5 ms·

Yes, 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 h

Yes, 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.

hguant 4y ago
>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.
- zbrozek 4y ago
  I trip over coal in folks' backyards in Kentucky. You don't need more than hand tools to get at it.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  They do open-cut mining in Wyoming, from what I saw.
- Tade0 4y ago
  There's still a significant amount of hard coal in Germany and Poland - Russian/Australian resources are (or were in the case of Russia) simply cheaper. In any case charcoal can be used as a substitute.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Wyoming coal is very much surface coal (at least in the Powder River Basin). The problem is that it's in the wrong place. It's not near iron deposits... well, there was a large iron mining operation near South Pass, but it ended decades ago. I don't know if it ended because it was played out, or just no longer economical.
  - flembat 4y ago
    Trade moves goods where needed. Cornish tin was used by people that had no idea Cornwall existed. It is even possible that ancient Egypt had access to cocaine and tobacco.
ethbr0 4y ago
One thing not to discount is that if we needed to rebuild civilization suddenly... a lot of us are going to be dead. 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?
- notahacker 4y ago
  And to a large extent, you skip the searching for raw materials to smelt cast iron to make a stove and go straight to searching collapsed buildings for cast iron stoves, or collecting railings to make a ladder etc...
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    Knowing how to repair and re-cast is still a useful skill, though. At some point the scavengeable items will have been scavenged and worn out, and if you want civilization to continue, you need to reboot it at a drastically lower level of complexity. That means building new production that can still be operated at the lower population levels of a post-apocalyptic world.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      "Civilization" is really two things though: intangible facts & physical artifacts If you preserve facts, you can reboot pretty quickly, relative to the initial time they took to discover. Imagine how quickly you could make high quality steel if you could skip all the fumbling and straight to the proper carbon mix! https://acoup.blog/tag/iron/ https://acoup.blog/tag/iron/
      - nostrademons 4y ago
        Certainly you can probably do it faster than the 10,000 years or so it took the first time. But it's not a panacea. A "cold start" of a complex system isn't just about replicating the system itself, it's about replicating the conditions that gave rise to it. (Witness how many ex-Googlers have founded search startups and failed to get traction, or how many people have replicated Facebook and Reddit clones and failed to get traction.) A lot of our industrial processes (like building microchips, photovoltaics, plastics, modern manufacturing) require a large base of tooling that itself requires prerequisites which may not be available. In some cases the raw materials (eg. crude oil, rare earths) are no longer accessible. The knowledge is useful, but it'll be useful in the sense that then people can look at their current situation and bring portions of the past into it. That's probably going to involve a lot of scavenging and looting, because why dig iron ore out of the ground and fire it with coal dug out of the ground when there are large supplies of abandoned scrap steel in the world?
rm_-rf_slash 4y ago
Good point. Even more, there is no way to make coal geologically ever again. All coal comes from fossilized trees that came about before fungi. They just grew until they fell over and stacked up then got buried and fossilized. Now they just rot. Which means starting from scratch would require a different fuel like oil, but that’s even harder to extract these days, let alone in a post-apocalyptic environment.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  I dunno. There are a lot of gas stations and truck stops last time I checked. Stuff stored in tanks underground tends to be usable for quite a long time.
  - User23 4y ago
    Pure gasoline is good for about 6 months. E10 is good for about 3 because ethanol is so hydrophilic. Fuel stabilizer can stretch that to a couple years, but gas stations generally don’t use it.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
      In theory and running high performance motors at rated capability. In the real world I use years-old gasoline all the time in small engines.
goatlover 4y ago
You wouldn't be starting from scratch as a lot of stuff already made would be left lying around, and the knowledge for fixing it and making it work would largely still exist in some form.
- groby_b 4y ago
  Yeah... coal and oil won't be lying around. Which robs you of your major energy source, breaking the "fix and use" plan. Metals are often in refined form, which means in many cases higher melting points. (E.g. pig iron is 1500K, steel is 2800K) We're not even mentioning electronics, because the vast majority of it isn't weather resistant, which means your "left lying around" is gone pretty quickly. Plastic is in many instances only reusable in its exact shape. Alkaline batteries last 5-10 years, so good luck with those. Solar cells, in the best case, 25-30 years. But all of that doesn't really matter. You'll spend the bunch of your time trying to just secure water, food, and shelter. Every day you don't get started on fixing things is decay. Every day you don't spend on food is hunger. (Subsistence farming is back-breaking, never-ending labor) And so it goes.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "Subsistence farming is back-breaking, never-ending labor" Subsistence farming without machines is back-breaking, never-ending labor. The whole idea is therefore to get machines up and running again as fast as possible. And it all depends on the doomsday scenario. In most cases, there should be enough machines left to scavange. Or after a while, enough animals to be hunted. Potential biggest hurdle are social dynamics. Confrontation instead of cooperation. And then the last capable electrician in the are gets shot, because some other scavenger wanted to get his corned beef.
    - groby_b 4y ago
      Beginning sentence: "Coal and oil won't be lying around". The amount of machines you can run is limited, and so is the duration. Animal hunting is mostly a settler fantasy. There's not a single place in the US that has sufficient animal population to sustain human nutrition for more than a couple hundred people. You will require careful husbanding. And, for anything larger than feeding ~100 people, you'll require feedstuff. Which you transport... Ah. There's the lack of energy sources again. Social dynamics are the least of your problem: The confrontation fans tend to die out quickly, or secure a fiefdom within which they ensure collaboration. Human beings pretty much default to tribal behavior. And they favor collaboration even across tribes. (I recommend reading Rebecca Solnit's "Paradise built in hell") Really, it's a tougher row to hoe than you think.

hguant 4y ago

>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.

zbrozek 4y ago
I trip over coal in folks' backyards in Kentucky. You don't need more than hand tools to get at it.
ethbr0 4y ago
They do open-cut mining in Wyoming, from what I saw.
Tade0 4y ago
There's still a significant amount of hard coal in Germany and Poland - Russian/Australian resources are (or were in the case of Russia) simply cheaper. In any case charcoal can be used as a substitute.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Wyoming coal is very much surface coal (at least in the Powder River Basin). The problem is that it's in the wrong place. It's not near iron deposits... well, there was a large iron mining operation near South Pass, but it ended decades ago. I don't know if it ended because it was played out, or just no longer economical.
- flembat 4y ago
  Trade moves goods where needed. Cornish tin was used by people that had no idea Cornwall existed. It is even possible that ancient Egypt had access to cocaine and tobacco.

ethbr0 4y ago

One thing not to discount is that if we needed to rebuild civilization suddenly... a lot of us are going to be dead. 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?

notahacker 4y ago
And to a large extent, you skip the searching for raw materials to smelt cast iron to make a stove and go straight to searching collapsed buildings for cast iron stoves, or collecting railings to make a ladder etc...
- nostrademons 4y ago
  Knowing how to repair and re-cast is still a useful skill, though. At some point the scavengeable items will have been scavenged and worn out, and if you want civilization to continue, you need to reboot it at a drastically lower level of complexity. That means building new production that can still be operated at the lower population levels of a post-apocalyptic world.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    "Civilization" is really two things though: intangible facts & physical artifacts If you preserve facts, you can reboot pretty quickly, relative to the initial time they took to discover. Imagine how quickly you could make high quality steel if you could skip all the fumbling and straight to the proper carbon mix! https://acoup.blog/tag/iron/ https://acoup.blog/tag/iron/
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      Certainly you can probably do it faster than the 10,000 years or so it took the first time. But it's not a panacea. A "cold start" of a complex system isn't just about replicating the system itself, it's about replicating the conditions that gave rise to it. (Witness how many ex-Googlers have founded search startups and failed to get traction, or how many people have replicated Facebook and Reddit clones and failed to get traction.) A lot of our industrial processes (like building microchips, photovoltaics, plastics, modern manufacturing) require a large base of tooling that itself requires prerequisites which may not be available. In some cases the raw materials (eg. crude oil, rare earths) are no longer accessible. The knowledge is useful, but it'll be useful in the sense that then people can look at their current situation and bring portions of the past into it. That's probably going to involve a lot of scavenging and looting, because why dig iron ore out of the ground and fire it with coal dug out of the ground when there are large supplies of abandoned scrap steel in the world?

rm_-rf_slash 4y ago

Good point. Even more, there is no way to make coal geologically ever again. All coal comes from fossilized trees that came about before fungi. They just grew until they fell over and stacked up then got buried and fossilized. Now they just rot. Which means starting from scratch would require a different fuel like oil, but that’s even harder to extract these days, let alone in a post-apocalyptic environment.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
I dunno. There are a lot of gas stations and truck stops last time I checked. Stuff stored in tanks underground tends to be usable for quite a long time.
- User23 4y ago
  Pure gasoline is good for about 6 months. E10 is good for about 3 because ethanol is so hydrophilic. Fuel stabilizer can stretch that to a couple years, but gas stations generally don’t use it.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    In theory and running high performance motors at rated capability. In the real world I use years-old gasoline all the time in small engines.

goatlover 4y ago

You wouldn't be starting from scratch as a lot of stuff already made would be left lying around, and the knowledge for fixing it and making it work would largely still exist in some form.

groby_b 4y ago
Yeah... coal and oil won't be lying around. Which robs you of your major energy source, breaking the "fix and use" plan. Metals are often in refined form, which means in many cases higher melting points. (E.g. pig iron is 1500K, steel is 2800K) We're not even mentioning electronics, because the vast majority of it isn't weather resistant, which means your "left lying around" is gone pretty quickly. Plastic is in many instances only reusable in its exact shape. Alkaline batteries last 5-10 years, so good luck with those. Solar cells, in the best case, 25-30 years. But all of that doesn't really matter. You'll spend the bunch of your time trying to just secure water, food, and shelter. Every day you don't get started on fixing things is decay. Every day you don't spend on food is hunger. (Subsistence farming is back-breaking, never-ending labor) And so it goes.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "Subsistence farming is back-breaking, never-ending labor" Subsistence farming without machines is back-breaking, never-ending labor. The whole idea is therefore to get machines up and running again as fast as possible. And it all depends on the doomsday scenario. In most cases, there should be enough machines left to scavange. Or after a while, enough animals to be hunted. Potential biggest hurdle are social dynamics. Confrontation instead of cooperation. And then the last capable electrician in the are gets shot, because some other scavenger wanted to get his corned beef.
  - groby_b 4y ago
    Beginning sentence: "Coal and oil won't be lying around". The amount of machines you can run is limited, and so is the duration. Animal hunting is mostly a settler fantasy. There's not a single place in the US that has sufficient animal population to sustain human nutrition for more than a couple hundred people. You will require careful husbanding. And, for anything larger than feeding ~100 people, you'll require feedstuff. Which you transport... Ah. There's the lack of energy sources again. Social dynamics are the least of your problem: The confrontation fans tend to die out quickly, or secure a fiefdom within which they ensure collaboration. Human beings pretty much default to tribal behavior. And they favor collaboration even across tribes. (I recommend reading Rebecca Solnit's "Paradise built in hell") Really, it's a tougher row to hoe than you think.