not just cars, but their constituent parts--and their constituent parts' constituent parts--all the way down to the materials. It has wonderful tables of data on the properties of various materials (from advanced plastics and alloys to leather, paper, and common fluids) accompanied by clear and precise mechanical diagrams
The materials-part could probably be useful, but still, the utility of cars in a world where neither their infrastructure could be maintained nor their fuel produced is highly questionable. Bicycles are far less vulnerable, in my opinion.
The 1978 book Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had the same idea. In the book the Earth is struck by a comet which pretty much wipes out large areas of the planet.
Being from before the internet, one of the characters collects a whole range of books for topics such as tools, engineering, farming etc.
Is this handbook still relevant in modern cars? I feel the new cars have so many hidden panels and electronics that you’re not expected to fiddle with the insides.
in a post-apocalyptic world, building an outdated suboptimal car is still better than not having the car at all.
I really wonder how practical this is though. The bicycle, for example, dates back to da Vinci, but we only became good enough at manufacturing to make the precise parts needed by the 19th century. having the diagrams is all well and good but we will also have lost the means of manufacturing reliably and that is going to be pretty tough to replicate.
Knowledge goes a long way though: i.e. knowing the 3-plate method for producing perfectly flat surfaces (most easily done with cast iron) gets you bootstrapped on making accurate tools, as does knowledge of how to build a lathe and what processes it is capable of.
All of which benefits from any type of work producing engine, since the core leap you need to make is to get away from being solely dependent on human labour as a power source.
Surely tractors are more important than cars as they help massively in food production. Simply moving about is easily done on foot. And the range of terrain that cars can cross is very restricted. Without regular traffic and maintaince I doubt roads would be passable in a couple of decades. Motorbikes though would still work fine.
This was taken seriously in 1950s US Civil Defense. Since Europe had already been through that process recently, there was a lot of knowledge available.
There's a classic set of books, "Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap", on this.
The kid's version: "A Boy and a Battery" (1942).[1] There's also "A Boy and a Motor", on how to build your own electric train set from old metal cans, some wire, a hammer and tinsnips, and the skills of a master machinist.
"Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap" I have that on my bookshelf, it's worth a read if you're just curious about how machine tools are made/work.
Might build the shaper out of there someday but currently it seems like it would be a better use of my time to buy an import lathe (assuming no natural disaster)
I wonder, aren't virtually all "easily" available resources already dried up to such a degree that highly advanced/specialized equipment would be needed to extract whatever is left?
Parent post is probably referring more to energy resources. Gas and diesel degrade fairly quickly and unless you live in the middle east, aren't just flowing out of the ground anymore. Solar + BEVs might be an option, but only if the apocalypse scenario didn't involve an EMP, otherwise you better know your way around diesel engines and making biodiesel + live close to a hydroelectric plant.
Hydro, wind, and solar-thermal power is 100% renewable and can be made with 19th-century technology once you've worked out how to build a dynamo. There are some geographic restrictions but one of those power sources should be available in most regions. Plus most of the population has died off in a post-apocalyptic world, so your generators don't need to be nearly as big.
Almost all power is generated by heating water into steam, which can still be done by burning almost anything. It won't be very efficient, but you can do it - so traveling to the nearest coal mine/plant may be an effective energy source.
The most easiest thing, so, would be a Sterling engine then. Something I have to read up again, I'd love to build one with my kids. After all, it was the machinery we did hand-drawn technical 2D drawings for back at university before we moved to CAD.
Steel does have a major use in your skyscraper but concrete is perhaps the main player.
Conc is a wonderful and bloody complicated material and so is steel.
Steel is basically iron+(stuff) - Fe 'n' that. If you add small amounts of carbon to iron you get steel and depending on how you do it you transform iron (brittle, hard etc) to a material that is "tough". Tough generally means that it will resist stress/strain more and will fail gradually rather than catastrophically quickly. If you add some other elements, such as chromium you get stainless steel. I can't precis a three year degree into a paragraph but this gets you started!
Conc is a remarkable material, which we think was invented by the Romans. It sets and cures rather than "dries" so will will quite happily work underwater - provided you stop the constituents being carried away by currents. Setting conc involves an exothermic reaction so it heats up - too much in one pour can set itself on fire!
Add steel in the form of "rebar" to conc and you have a material that is nigh on magic in its properties but you do need to know what you are doing. You can simply put C section steel plates in your beams or run FeCr rod through and tension the nuts (lol)
Conc n steel are the modern building blocks of the modern world. I'd like to see a lot more wood ...
Folks interested in such material science topics should definitely read about Wootz steel[1] (Damascus steel[0]) and roman concrete [3]. Its very hard [2] to concoct a high fidelity version of these today, mainly because it is hard to get the trace constituents right.
I could try to dig out my college reading list (it was actually Plymouth Polytechnic - that's Plymouth, Devon, UK) but it was 30 odd years ago. Things have moved on a bit but not too much.
Do you have a general interest in Civil Engineering or a particular project in mind?
Digging through your stuff would be a bridge too far :) My interest was bc this is a field that I know absolutely nothing about, and so the examples you give were suggestive of an exotic world. If there was something that could sketch out that world in the manner you did, it would be mind-expanding.
I like things that give me a look into a proximate universe that I'd never otherwise pursue, e.g., if I could read a really interesting piece about botany, or modern dance, or challenges in agriculture, or the Michael Jordan of show horses, or the world's most controversial geologist ...
The last two are useful for DIY. That lot is just concrete. Geotechnics and hydrology are also fascinating.
When I studied this stuff we had a class where we grabbed some time to use the Poly's (Polytechnic - a bit like a second tier University back in the day - UK) electron microscope. I over focussed on our sample and vapourised it! We were studying "concrete cancer" which is a bit of a problem in maritime towns because salt in the air is one of the components needed.
I went to Plymouth (Devon, UK) Poly, which is famously a sea town and so we saw a lot of conc cancer, eg the Drake Circus multi story car park.
And a literary source of inspiration to get into that mindset is Nevil Shute's Trustee from the Toolroom -- "well loved by tool lovers, especially engineers and model engineers, for its reverent treatment of machinery, tools, and craftsmanship", according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustee_from_the_Toolroom#Majo...
Sure spoke that way to me, as I read it back when... Uh, when it was about a third as old as it is now.
I bought The Knowledge several years ago. It's a fantastic book, with just the right amount of detail. One thing I particularly liked was the focus on how to get certain materials in a likely post-apocolyptic world - for example, instead of just telling you how to mine iron, the book explains that there is likely cast iron all over the place in things like cookware and even if it's heavily rusted, it can be cleaned and re-smelted and will be perfectly usable. The point was it was a practical guide to rebooting civilization, rather than just a list of recipes for technology.
As for the TV show premise at the beginning of the article (16 survivors that have to scavenge things in an abandoned place for a long period of time), this was done very well in a show called The Colony (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1470018/) with fairly realistic hardships (roving bands of thugs that would mace the survivors in lieu of firearms, for example). Worth watching, even if just for the interesting tech they produce, like distilling their own ethanol to power a small engine to recharge some car batteries to power handheld tools and lighting).
"The author purports to provide a blueprint to restoring a technological economy after a TEOTWAWKI event, but some his listed sources are from the realm of science fiction. Not an encouraging start.
He goes on to pretend that he knows more than he actually does. It's as if he skimmed a few sources but only superficially understood them. How else can he suggest that a collapsed society go direct to building blast furnaces, ignoring the bloomery method of reducing iron ore that provided mankind with workable metal for two millennia as a cottage industry? Then he goes on to suggest that we build Bessemer converters to decarbonize the pig iron. Does he not know that the Bessemer converter is all but obsolete? Did he miss the chapter about the (chemically) basic refining furnace, which is a lot easier to build?
He quotes a lot of interesting chemistry, then throws up a real laugher when he gets the simple and universally known formula for black powder exactly backwards!
While the book skims quite a potpourri of technologies we use today, he omits almost entirely the tools needed to implement them. Knowing how an electrical generator or motor is assembled is all well and good, but where will the impoverished builder get copper wire? Or the special steel sheet necessary for laminating magnet cores? Or the tooling for punching out the laminations?
He never even began to address the fundamentals of machine tools, on which about 99% of our modern technology rests, and without which you cannot build even an 18th century economy. .
As a high school science project, this would rate a solid C for effort, and something less for the end result."
I read so many glowing reviews of this book on Mastodon and so I opened it up. I felt the same way as the above Amazon reviewer. The book just felt shockingly naive. His book was driven by his personal vision/ideology moreso than any actual accordance with scientific or social scientific learnings. If you're suffused deeply enough in the ideology I'm guessing Dartnell is evocative, but if you're skeptical, Dartnell doesn't do nearly enough work to convince you otherwise and often makes you giggle and lose faith with his inaccuracies (like the formula for black powder lol) and impractical takes.
Sounds like we need a wiki for this stuff. If we managed to get a bunch of engineers contributing, we really would have a guide for rebooting civilization. Maybe include a button to print out the whole thing.
Can anyone really foresee a collapse of civilization which somehow renders all our technology useless and unrepairable, but somehow leaves access to computers and printers available?
I mean it's great to imagine if you want to be a pretend-prepper but the reality is that there will be millions of tons of food in the ground, tens of thousands of pounds of seeds available, oil, gasoline, kerosene, millions of cubic yards of fresh water. Lots of electrical generators, small and large, pretty much anything you need has already been built. etc, etc. You want to build a small house? Get materials from a large building!
We don't need a post-apocalyptic civilization to know how to refine cast iron, we need them to know how to repair diesel engines.
>Can anyone really foresee a collapse of civilization which somehow renders all our technology useless and unrepairable, but somehow leaves access to computers and printers available?
No but I can foresee a number of different collapses of civilization which render almost all computers useless within a relatively short amount of predictable time and the ability to connect those computers before they become inoperable to printers where one would print out numerous copies of the books.
But also, imho, it would be a compelling way to learn how the stuff of civilization actually works.
Maybe I'm weird but it's always sorta bothered me that if I accidentally went a thousand years back in time, I wouldn't know how to restore any significant modern technology. In the same way it used to bother me that I didn't know how to make stone knives and fire without matches, the most basic technologies of human history. Learning how and doing it made me feel like a more complete human being.
OK, maybe I misunderstood the post, but I still stand by my last statement. We don't need to recreate the Industrial Revolution, we just need to be able to repair and use the stuff that's already built.
Sounds like, if you want a capable materials, mechanical, chemical and electrical engineer to write your pull requests, you'd need to pay them a salary they request. (Them in plural, because it is unlikely to find a single individual good at everything.)
Software people like to say that software engineers is super complex and difficult. On the other hand, an enthusiast occasionally makes great FOSS contribution by filing a pull request. For some reason, that is?[1] quite rare in many other forms of engineering. If it is only because of capital cost differences of building things in physical world vs building in software world (which affects stuff like learning by experimentation), maybe we should acknowledge they are a part of reason why building things in physical world is complex and difficult.
That's the beauty of actual pull requests: that fat red X immediately saying a test case number 172 out of 42345 didn't pass, i.e. you're talking gibberish mister.
The beauty of publishing is that paper is patient and it may take literally centuries until someone draws a fat red X on point 172, that the Bessemer (or whatever) idea was always absolute and utter gibberish!
This is true both for the book, for the review you cite, for the comment you wrote, and for this comment of mine. It's nice to pretend you have a compiler-for-the-reality in your head that keeps predicting right every time, where in contrast with a true compiler you are wrong almost every single time.
The reviewer is under no obligation to, but if they feel strongly enough to write a detailed review, presumably they feel like a better written book would be valuable.
We probably can't "do the same again", so much of the Industrial Revolution (from my reading at least) was started with the huge amounts of wood, then easily accessible coal, then "spending" coal to get access to deeper coal.
If you started from scratch, there isn't really any easily accessible coal left.
And to a large extent, you skip the searching for raw materials to smelt cast iron to make a stove and go straight to searching collapsed buildings for cast iron stoves, or collecting railings to make a ladder etc...
Knowing how to repair and re-cast is still a useful skill, though. At some point the scavengeable items will have been scavenged and worn out, and if you want civilization to continue, you need to reboot it at a drastically lower level of complexity. That means building new production that can still be operated at the lower population levels of a post-apocalyptic world.
"Civilization" is really two things though: intangible facts & physical artifacts
If you preserve facts, you can reboot pretty quickly, relative to the initial time they took to discover.
Imagine how quickly you could make high quality steel if you could skip all the fumbling and straight to the proper carbon mix! https://acoup.blog/tag/iron/
Certainly you can probably do it faster than the 10,000 years or so it took the first time.
But it's not a panacea. A "cold start" of a complex system isn't just about replicating the system itself, it's about replicating the conditions that gave rise to it. (Witness how many ex-Googlers have founded search startups and failed to get traction, or how many people have replicated Facebook and Reddit clones and failed to get traction.) A lot of our industrial processes (like building microchips, photovoltaics, plastics, modern manufacturing) require a large base of tooling that itself requires prerequisites which may not be available. In some cases the raw materials (eg. crude oil, rare earths) are no longer accessible.
The knowledge is useful, but it'll be useful in the sense that then people can look at their current situation and bring portions of the past into it. That's probably going to involve a lot of scavenging and looting, because why dig iron ore out of the ground and fire it with coal dug out of the ground when there are large supplies of abandoned scrap steel in the world?
The analogies are apples and oranges, as all of them face existent incumbents with massive resources.
Which is where the point about population comes into play. Refining low-density elements (e.g. rare earth) into purified form is most of the difficulty and industrial base.
The available recyclable material from a civilization with a couple+ orders of magnitude larger population would be more than sufficient, even if chemical reprocessing is required.
Consequently, you run into an either/or. Either (1) there wasn't substantial loss of life (and industrial base), in which case no need to reboot, or (2) there was substantial loss of life, in which case there are more than sufficient recyclables.
And it's also hard to imagine a scenario by which we lack essential inputs. We've got more than enough crude oil or rare earths for the future. The only arguable example I can think of is helium...
> A "cold start" of a complex system isn't just about replicating the system itself, it's about replicating the conditions that gave rise to it.
True, but we also know the usefulness of what is beyond certain points so we don't have to do the stochastic walk through the economics to get there.
We know we want the printing press. We know we want glass. We know we want antibiotics. We know we want steam engines. We know we want electricity. We know we would want steel. etc.
Since we know that steam engines are useful, we don't have to wait for knowledge to get good enough and materials to get good enough to make them economically viable so we can gain the knowledge that putting them to general use is valuable. see: The Cotton Gin--anybody could have made it, but until the demand for cotton was sufficient there was no reason to take the risk.
Avoiding the technologic stochastic walk would be a big deal.
>If you started from scratch, there isn't really any easily accessible coal left.
I don't think this is strictly speaking true - certainly not for the US. I believe the majority of US coal production (according to wikipedia at any rate) is surface level mining, not the traditional underground mines people think about. I know that's true for parts of the Appalachian basin, I'm unclear as to whether that's true for the Wyoming mines.
Europe might be in trouble, I believe the only coal readily available on the continent is "brown" coal (lignite) which is suitable for power production, but has too many impurities to be used for steel production.
There's still a significant amount of hard coal in Germany and Poland - Russian/Australian resources are (or were in the case of Russia) simply cheaper.
Wyoming coal is very much surface coal (at least in the Powder River Basin). The problem is that it's in the wrong place. It's not near iron deposits... well, there was a large iron mining operation near South Pass, but it ended decades ago. I don't know if it ended because it was played out, or just no longer economical.
Trade moves goods where needed.
Cornish tin was used by people that had no idea Cornwall existed.
It is even possible that ancient Egypt had access to cocaine and tobacco.
Good point. Even more, there is no way to make coal geologically ever again. All coal comes from fossilized trees that came about before fungi. They just grew until they fell over and stacked up then got buried and fossilized. Now they just rot.
Which means starting from scratch would require a different fuel like oil, but that’s even harder to extract these days, let alone in a post-apocalyptic environment.
I dunno. There are a lot of gas stations and truck stops last time I checked. Stuff stored in tanks underground tends to be usable for quite a long time.
Pure gasoline is good for about 6 months. E10 is good for about 3 because ethanol is so hydrophilic. Fuel stabilizer can stretch that to a couple years, but gas stations generally don’t use it.
You wouldn't be starting from scratch as a lot of stuff already made would be left lying around, and the knowledge for fixing it and making it work would largely still exist in some form.
Yeah... coal and oil won't be lying around. Which robs you of your major energy source, breaking the "fix and use" plan.
Metals are often in refined form, which means in many cases higher melting points. (E.g. pig iron is 1500K, steel is 2800K)
We're not even mentioning electronics, because the vast majority of it isn't weather resistant, which means your "left lying around" is gone pretty quickly.
Plastic is in many instances only reusable in its exact shape. Alkaline batteries last 5-10 years, so good luck with those. Solar cells, in the best case, 25-30 years.
But all of that doesn't really matter. You'll spend the bunch of your time trying to just secure water, food, and shelter. Every day you don't get started on fixing things is decay. Every day you don't spend on food is hunger. (Subsistence farming is back-breaking, never-ending labor)
"Subsistence farming is back-breaking, never-ending labor"
Subsistence farming without machines is back-breaking, never-ending labor.
The whole idea is therefore to get machines up and running again as fast as possible.
And it all depends on the doomsday scenario. In most cases, there should be enough machines left to scavange. Or after a while, enough animals to be hunted.
Potential biggest hurdle are social dynamics. Confrontation instead of cooperation. And then the last capable electrician in the are gets shot, because some other scavenger wanted to get his corned beef.
Beginning sentence: "Coal and oil won't be lying around". The amount of machines you can run is limited, and so is the duration.
Animal hunting is mostly a settler fantasy. There's not a single place in the US that has sufficient animal population to sustain human nutrition for more than a couple hundred people. You will require careful husbanding. And, for anything larger than feeding ~100 people, you'll require feedstuff. Which you transport... Ah. There's the lack of energy sources again.
Social dynamics are the least of your problem: The confrontation fans tend to die out quickly, or secure a fiefdom within which they ensure collaboration. Human beings pretty much default to tribal behavior. And they favor collaboration even across tribes. (I recommend reading Rebecca Solnit's "Paradise built in hell")
A wood fired still might be a reasonable way to turn biomass into fuel.
And while farming may seem like back-breaking labor to the Aeron chair set, it’s really not that bad. You are tied to the land, but in the scenario that’s under discussion a Disney cruise vacation isn’t in the cards anyhow. You’ll want to have draft animals though of course as tractor replacements.
You need the still to start with :) But even then, you need the wood to fire them.
But yes, with draft animals you can make a go of it. It just won't leave you a lot of time to tinkertoy with the "leftover machines".
I don't think it's an unsurvivable scenario per se. I just think that the idea that you already have a starting point for an industrialized civilization is either quite naive, or takes a quite liberal view of "starting point".
I’m a fan of that book too - though hoping I never need it!
On a tangential theme, another one I read and liked at the same time was The World Without Us - all
about what would happen to the cities and infrastructure if all humans suddenly vanished overnight. Kind of depressing but there’s a lot of interesting and non obvious stuff in there
I can only say that those views are not universally held. I found it to be a lovely and engaging look at the technologies underlying our industrial civilization.
From the fiction side, Walter Miller's 1959 _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ [1] was written from the perspective of Benedictine Monks preserving knowledge - without truly understanding it - post apocalypse.
In _Earth Abides_[2] by George R. Stewart, the protagonist eventually gives up on his attempt to provide for the future, eventually deciding that the best he can do for his clan is to teach them to fend for themselves instead of foraging in the rubble.
That conclusion always reminded me of one of the conclusions of the WIPP report[3]: we may not be able to communicate with the future, so hopefully if nothing else, they'll learn to avoid the contaminated area through attrition....
In my sixty years on this planet, Earth Abides remains the most devastating, encouraging, and thought-provoking fictional work I have ever read. Though written in the 40's, its conclusions are no less valid today: humanity and its technology-based society are not one and the same.
Simple things we take for granted are a tremendous bootstrap: the germ theory of disease; the staff system of organization; education of the young; reading and writing; arithmetic; agriculture; static analysis.
Also, it seems like just knowing some of the dead ends would be a huge step up.
Like maybe we don't waste a ton of time and resources trying to turn lead into gold, or teaching left-handed kids to be right-handed, or trying to figure out which ritual to perform to which deity to make the crops grow.
In terms of doing the work of rebuilding civilization, I bet that you have under-rated the role of organized superstition. At the very least, it seems to play the role of superego for the group, and thereby it can prevent incessant bickering and can guide group efforts.
oh for sure, but to be effective it would need to be a planned or at least guided superstition and not the horrible random hodge-podge of legacy nonsense we are stuck with now
Another way to look at it is that the bickering is not just between people but also internal bickering. Having "superstitious" beliefs allows people to receive sublime commands but also gives them sublime permission.
> Also, it seems like just knowing some of the dead ends would be a huge step up.
This makes me think, how Knowledge in a post-apocalyptic society would really work. Some fundamental and comparatively easy technologies might not need to be rediscovered (directly jump to iron and omit bronze). But more advanced Knowledge needs a lot of special training, dedicated institutions, etc. And even if they had access to tales from the Ancients, they would still have to distinguish between valid and invalid information. Otherwise, we could end up with a culture of Flat Earthers.
You wouldn't just have access to the knowledge via tales, but the world around you.
You want to say the earth is flat? Why did the ancients have globes, then?
You want to say man made flight is impossible? Here is an airport with planes. Sure we have never gotten them running but what else could they do except fly?
Granted... Never underestimate the willful ignorance of the masses I suppose.
I wanted to emphasis the necessity to re-establish a scientific culture. Knowledge without experience and only from lore would be no real knowledge. Without a collective scientific practice there would be no ground to destinguish between true and false lore. They need to discover science for themselves again. It might be a bit easier and faster though, considering all the hints they would have, as you described it.
Oh, that static analysis. I, um, was thinking of something else with the same name. Yes, knowing how to build things that don't fall down is pretty fundamental.
Key element is probably less technology, and more social/political/religious unity. You need a stable and egalitarian social fabric to make consistent progress.
Core beliefs: rebooting civilization is hard but will make everything better (promised land), here's the scientific method and why it works, here's how to setup and maintain a democratic nation state, here's how to incentivize and reward inventors. Here's fascism and why it's bad. Here's the Prisoner's Dilemma -- everyone must cooperate with each other and identify and punish defectors. Here's songs and rituals and art you can participate in together to reinforce all of this.
Why is this getting downvoted? A stable society is an absolute must, and that means a group of people who have a common moral foundation. Else, how do we work together?
Total apocalipse is not possible (Earth is so large that it's impossible nuke EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE.
But if this is just experiment "what if" those are thing that I would suggest to do:
- Forget about computers and programming and gadgets
- DO NOT STAY IN BUNKER, INSTEAD FIND FRIENDS!
- Focus on FARMING as team
- Scavending for potatoes, grain etc - for seeds!
- FARMING
- FARMING
- FARMING
- FARMING
- FARMING
- HARVEST
- FOOD = LIFE
What you really need is:
- water (well or river)
- water filter (from sand, rocks, and wood ash) for human consumtion.
- fire (easy - a lot of lighters laying around, if not use your glasses!)
- fuck cars and fuel - you are not going anywhere as you need to do FARMING
- CORN, POTATOES, WHEAT production (parts that we dont eat are perfect food for sheeps or goats!)
- SHEEPS, GOATS production (milk and meat!)
- SHELTER: there must be plenty empty houses in this scenario (everyone died!).
- Do forming for few years. Then you grow and grow.
You could sell food in futre and rebuild society,
maybe as agroculture baron. :)
OPTIONAL: [you dont need electricity as farmer!]
- electricy from solar panels ("borrow" them) or from wind (you can use any electrical engine for it! For example from washing machine :). This stuff is hard but doable.
The #1 commodity in a scenario where society breaks down is trust. Trust allows you to form networks and benefit from specialization and cooperation. After you've established your basic, immediate needs(water, shelter) focus on building trust and relationships.
You need the tractor and fuel for farming or else you are going to waste your entire life farming and not getting anywhere. You need the car to transport and trade with others. Honestly, a lot of Africans won't notice anything different in a technology apocalypse.
You need tractors if you're farming for tens or hundreds of thousands of people. In which case it's probably not the apocalypse yet.
As the OP says the knowledge of making enough food to keep yourself, your family and your probably decimated community fed and healthy is the number 1 requirement for surviving civilisational breakdown.
I think the more interesting question than how to reinvent some technological gizmos is how to reinstate governance. It's handy to know how to build a solar panel but it isn't worth much if someone hits me on the head with a club five minutes later.
It's kind of funny to me that so much post apocalyptic writing is so overly concerned with technology when technology without much wisdom was what likely caused the apocalypse in the first place.
And that's hardly something there's an easy how-to answer to.
A primitive tribe or band tends have each member strongly connected each other member since with few resources, the people are the resources. Modern people don't have to care in the slightest about their neighbors and this is weakness in an emergency situation.
Moreover, a "collapse" situation, in many instances, would imply a general social failure even more complete than recent problems we've seen (consider "I'd rather X many people die than the economy suffer [from Covid or limiting carbon pollution or etc"] a statement about non-community). I don't know how mainstream society would even come back from that. Perhaps the Amish would do well.
I live in central Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County - there's an Amish farm walking distance from where I sit.
I think about societal collapse a lot, and was just recently ruminating on how the Amish would do in that scenario.
They're clearly more prepared for it than most of us, but they're a bit more dependent on the outside world (or "the English", as they refer to us) than you might expect.
It's pretty common to see buggies parked at farm and tractor supply shops around here, and you'll even see them in the local ERs. When they sell stuff at farmer's markets I've seen a lot of plastic wrap, plastic containers, plastic bags, and aluminum foil. Some even have cars, depending on the sect.
All that said, they do live much simpler, lower-tech lives, with plenty of ingenious manually-powered tools (I once saw a mule-powered lawn mower in action while driving past a farm).
I expect they'd have some bumps adjusting, but that they'd mostly be able to, unlike the rest of us.
> It's handy to know how to build a solar panel but it isn't worth much if someone hits me on the head with a club five minutes later.
Most people will quickly assemble in groups/tribes/families. People can realize danger, and even independents will know when it's time. Chaos will be transitory and most people will be unaffected; however, supply lines will be limited to neighboring friendly tribes/villages. As a result, shipping things from the other side of the world will be expensive and slow. Products will make their way slowly, so you'll always get the end product but inefficiently.
Its likely there will be mass violence in the beginning and pretty much everyone will be affected imo. Criminal types will flourish taking what they will. Most will die from starvation pretty soon though. Those who have some sort of food source will become huge targets very quickly. Your only real hope is to have some tucked away huge bit of land with water and food already growing. Even then that wont be enough.
> Its likely there will be mass violence in the beginning and pretty much everyone will be affected imo.
No. Cities will be affected disproportionately but that's it. The crime rate is too low. Even if it x10, it'll be roughly the same as Brazil or El Salvador (which still has people and communities living there!).
> Criminal types will flourish taking what they will.
Corporations and large enterprises will likely be targeted more.
> Most will die from starvation pretty soon though.
No.
> Those who have some sort of food source will become huge targets very quickly.
People will trade with farmers; like they did before? Just food will become more expensive. There is massive food waste (especially in the US), and even places like Africa will be fine.
A post-Apocalyptic world is more about the collapse about the current order (current government, corporations, current powers) than the death of the people. Unless a nuclear winter sets, most people will be fine.
Technology on its own can't cause the apocalypse. It needs mismanagement or misuse by humans.
Looking at the world today you see societies crumble while others thrive. This, despite having access to the same or similar technology. The difference being in how they organize themselves and their vision of themselves.
I've read his book The Knowledge years ago and it was an eye-opener. I wasn't aware how complex our agricultural and technical societies are and how much they depend on shipping and crude oil. Without oil and shipping, no chemical industry, and without chemical industry no advanced technology and no mass food production. People in supply chain management know that too well but I was simply not aware of how fragile our society is before I read his book. The premise of the book that just the right number of people die but enough remain to kickstart society is arguably a bit contrived, though.
Unfortunately, my overall conclusion from this book was rather negative, which is definitely not part of the book itself. It seems to me that our current technological level with a focus on consumption and constant production of new goods for short-term use, without taking into account full energy and ecological lifecycle balances, is completely unsustainable. Even with recycling and under the assumption that energy could become easier to produce (e.g. fusion) our lifestyle seems to exploit too many finite natural resources like e.g. oil. This has been known by many people since the 70s and 80s of last century and it still amazes and depresses me how slow the overall rate of change is.
The worry is overblown. Oil is still used all over the place because it's cheaper than the alternative. When it's not, it'll be replaced.
You can straight up synthesize an oil analog from biological sources, and even if you couldn't the oil necessary for non-energy purposes is far far less than that used just to burn.
Solar is what is going to replace fossil fuels mostly, it's already cheaper than coal.
Like it or not, most of the motivation for change will be economic. With the price of energy in the current times of war and inflation, solar is looking quite good.
Industrial chemistry always has alternatives. Ammonia based fertilizers can always be produced with air and water instead of air and natural gas, it's just somewhat more expensive.
There are no viable replacements for fossil fuels for a tremendous number of uses. There is currently no plausible way that, for example, long-distance flights could run entirely off solar.
Your economic analysis of
> Oil is still used all over the place because it's cheaper than the alternative.
has no contradiction with prices skyrocketing. Fossil gasoline might get to $20/ or $50/gallon before it's more expensive than the alternative, and so on for everything else.
"Somewhat more expensive" fertilizer means more expensive food, which means starving people, which is horrible on its own, but which could also create a very dangerous political situation.
Also the risk isn't that we'll run out of fossil fuels, it's that continuing to use fossil fuels would cause so much environmental damage that restricting the supply, as horrible as that would be, would be better than the alternative.
Viable non-fossil replacement for jet fuel: synthetic kerosene made from various biological sources. Approved for 50% blend on commercial aircraft, some older things depend on fossil components but a very fixable problem if it came to it.
These guys claim an estimate of $3-4 per gallon (pre-tax and pre-distribution) for synthetic gasoline. Not 20 or $50 per gallon. https://carbonengineering.com/air-to-fuels/
> "Somewhat more expensive" fertilizer means more expensive food, which means starving people, which is horrible on its own, but which could also create a very dangerous political situation.
It really is only somewhat more expensive. Because of natural gas nonsense, the price of nitrogen fertilizer tripled ( https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/crops/article/2022/... ) and is still getting used, we're talking about a moderate increase in price to switch from methane hydrogen in the amonia-from-air process to electrolyzed water sourced hydrogen.
Lots of nonsense based fearmongering goes around, the actual solutions are sure to exist and don't involve doomsday, but moderate price increases (and probably once they scale, price reductions)
A problem with biofuel is scaling it up, see: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7498153. According to that article the U.S. would need to devote "an area bigger than Texas and California and Pennsylvania combined" to crops specifically for its own jet biofuel needs. That's just for flying, not for food or fuel for ground transportation or anything else.
Your gasoline link talks about 2050. Gas is averaging $5/gallon in the U.S. Where's this $3-4/gallon gas? And that $5/gallon price is aggressively cheap, Biden couldn't even get a tiny carbon tax through a government his own party controlled. I made up $20 and $50 but what do you think a fair price is if we price in environmental externalities? What would that price be between now and 2050?
By "natural gas nonsense" I assume you mean supply issues related to the war in Ukraine. That disruption is exactly the sort of problem we can expect more of going forward, or do you think it's some kind of one-off aberration? Also from https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/22/fertilizer-prices-are-at-rec...: "The impact, Barclays suggested, will be 'extremely asymmetrical' with most emerging market economies disproportionately affected by food and fertilizer supply risks."
If you're interested in this topic, you might also be interested to learn about http://collapseos.org/: "It is a Forth operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse."
Fifty years ago we had teletype machines with paper tape readers/punches. This was an ideal impedance match of technologies. All the front panel switches and blinking lights on the old computers were to get a boot loader keyed in. The boot loader read the bytes from the teletype. The paper tapes stored the programs.
What is needed for the collapse scenario is the equivalent of the teletype. It can't just be another working computer acting as a terminal. It has to be something we can bootstrap to get the small CPUs lying around working.
I'm always impressed by 80k hours to surface answers to the most existential problems! They had another good one about spinning up the global food supply post-apocalypse.
Dartnell seems to be thinking longer term than immediate (first 2 weeks). Are there any guides for the first two weeks?
I wonder if the US military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) guides are the most comprehensive resources? While intended for stranded individuals, they assume you're dropped anywhere in the world with minimal gear.
There are general guides to the first two weeks - FEMA has several publications about this [0]. You don't need to go full prepper or SERE for that period of time - just get a water filter and some freeze fried meals, or have a pantry with beans and rice on hand - they keep for ~1 human half-life, so you don't really have to worry about them going bad.
I wouldn't view SERE as a useful resource, if only because the assumptions SERE makes (hostile territory, woodland survival, etc) aren't really applicable to someone living in an urban or suburban environment, which is what I assume most users of this website are.
Eh, preppers overdo it because it's fun for some people.
I have a case of water bottles in the trunk of my car, a bit of camping gear in the closet, and enough dry pantry goods on hand to last a good long while. None of this is to "prepare" for anything besides the water in case of some incident that strands me in my car. Not that much special is required to survive for a couple of weeks. Maybe if you want to practice go on a couple of day long camping trip in the woods, it'll probably be fun.
That's what I'm saying haha. I'm not looking to "prep" and the prepper manuals go overboard for what >99% of people are looking for. I'm looking for the practical things.
Go to a Costco business center and buy a bag of rice, a bag of beans, and some bottled water. Buy some camping gear and cook dinner once in a while over a fire in your back yard or a camp ground. Keep a go bag packed that you could pick up and live out of for a week at a moments notice. Take interest in the things around you and learn how to do things yourself instead of paying other people to do them, even if you don’t do them yourself most of the time.
I'd supplement that with a few bags of charcoal stored in sealed Rubbermaid garbage tubs and some cigarette lighters -- you need a reliable source of fire and wood's a pain in the ass to depend on outdoors.
Also rice & beans gets old. Grab 50lbs of canned meat while you're at it.
I took a couple cans of Chinese fried rice (yes, it comes in a can!) on a camping trip once: it was everyone's favorite meal.
If you value freedom you are going to have to be able to move fast at a moment's notice. Preppers do nothing but hoard liability. The local gang is going to own your shit.
If you take a "social good higher good" outcome.. maybe your role in the cycle was to stockpile, not to survive? Dystopia for the individual might still be net beneficial for the species.
I'd hope not, but use value remains, even if you dont? Fictional gangs are asshats and waste it but actual Gangs have distorted rules and hierarchy and sometimes preserve things, not waste them: those Harley spares are hard to find. The quartermaster farms them out judiciously.
There are thousands of prepper guides around, depending on how much work you want to do. I'd say a good start would be to think about the pandemic and think about what stuff became hard to get and make sure you have more of that available. Medications are a big one - try to have enough spare to last a couple of months. Having actual cash is important too, as is having copies of ID and other documents.
Also, make friends with your neighbors. You're far more likely to be okay if you have a strong community around you than if you try to build a bunker and live alone from the world.
> Medications are a big one - try to have enough spare to last a couple of months.
I've always wondered about how to carry out this advice for medicines other than what's available OTC. If someone depends on prescription medication, is this possible? How do you ask?
1) "Hi doc, I'm thinking about ways to better hedge tail risk as I get a little older. In the case of this particular med, obviously it'd be really bad to be without it for [2 weeks, whatever]. People were without meds for that long in [Katrina, other example disaster]. So, I'd like to have a supply on hand. Can you prescribe me [a month] extra?
2) Lie. "Hi doc, I'm going to [really far-flung place, Alaska] on a [long, 3-month] expedition. I need to have my meds. What should we do?
3) Skip the bullshit and, assuming they're not controlled substances, just order directly from an Indian / Canadian pharmacy online.
For non-controlled substances, I've been able to ask for more from my doctor and just pay out of pocket.
For controlled substances, you could probably ask for a slight change in prescription (e.g. a single 20mg pill vs. 2x10mg) right after the first one was filled, or ask for a slight change in dosage.
Technically this is legally dubious, but it's also ridiculous that there is no buffer allowed to be built in.
After the first two weeks, there's the first year then the first five years and so on.
E.g. Living through the first winter will require a huge effort in stockpiling, which gets better the second year. Scavenging for the first 5 years turns to agriculture and animal husbandry and smelting.
Time and again, techno-utopians tend to forget that, for most of humanity's existence, knowledge was passed on orally and was not "scientific", but it allowed us to survive and flourish. It is not solar concentrators what will allow us to survive, but knowledge of the earth, soil and awareness of the place that we occupy on the web of life. And that knowledge cannot always be registered, but has to be learned from practice. You don't need a guide to know how to grow potatoes, you need to learn it and teach it to the next generations.
Unfortunately, that's not as fancy as talking about solar energy or mathematics, or fantasizing about the great library at the end of the universe.
How would info on how to grow potatoes not be something you can write down? And knowledge of a place is called a map?
To me, your comment sounds more like an argument for picking books with different topics rather than not using books but relying on oral retelling to "allow us to survive and flourish". And I agree this potato farming type of info sounds more broadly useful than the books I saw shared above about metal alloys and other automotive-related tech.
Then again, the title of the post is bouncing back, which would go beyond just farming and survival knowledge. I suppose we need both and your survival in the wild info is fundamental to allow their tech info to be useful.
Weird take. Sure, you could try to re-build what you had before the apocalypse. Or you could build a new world that isn't the one that just plunged everything into chaos. If our technology wasn't so good, the world wouldn't be as populated, we wouldn't need so many resources, there wouldn't be so many ways to poison the earth, and the earth would be habitable and sustainable for millennia.
After the apocalypse, I want the people who can dig wells, practice permaculture, organize a farm, keep sheep, spin yarn, blacksmith, prep lumber, fire pottery and glass, tan leather, hunt, fish, manage woodlands. Doctors and scientists would be handy too, but now that we know so much about how biology works it wouldn't be so difficult to keep people living longer. Assuming antibiotics still work in 20 years and we retain some basic surgical skills, we're basically set.
The most challenging thing after an apocalypse is obviously going to be government. If there's no law and order you can't really organize anything. Whoever has the most power, best strategizing, and most flexible morals will collect the most resources and gather the largest forces. It'll be "join or die", and slavery will come back. Just read your history to see what happens when societies crumble.
> Assuming antibiotics still work in 20 years and we retain some basic surgical skills
And what happens when the antibiotics and sterile surgical implements run out, due to the incredible industrial machinery needed to produce them having disappeared? "1600's Welsh countryside but with modern medicine" doesn't quite play out without the corresponding modern supply chain, at least for long.
You don't need industrial machinery to produce penicillin. You can sterilize equipment a variety of ways, such as with horseshoe crab blood, fire, alcohol. Now, would it work well for 7 billion people? Hell no. I'm hoping the apocalypse knocks out a significant chunk of the population, and that at that point we can focus on sustainable, simple living, rather than industrialization.
I can build you a sanitized laboratory with 16th century equipment. That's the great thing about how much knowledge we have now: we can do more with fewer things.
This viewpoint is appealing, but the thing is: natural selection says it isn't possible in the long term.
For every person like you, who thinks s/he knows how things would be better for the environment and others, and how to get there (at least approximately), there is another person who doesn't give a shit and who will do long-term damage in exchange for short-term gains all day long. That person will out-compete you and other people like you.
We do, however, seem to be getting better and better at solving these sorts of cooperation puzzles. I just don't see a way out of the Malthusian problem (there will be more and more of the sorts of people who breed more, by definition). We might just have to live with a boom-and-bust cycle on this planet, much like other species, but on longer timescales. It's also possible we avoid the evolutionarily stable state and manage to successfully trap ourselves in some sort of metastable state.
It's all going to be fine and your life will be really good, though :-)
" I just don't see a way out of the Malthusian problem (there will be more and more of the sorts of people who breed more, by definition)"
Why is that by definition? Even animals have more or less offspring, depending on the food offering/suitable habitat.
It balances itself out. In nature by starvation.
But humans could find other ways.
But btw. there are many many people starving and allways have been.
It is not like we are heading to a starvation crisis. We are already in it and always have been. The question is rather, of whether we can stop it one day and have all humans fed and cared for in a sustainable way.
> We might just have to live with a boom-and-bust cycle on this planet
Reminds me of:
"The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer sun does not prevent, the human race is always increasing at times, and at other times diminishing in numbers." - from Plato's History on Atlantis
Boom and bust cycle? There’s been one boom and now there will be one bust. Unless you have some fancypants geoengineering idea which will stabilize the climate and put fossils back in the ground.
There've been plenty of booms and busts before, eg. the late Bronze Age collapse, the fall of the Roman Empire, most Chinese dynastic transitions, the destruction of North American civilizations by colonialism. This boom just happens to be bigger than the ones that came before.
> can dig wells, practice permaculture, organize a farm, keep sheep, spin yarn, blacksmith, prep lumber, fire pottery and glass, hunt, fish, manage woodlands
I'm very confused by why you think this is sustainable - this type of life uses FAR FAR FAR more resources than modern living. It only works with a low population.
England for example basically cut down every tree it has in order to sustain this type of (old) life. They found coal because they had no choice, they were about to run out of energy.
If you just want to kill lots of people and have a low population, I suppose you can advocate for that, but it's completely orthogonal to the type of technology we have.
FWIW, 17th Century Europe didn't have access to the technology and knowledge that we have today, that do not require any fancy devices or technology to improve our efficiency of resource usage in the hypothetical scenario discussed in this thread.
At the time, there were many incentives to deforestation, but the main ones were to procure wood as fuel, and to clear arable land for agriculture and animal husbandry. I can at least speak to these two.
It was true in the past, that wood was an unsustainable source of heat. However, with modern wood-burning stoves, even in the nordic latitudes, this is no longer true.
Sweden and Norway have done a lot of innovation in this department in the last 80 years, because it's a matter of national security for them. They've found that it's actually more sustainable, affordable, and environmentally-friendly, to use wood as the main heating source for homes, rather than oil or coal. Again, this is only true if you're using wood stoves whose construction is informed by modern (post-WWII) knowledge. But the stoves are cast-iron, their manufacture doesn't require nanotechnology, pure silicon, etc.
On the agricultural front, it's difficult to overstate how far we've come in the last 400 years. Our caloric yield per acre on the same acreage of arable land would be much higher, today, even if you were to take away the products of modern industry (fertilizers, etc) that would presumably be inaccessible in an apocalypse.
Especially given access to new world domesticated produce, like potatoes, maize, various nuts, squashes, legumes, yams, tomato, maple, rubber.
> I'm very confused by why you think this is sustainable - this type of life uses FAR FAR FAR more resources than modern living.
Living in a society without heavy industry, without, electronics and without internal combusion engines uses up "FAR FAR FAR" more resources than living in a society with them? How so?
Because the internal combustion engine is surprisingly efficient.
Did you know you release more CO2 walking a mile than driving a mile? It's surprising, but it takes a lot of energy to grow food, and then a lot of energy is lost by the time that food powers you.
Yes the CO2 from food is from the air, so not the same, but it's just an example of efficiency. Ignoring the source of CO2, a tractor emits less CO2 than a horse, for the same farm work.
You still need to heat your home, you still need to find fertilizer somewhere, you need fuel for cooking. You need to make clothing.
All those things take energy, and modern living uses less energy. The main difference from the past is there are more people now. And in the past a lot of that energy came from the sun, rather than being mined.
But back to resources (rather than just CO2): To live like a farmer you need wood, and you need more wood than can re-grow in the area available to you. Look at peat moss mines in Ireland - they mined so much, just for basic living, there's not much left.
No, the main difference from the past is that we have been taking fossil fuels out of the earth and burning it for the last 200 years, and releasing in that very short time the CO₂ that has been stored in them for many millions of years. This is much more than the amount of CO₂ that the environment's carbon sinks can bind and so we are warming the environment, and at a very fast pace.
Like you say, the CO₂ we breathe "comes from the air". Specifically, that CO₂, like the carbon gasses released by farming and agriculture, is part of the atmospheric carbon cycle that circulates carbon gasses between the biosphere and the atmosphere. This cycle is stable, it has been stable for millions of years and it has never caused a greenhouse effect, neither is there any risk that it will cause a greenhouse effect, now or in the future. There is certainly no chance that the CO₂ we exhale will cause the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere to shift, because that's where we get our carbon in the first place.
The internal combustion engine on the other hand, efficient or not, is burning fossil fuels and is a primary driver of release of the CO₂ bound in fossil fuels, to the environment. This is a major mechanism of climate change.
That having been cleared up, you're making a weird argument that is very difficult to support. If I understand correctly your earlier comment that I quoted, you're saying that living, in summary, without burning fossil fuels, is not less sustainable than living while burning fossil fuels. You 're saying that this is because the internal combustion engine is efficient. You mean that it makes good use of the fuel it burns, but its fuel cannot be easily replaced (because it takes billions of years for it to be created by natural processes that we can't replicate at scale) and burning it is causing a greenhouse effect and climate change.
So, no, it doesn't make any sense that living without burning fossil fuels, without combustion engines, without all the trappings of modern life, is not more sustainable than living with them. We can discuss the benefits and risks of either way of life (I'm not keen to return at a pre-industrial time myself) but it is abundantly clear which way of life is sustainable, and which isn't. And that's not "more sustainable". Burning fossil fuels is just not sustainable anyway you cut it.
That’s the point. Killing lots of people lowers the population, but it doesn’t stay low. Over time, the population will always approach the carrying capacity, so the only way to permanently lower the population is to make the carrying capacity lower.
Going back 300 years in tech won't reduce the carrying capacity permanently. We'll either rebuild modern technology or will cut out enough trees to cause an environmental catastrophe.
I mentioned woodland management, which would have prevented deforestation. There's actually many practices we can implement to make more use of the land than we've done in the past. Just picking different crops would enable us to feed the entire existing planet with a fraction of the land area we use today. And we certainly know a lot more about sustainable climate regulation than we did in the past, requiring fewer fuels and enabling more sustainable ones.
Producing more technology to keep swelling the population obviously isn't working either (hello, climate change). Human civilization needs downsizing, or at least more rational and sustainable resource use/management.
It's certainly sustainable, but a three-generation nuclear family will need two or three farmable ("arable") acres to prosper. Expect the population to diminish substantially.
What is not sustainable is high technology, which likely can't be quickly restored, once it crashes. It might take a couple of centuries to put all the systems back in place, if the crash is deep enough.
I think parent meant that absent the high tech and energy dense supply chains that underly modern society, people would have to do a lot of things to sustain a society that for us these days can be solved by going to Walmart.
This may be the right place to mention that the comment in the article, "But the photovoltaic cells we use today need pure silicon, and nanoscale manufacturing — essentially the same technology as microchips used in a computer — so actually making solar panels would be incredibly difficult." is incorrect.
One needs only modestly pure silicon and no nanoscale tech at all. You can make photovoltaic cells with a small furnace and a couple of rather basic inorganic chemicals. Patterning for diffusion masking can be done with wax applied by hand.
You do need some electricity, so steam power or biodiesel would be necessary at first. You will need to run scavenged vacuum pumps and induction heaters to create the silicon ingots and zone refine them. You will need to conduct some basic inorganic chemistry and be able to produce the key industrial acids and bases.
Edit: you will need to recreate Pyrex glass and be able to form it into tubes and chemical glassware.
The Soviet Union tried to create antibiotic resistant bacteria as part of its bioweapons program. They were able to increase antibiotic resistance but not make anything totally resistant, so I expect antibiotics to still work 20 years from now.
Widespread resistance to particular antibiotics is also the product of an advanced industrial society where new variants of pathogens spread easily amongst billions of internationally-travelling city dwellers and widespread prophylactic use of the antibiotic creates strong selection pressures.
Its a bit different after an apocalypse. In theory, an isolated post-apocalyptic community could roll a 1 and get bacteria that is resistant to locally available natural and stockpiled antibiotics in their community, but that's quite low down their list of concerns.
Yeah, let’s go back to pre-industrial technology. But let’s do it with “government”. You really think that you’re gonna have some kind of cross between a hippy commune and modern centralization of force/taxation? A world were all of us now-middle class folks can just go to work on the permaculture farm 8–6 and relax with our organic root beers afterwards? Welcome back to Medieval serfdom for most of us, I say.
Look back to High Farming in England. Read William Cobbett's book, Cottage Economy (1833). No need to go back to the dark ages.
> Besides, skim-milk and bread (the milk being boiled) is quite strong food enough for any children’s breakfast, even when they begin to go to work; a fact which I state upon the most ample and satisfactory experience, very seldom having ever had any other sort of breakfast myself till I was more than ten years old, and I was in the fields at work full four years before that. I will here mention that it gave me singular pleasure to see a boy, just turned of six, helping his father to reap, in Sussex, this last summer. He did little, to be sure; but it was something. His father set him into the ridge at a great distance before him; and when he came up to the place, he found a sheaf cut; and, those who know what it is to reap, know how pleasant it is to find now and then a sheaf cut ready to their hand. It was no small thing to see a boy fit to be trusted with so dangerous a thing as a reap-hook in his hands, at an age when “young masters” have nursery-maids to cut their victuals for them, and to see that they do not fall out of the window, tumble down stairs, or run under carriage-wheels or horses’ bellies.
Cobbett, William. Cottage Economy To Which Is Added The Poor Man's Friend (pp. 55-56). . Kindle Edition.
The first duty of government is the security of its citizens and their property. That is what war lords provide, and later more sophisticated forms of government should do the same.
The problem isn't technology. The problem is immoral people. Immoral people make immoral and greedy governments. Immoral and greedy governments wield power to acquire more and survive as a parasitic organism. All governments move towards totalitarianism. No nation-state in the world has ever escaped this eventuality.
Limiting technology won't limit the harm even one evil person can do. Take a look at Gengis Khan, for example.
What limits immoral people is the moral people around them.
The reason Western culture has fared so well over the last 500 years is because it was largely Christian in nature. There are fundamental values embedded in the Bible that have echoed into what we consider to be "human rights" today. These ideas are uniquely Christian in nature, and rely on a Christian morality in order to function.
"Do to others as you would have them do to you", "love your neighbor as yourself", "you need to work in order to eat", the ten commandments (which are pretty common sense if you're looking for a stable society), a true/faithful set of weights and measures -- including a sound currency, lending for interest gained is illegal, and so on.
All of these require a basis of people who are willing to adhere to them. The Western world lacks people who are willing to adhere to them. In fact, we've been taught to hate the West and its contributions to the world. We hate white people, we hate Christianity, we hate absolute truth, we hate moral law, we hate being accountable to the Almighty, and we scoff at anyone who loves those things.
> The problem isn't technology. The problem is immoral people.
i think you are underestimating the power of your tools (technology) to shape you instead of the other way around... might be a good idea to read up on Marshal McLuhan and Neil Postman to get an idea what technologies and systems can do to us (as humans)
> The reason Western culture has fared so well over the last 500 years is because it was largely Christian in nature. There are fundamental values embedded in the Bible that have echoed into what we consider to be "human rights" today. These ideas are uniquely Christian in nature, and rely on a Christian morality in order to function.
human rights came from the bible? got any proof for that claim?
> human rights came from the bible? got any proof for that claim?
I apologize for the delay. Let me see what I can do.
By my reckoning the core of "all men are created equal" finds its roots in Paul's letter to the Galatians where he says
3:27 For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
3:29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.
The statement "All men are created equal", from the Declaration of Independence is an appeal to the idea of the perfected church. That is, in a perfect world, the christian church conducts itself in such a way that none of the above "identities" matters any more. (See Romans 12 for how the church ought to act towards itself and others.) You aren't valued more or less than because of your race/ethnicity/people, or because of your financial status, or even because of your gender. If the ideal is realized, there is true equality.
In the Lord's Prayer, there's a request to God to bring His kingdom into this world
...Your kingdom come, Your will be done...
The founders of the US understood this and it is reflected in the Preamble of the Constitution
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
They recognize they can't achieve perfection, and still seek it out "in order to form a more perfect union".
I argue that the fundamental human ~right~ truth is equality. From that all other rights stem. Without equality, none of the other rights enshrined in the constitution (what you say, who you associate with, your right to self defense, your right to your person -- habius corpus, your right to swift justice, and so on) all have their roots in the sovereignty of the individual. And the sovereignty of the individual among peers is only guaranteed if one has equality with all the rest.
This seems a bit overstated. Civilization is way older than Christianity, and there is no evidence I can see that civilization under Christianity is any more moral than any other kind.
I think the answer is that if you don't, then there won't be people after "over thousands of years", or even after a few generations, anyway.
I mean because this is after the apocalypse we're talking about, yes? Either people figure out how to restart civilisation in a sustainable manner or they die out after a short while.
There is a semi-practical use for this information: these are the absolute minimum tech trees required to spin off an independent off-planet habitat (whether in vacuum or on another planet).
If you're a hecto-billionaire / trillionaire however, this is also the information you'd want to be assured you can try whatever harebrained scheme you want and if it breaks the world, you externalize all that harm and "reboot" the world in your own image with this information. It would be bad if someone really buys that line; I don't think it is possible without a lot of testing on a vast scale, aka trying it out for real in say, space. Good thing the only working example we have of this kind of "booting" is history, and it seems to take way more than a $trillion to run the "bootstrap firmware" to a self-sustaining civilization at around say, 1940's tech tree level. I estimate around 70-100M people+children at the beginning, 30-40 years before you're out of bootstrap phase.
Well, if you are dead, your actions are not going to change anything (because you won't be performing any actions). So if you are going to plan, you can only plan for the case where you survive
You can also allocate all this effort into preventing whatever apocalyptic scenario is likely to happen, but that's a lot less self-centered and forces you to accept uncomfortable truths about yourself and your place in society. It's much easier to daydream about being constrained by technical problems alone, and if you are realistic that's not going to be the biggest problem in any post-apocalyptic scenario. We'll still have toasters and solar panels, microscope slides and computers. That's not the problem. Even in that case, we won't have to reinvent the wheel.
I'm always entertained by the optimism of people that think they can prevent whatever apocalyptic scenario is likely to happen, but that'd force you to accept uncomfortable truths about yourself and your place in society.
Collapse is inherent in any system that undergoes unchecked exponential growth, and is more a function of ecology, population, game theory, and millions of years of human evolution. If it's going to happen, there's nothing that you as one of the 7+ billion humans alive on earth today can do to prevent it.
The Egyptians didn't get the memo and failed to collapse from internal problems. Instead, they were conquered by an empire with internal problems that papers over problems by acquiring more land and gold mines.
> If it's going to happen, there's nothing that you as one of the 7+ billion humans alive on earth today can do to prevent it.
I'm one of the unreasonable people that is planning to do something about that. I consider ancient Egypt to be proof that the problem is neither ecology, population, game theory and millions of years of human evolution.
What I find particularly entertaining is that it would require me to develop "everything" from scratch in a destitute country. It ought to be impossible yet the amount of money needed to kick-start this development is something a person from silicon valley would laugh at.
I wonder how we expect "new humanity" to deal with the fact that we burned all the easy coal, oil, gas deposits.
Also, the most important invention would be the printing press including typesets, ink and paper, as there is no way you can do everything in one generation.
To me the most likely scenario is global thermonuclear war. Surviving that and then getting back to normal means finding the stuff/people not broken, fixing the broken things, and not really starting completely over. Granted, after seeing how many people freaked the eff out over the pandemic which is absolutely trivial in comparison to nuclear war I wonder about the mental stability of anyone. Would there be anyone that could be relied on?
I was about to rant but you made me realize that the original story was a trilogy.
When I read it as a teenager I guess I jumped straight into the sequel because I loved it so much. But then I had to read the related arc of the robot an then the prequel.
We miss you good doctor Asimov <3 (but you wrote so much there is still something old to rediscover)
There's always "A World Made By Hand" by Kunstler if you want a picture of what life might be like after the world runs out of oil. It's more of the "dying not with a bang, but with a whimper" variety of post-apocalyptic book. It's bad, but not horrible. Life just sort of slides back into the 18th century in a disorderly, messy and ungracious sort of way.
The 3D printing revolution is close on the horizon. In my lab, we're already printing our own test-tube holders, lens cases, and much more. Initially this was due to the supply bottleneck during/after covid, but now its become a dependable, cheaper resource. One fewer firm to ship from. I'm of the belief that it's a trend. My SO tells me how her lab is currently experimenting in 3D printing their own drug capsules.
I'm of the hope that we develop this tech far enough such that survivors need to stumble only upon a printer to build what they need.
The subject had been explored many times over in books, games and magazines.
I quite like Horizon Zero Dawn's take - that post-apocalypse people should take it slow deliberately, the first reason being that too big of an advance in tech caused a given apocalypse in the first place.
I started writing "important experiments for kids" (on github somewhere) based a bit on this - just what are the base experiments (distance to moon etc) that we should all know - like what books should we all read.
i think things like this should be part of the curriculum
> One of the ideas I played with in The Knowledge was what would you most want to whisper in someone’s ear — like 2,000 years ago, or if someone’s having to go through this process again — that once you’ve told someone, it kind of makes immediate sense. ...
This is a fascinating idea.
> And for me, the one that stood out by far the most significantly was this idea of germ theory and how that links to the microscope. ...
There's what you'd want to whisper and what the person (and their community!) would accept. History has shown people to be extremely resistant to the germ theory of disease.
> And actually, one of my favorite maker projects when I was researching for The Knowledge was making some Robinson Crusoe glass from scratch. ... And there’s nothing stopping the ancient Romans over 2,000 years ago building a microscope, if only they’d known what to do.
I'm not so sure about this. A lot of societal and technological developments happened between the first microscopes and the connection to germ theory. From a different article:
> In 1676, Dutch cloth merchant-turned-scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek further improved the microscope with the intent of looking at the cloth that he sold, but inadvertently made the groundbreaking discovery that bacteria exist. His accidental finding opened up the field of microbiology and the basis of modern medicine; nearly 200 years later, French scientist Louis Pasteur would determine that bacteria were the cause behind many illnesses (before that, many scientists believed in the miasma theory that rotten air and bad odors made us sick).
You whisper in someone's ear "Things you can't see cause disease. The key is making and polishing glass. Now, get busy."
Then, within a few decades, the person is dead. Depending on a lot of factors, that person is pretty likely to have taken the knowledge, and the drive to put it into practice, to the grave. Imagine the reaction to this revelation this unfortunate soul would be greeted with. Unfortunately, we don't need to imagine, because history tells us quite clearly what happens to people who are far ahead of their time.
So the trick is to reveal something just far enough ahead to be useful, but not too far ahead to upset prevailing views and power structures. Not easy at all.
Now, imagine the world as we know it has been destroyed by something that sets us way back. How long does it take us to revert to superstition and witch hunts? The sad truth is that we're already there, even at the technological high water mark of the species. I doubt it would take more than 10 years of sustained primitive living to turn the clock back 2 or 3 milennia.
I have to be honest but when I'm thinking of post-apocalyptic scenarios and what I could do to survive, I'm thinking of my cheesemaking skills that I can use to preserve nutritious milk to keep my people fed. And I'm thinking of the farming skills that I lack and that I should really learn.
Civilisation starts with a few sheep or goats, a plot of land cultivated with cereals, some olive trees, maybe a vineyard on the side of a hill. If you can have bread, cheese, olive oil and wine, you have civilisation.
And if we can't set this stuff up, forget about rebooting technology, because we'd be all dead.
My plan, in the event of civilizational collapse is to somehow make it to New Zealand and pitch start-up ideas like the bejesus to Peter Thiel until he lets me into his luxury bunker.
0. https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/bosch10/