20 ms·
Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoSimple 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. It's not all about gadgets and electricity.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoI find it a bit weird to have static analysis on that list. Other than that, I agree. Why static analysis?
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoe.g. Building a hut, with cross-bracing so the square-lashed frame doesn't collapse in a light breeze. 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!
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoOh, 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.
- YZF 4y agoYou gotta have `lint` in a post-apocalyptic world though.
- imoverclocked 4y agoYeah, it's useful for starting fires.
- renewiltord 4y agoLittle known fact: Rome collapsed because they did not use a language that was amenable to type-checking.
- ntoskrnl 4y agoThankfully Rome 2.0 didn't make the same mistake. https://rome.tools/ https://rome.tools/
- toomuchtodo 4y agohttps://youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA https://youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
- Ishmaeli 4y agoAlso, 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.
- Archelaos 4y ago> 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.
- bluefirebrand 4y agoYou 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.
- Archelaos 4y agoI 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.
- jerry1979 4y agoIn 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.
- jwithington 4y agoI'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.
- alasdair_ 4y ago> Are there any guides for the first two weeks? 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.
- nescioquid 4y ago> 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?
- NoImmatureAdHom 4y agoI can think of three ways: 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.
- alasdair_ 4y agoI 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/ 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).
- wmwmwm 4y agoI’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
- myth_drannon 4y agoThe book has scathing reviews on Goodreads.
- ravi-delia 4y agoI 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.
- CJefferson 4y agoYes, materials will be important. 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.
- Animats 4y agoThis 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. [1] https://archive.org/details/boyandbatteryrev00yate https://archive.org/details/boyandbatteryrev00yate
- teddyh 4y agoSee also The Mysterious Island (1875) by Jules Verne.
- hh3k0 4y agoI 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?
- bluefirebrand 4y agoAfter an apocalypse, if you survive and society has collapsed, resources will be abundant. You will just have to strip materials from cars and buildings instead of digging them out of the ground.
- VectorLock 4y agoBetter hop to it, that steel isn't going to last forever.
- bluefirebrand 4y agoI sure hope that the steel in skyscrapers and stuff is going to last a long freaking time though.
- 13415 4y agoI'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.
- colechristensen 4y agoThe 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.
- sky-kedge0749 4y agoThere 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.
- alx__ 4y agoI also recommend Ryan North's book, How to Invent Everything https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ Because you'll need a little humor if you're stuck in post-apocalyptic world
- gavmor 4y agoIf 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. 0. https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/bosch10/ https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/bosch10/
- _jal 4y agoMachinery's Handbook is similar, but sort of a step back on the production chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinery%27s_Handbook 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-accuracy https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/foundations-mechanical-accura...
- ImprovedSilence 4y agoAnother similar vein, the electrical engineering handbook https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780121709600/the-electrical-engineering-handbook https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780121709600/the-electri...
- throwawayarnty 4y agoIs 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.
- bobthepanda 4y agoin 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.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoI 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
- DylanDmitri 4y agoKey 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.
- all2 4y agoWhy 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?
- barry-cotter 4y agoThere’s a mixture of universal features of how societies work well and political fashion. The parochialism is annoying.
- throwaway892238 4y agoWeird 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.
- akersten 4y ago> 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.
- throwaway892238 4y agoYou 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.
- 4y ago
- Barrin92 4y agoI 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.
- 99_00 4y agoTechnology 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.
- joe_the_user 4y agohow to reinstate governance 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.
- NateEag 4y ago> 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.
- laverick 4y agoRelated project & TED talk - Open Source Blueprints for Rebuilding Civilization https://www.opensourceecology.org/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoMy 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.
- azemetre 4y agoYou’re better off becoming super fit and staying young. He might let you be his blood boy, way better odds this way.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Barrera 4y ago> 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). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-we-owe-to-the-invention-microscope-180962725/ 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.
- datavirtue 4y ago"bounce back faster" Why is that a concern to the survivors? Perhaps they decide that "bouncing back faster" is the last thing they want?
- ForHackernews 4y agoIf you're interested in this topic, you might also be interested to learn about http://collapseos.org/ 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."
- wrycoder 4y agoFifty 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.
- hansor 4y agoTotal 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.
- 01100011 4y agoThe #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.
- imtringued 4y agoYou 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.
- cheese_goddess 4y agoYou 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.
- Thorentis 4y agoAn aside, but the title sounds like the premise of Asimov's Foundation series. Highly recommended, I thoroughly enjoyed reading all three books.
- mariojv 4y agoI thought exactly this when reading the article. I found this comment by searching for "Foundation" in the comments section. Maybe humanity needs a real Foundation in these times.
- Twisell 4y agoI 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)
- ImprovedSilence 4y agoPrimitive technology is a pretty fascinating YouTube channel along the vein of (re)building everything from scratch. https://youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA https://youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
- chasd00 4y agoTo 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?
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- salgernon 4y agoFrom 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.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages#cite_note-Sandia_1992-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin... [3, (big pdf!)]: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/m2/1/high_res_d/10117359.pdf https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/m2/...
- vertnerd 4y agoIn 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.
- mateo1 4y agoI'm always entertained by the optimism of the people who think they'll be the ones to survive.
- Georgelemental 4y agoWell, 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
- mateo1 4y agoYou 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.
- nostrademons 4y agoI'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.
- imtringued 4y agoThe 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.
- yourapostasy 4y agoThere 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.
- marsven_422 4y ago
- mym1990 4y agoThis reminds me of the Foundation series. Watched the show and reading through the books now, an interesting premise.
- antihipocrat 4y agoA technological roadmap may just bounce us right back into another apocalypse.
- eternityforest 4y agoWhy not literally stockpile the things needed to pick up mostly from where things left off? 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?
- tetris11 4y agoThe 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.
- imtringued 4y agoI 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.
- seu 4y agoTime 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.
- Aachen 4y agoHow 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.
- narrator 4y agoThere'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.
- craftuser 4y agoYou might also enjoy: Dr. Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone
- cheese_goddess 4y agoI 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.
- Temporary_31337 4y agoThe 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.
- Havoc 4y agoIt just occurred to me that I bought the book in kindle. So uh I guess first priority is find a way to charge a kindle