9 ms·

Moving through West Africa I admire the resilience of people here. In many places, the power being ON is the surprise, not when it's OFF. I often wonder what wo

• Caveman_Coder 9y ago
  Most, if not all, of us here on HN would be out of our normal jobs. There isn't really any immediate need for developers when there isn't any electricity.
  • grecy 9y ago
    Think bigger. Almost overnight you would have no access to food or clean drinking water. There would certainly be no gasoline, heating, cooling, showers, etc. You wouldn't even be able to "get" money - ATMs won't work and you certainly won't be able to use your smart phone. So you would not be able to buy life necessities even if someone were selling them. A job will be the last thing you think about.
    • Caveman_Coder 9y ago
      I was mostly being tongue-in-cheek. Of course we wouldn't care about a job at that point...its also why I have the required amount of necessities ready to go in case it does.
      • kwhitefoot 9y ago
        > the required amount of necessities ready to go What is the required amount? And where where would you go?
        • Caveman_Coder 9y ago
          I should say I have my required amount of necessities... Where would I go? It depends
    • zyb09 9y ago
      I think what he is trying to say is, that developers will be useless dead weight in this kind of post apocalyptic scenario. Everybody will be out of there normal day jobs, but a lot of people can contribute to survival with their skillset. Doctors, mechanics, farmers, caretakers, hand labor, etc. will be in high demand. Office people & developers, not so much.
      • talmand 9y ago
        Am I one of the rare developers that grew up in rural USA that has remnants of what are now known as survival skills but I just consider as childhood fun? I always tell my team that if things go bad then I'll be the one keeping them alive.
        • zyb09 9y ago
          You sound like a good guy to be around :)
          • talmand 9y ago
            I like my team, I'll keep them alive. That way when society returns our children will be able to take over our webdev duties.
      • logfromblammo 9y ago
        We are not dependent upon any specific technology. We are "fixers", and computers are just our hammer that makes everything else look like a nail. Take them away, and the other, lesser tools in the toolbox are still there. I intend to attach myself to a raider strongman, to provide solutions to their difficult problems, such as how to crack an entrenched survivalist's defenses and get his stockpile out. I'm a decent hand at basic chemistry, too, like organic extractions and distillations. There are many potential princes, and Machiavelli only needs one of them.
  • dsq 9y ago
    All developed countries have numerous storage depots, the existence and location of which are only accessible in some online form. Even offline digital form such as a downloaded wikipedia. So a computer-literate person might be of use to a post downfall warlord, plunked down before a laptop powered by a diesel generator and ordered to "do the magic" perl scripts to retrieve all Costco warehouses within a fifty mile radius...
• nopinsight 9y ago
  Growing food is not that hard. If necessity calls for it, people can learn to do it sufficiently well from books and neighbors. More challenging issues are access to clean drinking water and fertile land, safety from pillaging, and getting proper medical care.
  • FooHentai 9y ago
    >Growing food is not that hard. If necessity calls for it, people can learn to do it sufficiently well from books and neighbors. Disagree. It's pretty hard, from a cold start, to reach the point of producing a significant number of calories independently. It's a far cry from keeping a veggie/herb garden, and even harder in turn to do it over a number of successive years. Also, if we're specifically considering a scenario without power, the preservation of that food through the year is a major challenge in itself. >More challenging issues are access to clean drinking water and fertile land, safety from pillaging, and getting proper medical care. Absolutely agree.
  • Angostura 9y ago
    I encourage you to watch the first episode of James Burke's original Connections, if you believe that.
  • booleandilemma 9y ago
    Wouldn't winter come and kill all your crops? How much food are you planning on growing?
  • GlenTheMachine 9y ago
    I grew up in a farming family, and I run a hobby sheep farm. Supplementing your food supply with a family garden isn't that difficult. Completely supplying yourself and your family with enough calories to live via farming is enormously difficult, both in terms of physical labor and in terms of skillset. It also takes at least 45 days, from a standing start, to get anything edible, and that's if you are willing to suvive completely on turnips (which have the shortest yield period of any domesticated vegetable crop). Corn, beans, and potatoes, which are going to be the crops that provide the bulk of your calories in a survival situation, require roughly 100 days to yield, and they only grow during the right season. Furthermore, without either industrial fertilizer or an established farming system that includes animals, you will only grow those crops once before your land begins to be depleted and your yields in subsequent years will drop until they are no longer survivable in approximately year three. You are growing the animals as much or more for manure as for meat. And none of that includes the vagaries of the weather and various plant diseases that can decimate your crop. Basically, if you don't have access to fresh water, you're doomed immediately. If you don't have at least a 12 month supply of food in your basement, you're doomed in two to three months. If you haven't already implemented a closed nitrogen system using composting and animal agriculture, but happen to have land, seeds and a hoe, you're doomed in two to three years. If you have done all of those things you can probably survive for a decade ot three, if you can outlast the looters. For reference, the pioneers who cleared the forests in the midwest would go in on year one and girdle all of the trees. Then they'd go back home. In year two, they'd plant turnips and pumpkins, which would grow among the dead trees, and they'd survive on those for the first couple of years as the stumps rotted. It took several years to establish a sustainable farm. The pioneers who went eg to Utah, where there were no forests, would plant immediately, but the first crop was just seed potatoes, which they would harvest and store - they couldn't carry enough to eat, and were essentially bootstrapping a potato crop from what they could carry. They carried enough food to survive through a complete growing season, augmented by hunting and foraging. It was a hard life, they were living hand to mouth, and they already knew what they were doing.
• adventured 9y ago
  That's a nice fantasy I suppose. You're no doubt aware of how much West Africa's population has increased since WW2, such that they now have hundreds of millions of people. Most of those people - as in the West - can only exist due to increasingly advanced, connected economic and technological systems. Nigeria's population as an example, has gone from 45 million to 186 million since 1960. That extreme population growth has equally big requirements that are necessary to keep all of those people from dying. In a given year, the West is directly responsible for tens of millions of people being alive in Africa. Routine food aid and supply, sometimes preventing famine and random general food scarcity. This has been a non-stop effort for decades and continues in many places across Sub-Saharan Africa. Medication supply, preventing millions of deaths from everything from HIV/AIDS to TB to malaria to infection. That includes invention, manufacturing and delivery of drugs. Outbreak intervention. The substantial response to the 2014-2016 ebola outbreak as an example, which stopped it from becoming a catastrophe. A massive percentage of people - represented by typical extreme population growth curves of the last ~50 years - in low development nations would die in your scenario. If you need a recent example of how fragile the lower development nations are (in part due to their commonly vast population expansions and weak supporting infrastructure), you need look no further than the global food riots from the commodity bubble of ten years ago, as it dramatically rocked the world's poorest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_price_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_pri...
  • username130917 9y ago
    I dont think food aids were responsible for the massive growth in Nigeria's population though improved healthcare definitely played a role in that. I think the biggest contributor to population growth has been the consistent susidizing of the local economy from oil income. Also, Nigeria was able to handle the ebola epidemic that got to its shores with little to no outside assistance.
    • notfromhere 9y ago
      its petroleum fertilizer. places like mexico were famine-ridden in the 40s until they figured out how to make industrial fertilizer
• tpeo 9y ago
  Is "resilience" really the word for what's on your mind? As far as I understand, "resilience" is the ability to recover from loss. But if electricity is rare enough to be treated as a gift rather than a given, should it be considered a loss when it goes away?
• mirimir 9y ago
  > I think there is a lot to be said for knowing how to grow your own food, hunt your own meat, build your own shelter, etc. That's true enough. The problem is the people with guns, who will take all that from you. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a very depressing read. Its scenario is worse than grid collapse, in that nothing could be grown. But there wouldn't be much commercial agriculture without electricity.
  • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    Having a .45 as your disaster/emergency preparedness plan only works in places like CA and a few other coastal states where the odds are very low that any random other person is packing. I would not advise it.
    • mirimir 9y ago
      It doesn't scale well, though. Especially because serious looters will have probably hit National Guard armories, before getting to you :( Indeed, once things get bad enough, the most serious looters will be former police and military.
      • Danihan 9y ago
        My personal fantasy always has me going underground for about 10 years, then coming out once any violent purges are over, well-rested and ready to repopulate. Resilient, like a cockroach. I always think that particularly when I watch "The Walking Dead." I'd just find a nice bomb shelter and try to write my the great American novel for about 5-10 years. No trying to seek out other survivors, no trying to rebuild, etc. I mean, I'm pretty introverted (and also very overworked at the moment,) so really that just sounds like a nice vacation. Maybe in reality I'd get tired of it pretty quickly. But being bored and lonely for a few years still beats ending up as cannibal jerky hands-down.
        • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
          Combine the best of both. Carjack your way to the boondocks with everything you need. Box truck + travel trailer + contents of a Walmart garden center would be a damn good start. /s (should be obvious)
• pjc50 9y ago
  > In my experience and estimation, a massive percentage of people in Developed countries would wither and die, while undeveloped countries would continue to function almost exactly as they do now. Well, yes. That's what the infrastructure is for. Do not romanticise places without infrastructure; there you simply have a much higher risk of dying from something that westerners would consider preventable. Like maternity. Growing your own food works until there's a crop failure. Who here is old enough to remember the Ethiopian famine of the early 80s, possibly the first and most shocking western TV news coverage of a famine?
  • FooHentai 9y ago
    OPs position seems to be that primitive societies are more resilient against any event that disrupts technological capabilities. I agree with that. Your position seems to be that primitive societies are a horrible place to live and if it's a choice between the two, no sane person would argue for a return to primativism. I agree with that too. There's a 'third way' that seems to be gaining some ground among luddites, preppers, off-gridders and primitivists. The idea is to take full advantage of modern technologies but also devote a portion of resources and time to maintaining the capability to do things 'the old way'. So, be 'on the grid' but combine it with on-premise solar/wind/hydro/genny. Use all the appliances in your modern kitchen but go into the woods a few times a year and test your ability to make fire from sticks. Buy goods from the supermarket but still grow a portion of your food at home. This third way is far from flawless. It's still a gamble, not unlike Pascal's Wager: You are investing time and money into maintaining primitive capabilities that are far inferior to the technology-enabled capabilities available to you in the modern world, and you're double-spending to maintain both in parallel. But if you can approach it as a hobbyist, it can be a pretty fun and challenging pastime to get invested in.
    • pjc50 9y ago
      This is veering into the "prepper" debate, which the Economist clearly wanted to set up with their disaster-porn writing in the article. But the key question has to be: individual or collective resilience? Yes, it's not a straight up conflict, but I do think things could be greatly improved if people kept asking questions about collective preparation for crises, improving the civic and governmental responses to them, and (in the case under discussion) not ignoring problems simply because they are uncomfortable and expensive.
• WalterBright 9y ago
  Too many people for hunting meat to be remotely viable, probably by at least a 100, maybe a 1000. Everyone growing their own food is subsistence agriculture, and that cannot support the population, either.
  • adam 9y ago
    Thanks for bringing up this simple fact. Being skilled in hunting, fishing, etc. still doesn't mean you're actually going to be able to find game with any kind of sustained outage going on, unless you are in a very remote part of America given the numbers of people (and fellow skilled hunters) who will be in your same predicament.
  • mirimir 9y ago
    Eventually, they'll be hunting each other. Until the population drops back to the subsistence level. But of course, international aid would kick in, well before it got to that. One hopes, anyway.
    • BatFastard 9y ago
      It would take years to get into place the infrastructure needed to supply aid for 300 million people. But the population would be greatly reduced by that time.
      • mirimir 9y ago
        Yeah, you need to be realistic.
  • athenot 9y ago
    It's a first world fallacy that you need to eat steak every day—or any other large animal for that matter. It doesn't take a lot of land to raise chickens and with a few, you already have more eggs than you know what to do, ergo you can pool that with neighbors. Someone can own a cow, which requires 1 acre of pasture but produces enough milk for many families. If you want to see what this looks like at scale, just look at the countryside in Europe a century ago. Villages are mostly townhouses all huddled together, often with long-stretching back yards supporting vegetable gardens, and fields all around. Is that hard work? You bet! A lot more physically demanding than city life. But also more sustainable. The downside of course being that there's so much focus on basic sustenance that few people can devote time to occupations of the mind (which is primarily what cities are devoted to). It seems over time the 2 models have fought each other and the city has won, but a question to ask is if this has been at the cost of resilliency. To me, this is the attraction of suburbia. Not the nice lawns (though I have one) or country clubs, but the ability to have one foot in the city and keep at least a toe in the countryside, with my own vegetables.
• abraae 9y ago
  I wouldn't compare it to the lifestyle of someone in West Africa, but we have an off grid cabin that we built the infrastructure up from nothing. Such excitement to achieve the milestones we take for granted back in the burbs. A fire pit. Rain water tank. A sheltered long drop to crap in. Solar electricity. Hot running water and a sink. A shower. Internet. Every one achieved was a huge leap forward in comfort. It really helped me get perspective on what you really need to live, and cured us of any desire to strive for a bigger and bigger house with immense walk-in wardrobes.