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Is there any guide or plan how to rebuild from such a catastrophe? Even brief nuclear winter would cause billion of deaths from starvation (and chaos caused by

Is there any guide or plan how to rebuild from such a catastrophe? Even brief nuclear winter would cause billion of deaths from starvation (and chaos caused by collapsing economy). I just wonder if we have a plan B to rebuild stuff (relatively) quickly or humans will be thrown into preindustrial world condemned to reinvent everything again?

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Whatever hope we had of surviving a nuclear winter now was gone the moment the virus shot the global supply chains to hell.
- wolco 7y ago
  The supply chains are back. China has made big progress and are back to work.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    They're not back yet. The back end is pumping goods again, but the receiving side is crashing, sending demand shock waves upstream.
parsimo2010 7y ago
Plans A-Z call for us avoiding all nuclear winters and impacts from large asteroids. We don’t and won’t ever have a way to quickly rebuild after extinction level events. It will affect multiple generations in the best case.
- addHocker 7y ago
  We can enrich the odds of recovery though, for example by dezentralizing knowledge storage and transfer- aka, youtube tutorials.
anonuser123456 7y ago
There are not plans for such an event. Such plans are inherently unpalletable. The right answer would be murder 90% of the population to sustain the resources for the 10% during the recovery. How many people are game for that?
- SllX 7y ago
  Well you probably don’t need a whole 10% to murder the other 90%.
  - anonuser123456 7y ago
    My point is... If you have enough foodstore for X% of the population to make it through the 5-10 year period of crop failure, but can't do that if you try to feed 100% of the people what do you do? I choose the 10% and continuity of civilization over 100% and complete destruction of society. And if I'm in the 90% .... I'll be pissed, but what needs to be done must be done. In WW2 sailors sealed themselves up below the waterline to save the ship at certain doom to themselves. The universe is an ugly place... But to see the light of humanity possibly extinguished is a worse prospect for me personally.
rurp 7y ago
The world just got caught completely flat footed by a virus that's closely related to the seasonal flu. I shudder to think what will happen when something 1000 times more novel and deadly inevitably comes along.
- magduf 7y ago
  Depends on your definition of "deadly". The MERS virus was much more deadly than this thing, and that wasn't very long ago. The problem with it was that it was too deadly: it killed people off pretty quickly. Pathogens that are highly deadly usually aren't very good at starting plagues, because they kill off their hosts too quickly and for that reason don't spread that much. This one is worse because it has a really long incubation period with few or no symptoms and then does its thing, but still with a relatively low mortality rate. I guess what would really cause civilization to collapse would be a virus that has a very long incubation time with no symptoms, and then sudden very high mortality.
  - Jeema101 7y ago
    I mean, that's kind of what HIV was up until the mid-late 90s anyway. No symptoms for years and then nearly 100% mortality. It's killed millions but still hasn't wiped out civilization.
    - magduf 7y ago
      HIV didn't spread very quickly because it required fluid transfer (and usually sexual, even kissing generally didn't spread it). It's hard to have an "outbreak" when a virus is so difficult to spread between people.
ukabwlsbeux 7y ago
If society was actually thrown back into preindustrial levels, odds are good we would never get back, because all of the easy to acquire oil/coal is already gone.
jerf 7y ago
"Is there any guide or plan how to rebuild from such a catastrophe?" There's a ton of them. You can google "prepper community". IMHO all of them tend to underestimate the cleverness of the remaining humans; i.e., holing up in a cabin in the mountains with a metric ton of freezedried food won't help when you've got people with a metric ton of freezedried motivation to find you. It doesn't matter how much planning you do; such plans would not survive contact with the enemy anyhow. I stick to the regular amounts of prep I've been advising anyhow. It helps even if such a worst-case occurs and gives you time to plan your next move, which is all you can really ask for anyhow. To close out on a happier note, it isn't even all bad news, and it may be getting better over time. Even a catastrophic collapse of civilization could still leave you with a lot more resources than you'd expect, as society gets wealthier over time. For instance, every house that has solar panels on it is just a few components away from being able to provide small, but potentially vital, amounts of power, power that will have all sorts of uses. It may not be fun but people may surprise you with what even the "shattered remnants" of civilization can do. After all, we bootstrapped once already with none of that stuff.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Whatever hope we had of surviving a nuclear winter now was gone the moment the virus shot the global supply chains to hell.

wolco 7y ago
The supply chains are back. China has made big progress and are back to work.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  They're not back yet. The back end is pumping goods again, but the receiving side is crashing, sending demand shock waves upstream.

parsimo2010 7y ago

Plans A-Z call for us avoiding all nuclear winters and impacts from large asteroids. We don’t and won’t ever have a way to quickly rebuild after extinction level events. It will affect multiple generations in the best case.

addHocker 7y ago
We can enrich the odds of recovery though, for example by dezentralizing knowledge storage and transfer- aka, youtube tutorials.

anonuser123456 7y ago

There are not plans for such an event. Such plans are inherently unpalletable. The right answer would be murder 90% of the population to sustain the resources for the 10% during the recovery. How many people are game for that?

SllX 7y ago
Well you probably don’t need a whole 10% to murder the other 90%.
- anonuser123456 7y ago
  My point is... If you have enough foodstore for X% of the population to make it through the 5-10 year period of crop failure, but can't do that if you try to feed 100% of the people what do you do? I choose the 10% and continuity of civilization over 100% and complete destruction of society. And if I'm in the 90% .... I'll be pissed, but what needs to be done must be done. In WW2 sailors sealed themselves up below the waterline to save the ship at certain doom to themselves. The universe is an ugly place... But to see the light of humanity possibly extinguished is a worse prospect for me personally.

rurp 7y ago

The world just got caught completely flat footed by a virus that's closely related to the seasonal flu. I shudder to think what will happen when something 1000 times more novel and deadly inevitably comes along.

magduf 7y ago
Depends on your definition of "deadly". The MERS virus was much more deadly than this thing, and that wasn't very long ago. The problem with it was that it was too deadly: it killed people off pretty quickly. Pathogens that are highly deadly usually aren't very good at starting plagues, because they kill off their hosts too quickly and for that reason don't spread that much. This one is worse because it has a really long incubation period with few or no symptoms and then does its thing, but still with a relatively low mortality rate. I guess what would really cause civilization to collapse would be a virus that has a very long incubation time with no symptoms, and then sudden very high mortality.
- Jeema101 7y ago
  I mean, that's kind of what HIV was up until the mid-late 90s anyway. No symptoms for years and then nearly 100% mortality. It's killed millions but still hasn't wiped out civilization.
  - magduf 7y ago
    HIV didn't spread very quickly because it required fluid transfer (and usually sexual, even kissing generally didn't spread it). It's hard to have an "outbreak" when a virus is so difficult to spread between people.

ukabwlsbeux 7y ago

If society was actually thrown back into preindustrial levels, odds are good we would never get back, because all of the easy to acquire oil/coal is already gone.

jerf 7y ago

"Is there any guide or plan how to rebuild from such a catastrophe?" There's a ton of them. You can google "prepper community". IMHO all of them tend to underestimate the cleverness of the remaining humans; i.e., holing up in a cabin in the mountains with a metric ton of freezedried food won't help when you've got people with a metric ton of freezedried motivation to find you. It doesn't matter how much planning you do; such plans would not survive contact with the enemy anyhow. I stick to the regular amounts of prep I've been advising anyhow. It helps even if such a worst-case occurs and gives you time to plan your next move, which is all you can really ask for anyhow. To close out on a happier note, it isn't even all bad news, and it may be getting better over time. Even a catastrophic collapse of civilization could still leave you with a lot more resources than you'd expect, as society gets wealthier over time. For instance, every house that has solar panels on it is just a few components away from being able to provide small, but potentially vital, amounts of power, power that will have all sorts of uses. It may not be fun but people may surprise you with what even the "shattered remnants" of civilization can do. After all, we bootstrapped once already with none of that stuff.