Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world
80000hours.org
80000hours.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinery%27s_Handbook
Edit:
And a step further back would be Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy, by Moore. That book is a marvel of applied reason.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/foundations-mechanical-accura...
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.
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.
Pretty sure it covers modern cars fairly well.
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!
> 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
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.
You could also drive things directly using a modified bicycle - see the Bicimáquinas-project from Guatemala: http://www.mayapedal.org/index.en
The reprinted-under-many names book from Germany in the 70s? called variously:
"How Things Work", "The Way Things Work", and more
and published by Simon & Schuster, Paladin Press, and others
Searching for C Van Amerongen will bring it up, although I think it is by multiple authors.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=C%20Van%20Amerongen
I like it so much I have many copies of it both soft and hardcover.
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.
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.
Being from before the internet, one of the characters collects a whole range of books for topics such as tools, engineering, farming etc.
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.
You will just have to strip materials from cars and buildings instead of digging them out of the ground.
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 ...
Do you have a general interest in Civil Engineering or a particular project in mind?
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 ...
- "Tacoma Narrows bridge failure" - "Roman concrete" - "Millenium bridge London" - "Concrete cancer" - "Gabions" - "3,2,1 concrete mix"
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.
When you're done with concrete cancer then why not investigate how a building in Florida can collapse - ie this horror: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57631698
Cheers Jon
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel#Reproduction_resea...
"You can't simply...", right? (The "lol" kind of gave it away.)
Too bad, I thought that was about it.
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)
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
In any case charcoal can be used as a substitute.
And consequently, those surviving and rebuilding are going to have the residue of a civilization that supported many more people to work with.
Cast iron might be relatively rare, but would it be relatively rare for 1/1000th as many of us?
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/
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?
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...
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.
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.
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)
And so it goes.
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.
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")
Really, it's a tougher row to hoe than you think.
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.
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".
"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."
If Amazon commenters filed pull requests rather than potshots, the world would be a better place. :)
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.
[1] Or looks rare, I may be mistaken.
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.
If he hosted it on GitHub that would be a different story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No special steel sheet.
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....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
[3, (big pdf!)]: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/m2/...
It's not all about gadgets and electricity.
Why static analysis?
Or hanging the ridgeline of a shed roof from a post so it doesn't push the walls out of line.
Or building a truss for a bridge over a creek, instead of a huge arch of stone.
Lots of places statics comes in handy. And we take it for granted, that we know this stuff!
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.
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 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.
Or is it just an instance of: “this is the status quo, accept it”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://aviationbenefits.org/environmental-efficiency/climat...
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)
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."
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.
https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/
Because you'll need a little humor if you're stuck in post-apocalyptic world
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 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.
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 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.
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.
An emergency action guide of some sort...
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.
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.
a) Lots of books have covered this already (SAS Survival Handbook, etc)
b) the first 2 weeks is going to be largely luck whether you survive or not, so he's going to jump ahead to cover the lucky ones
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.
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.
[0] PDF warning! https://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/f&web.pdf
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.
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.
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.
Sooo. How are you going to grow enough of that, while /not growing/ any other type of fungus, mold, bacteria, etc...
There's a reason modern medicine utilizes things like cleanrooms and laboratories, instead of y'know a farm and a barn.
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.
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.
The leaders of the day decided, that the protected lands would no longer receive protection, there was no populace vote.
You think post-apocalypse would be different from a monarchy /how/ exactly?
The strong rule, and without rule of the masses and enforcers of law, we're back to warlords and kings. Good luck with your processes...
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.
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.
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.
What's the point in that? You end up using the identical amount of resources, but having fewer people. What goal exactly did you accomplish?
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?
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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
How are you going to get people to agree to "live sustainably" over thousands of years?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Here's a short essay that covers this more in depth: https://www.gotquestions.org/human-rights.html
[edit] wording [/edit]
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.
Can’t really have it both ways.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Maybe humanity needs a real Foundation in these times.
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)
Why is that a concern to the survivors? Perhaps they decide that "bouncing back faster" is the last thing they want?
Is anyone working on how one might build a scaled down version of current supply chains?
How small can a chip fab be, to be able to bootstrap another fab? Can you make drugs in fully automated shipping container sized labs?
Has anyone mapped out a full process from "Every very high tech facility destroyed" to a full technological society?
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.
i think things like this should be part of the curriculum
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).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-we-owe-to...
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.
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.