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"Humans" as such would have still survived, but I don't know, if that what would have been left of it would be realistically to be called "civilization". I am

"Humans" as such would have still survived, but I don't know, if that what would have been left of it would be realistically to be called "civilization". I am also not to sure, if they (the remnants) would survive for long with global climate change and radioactive fallout everywhere.

InclinedPlane 12y ago
Almost certainly a Cold War maximum nuclear war would result in collapse of industrialized civilization as we know it, concomitant with an enormous reduction in worldwide population. Nevertheless, a lot of things would almost certainly remain: literacy, agriculture, metalworking, the ideas of science and industry, and so on. Human civilization would be in a very bad state for a good long time, but it would mostly be a setback to previous eras, not complete destruction of civilization.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  That is far from certainty. Industrialization depended on having easy and abundant access to natural resources like coal, oil, and various metals. We've exhausted the easy deposits of these resources, the ones a preindustrial civilization could get to. If civilization were to collapse now, it may never rise again.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Nah. We've got information, which is more valuable than energy and not likely to be lost in a collapse. Civilization doesn't require pissing away prodigious amounts of energy on every little thing - that's just the way we do it when we have lots of energy. Also, there's plenty more available energy on this planet, many times the amount we've used so far in building this civilization. Methane Hydrate, Thorium to name a couple. We're just drunk on oil right now, but don't confuse that with 'using up all the energy.'
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      Neither of your premises have much to support them. Dennis Meadows, of Limits to Growth fame, has noted that adding technology to his models does very little to shift the ultimate outcome. And information absent energy isn't worth much at all. The world as a whole has effectively equal access to information. What's it's got unequal access to are raw material resources, most particularly energy.
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        What its got is different cultures, which makes all the difference. The Protestant work ethic has an entirely different outcome for a people than many other ethics for instance. Japan has little or no natural resource - look at what they accomplish. And what do you mean, absent energy? There's plenty of energy around. Methane Hydrate reserves are estimated at 6X all the oil we ever found for instance.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    It would be problematic for the rebuilders if we managed to vaporize everything we've built, but at the moment, pure metals are far more available than they've been in history. We've also probably evened out the geographic availability (so for example you can scrape together a few hundred pounds of copper pretty much anywhere there is a little bit of settlement). I agree that coal/energy would likely be a problem.
    - jessaustin 12y ago
      I'm not sure what book it was (I'm thinking it was something by OSC), but I've read a scifi story in which some mad scientists were intentionally "resetting" civilization to no-tech chapter one. They had no problems slaughtering billions of people, burning their possessions, and brainwashing their descendants. The major issue was removing all those convenient alloys from the reach of future metallurgists. They eventually settled on some nano-tech devices that melted everything into giant blobs and then sank the blobs thousands of feet into the Earth. There was a quip at the end about geology in future being doomed to failure, based as it would be on some harebrained explanation for the natural formation of convenient blobs of alloy. I wonder if the story itself is as fucked-up as my memory of it is.
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    I've seen that argument made many times, to be frank it's not actually as well founded as it seems. This is because it confuses two very different things: ease of production of natural resources and cost effectiveness of production of natural resources. In the early stages of industrialization ease of production is paramount, but in later stages quality, production volume, and per unit cost is paramount. Early resources can be very much more expensive to produce and very much lower quality (as they were historically) and yet still be viable. Take coal for example. A small coal mine near the surface can be a quite viable source of coal in early industry, but such coal mines would not be economical in the modern era. Because modern coal is higher quality, much higher volume production, and mined out of areas where it is generally most amenable to industrialized production. There is an old abandoned coal mine within walking distance of me right now, I've been there and picked up coal off the surface of the ground. There's still literally tons of coal there that could be mined quite easily by hand. But compared to other sources of coal in the 21st century it's simply not economical to bother worrying about trying to extract it to depletion. And the same exact principles apply to essentially every other natural resource. For example, we no longer mine bog iron because it's a very manual labor intensive work compared to, say, shoveling hematite sand into rail cars. Additionally, this argument ignores the fact that vast amounts of resources will exist in the form of remnants of our present civilization (only the tiniest fraction of which will be vaporized by nuclear explosions). Huge amounts of iron, aluminum, glass, etc. will be left over, short-cutting the normal production process as for pre-industrial processes. Re-industrialization after a collapse will be different than past industrialization but I see no indications that it will be very much more difficult and certainly not impossible.
    - Houshalter 12y ago
      Civilizations have collapsed before from far less serious disasters. From Mayans to Mediterranean civilizations (several of them actually) to the 5 centuries of decline and stagnation of China, and probably countless more I haven't read about. And the industrial world is far less resilient. We depend on huge amounts of infrastructure and massively complex systems of trade and production. Very likely we would return to subsistence farming. There would be little or no remaining industry, and not enough resources to support it. Generations would go by with little technological progress. Metal would rust away, buildings collapse, forests regrow, and after awhile there wouldn't be much left of our civilization. (This is of course assuming a worst case scenario where the whole world is bombed or a nuclear winter happens.) When we did finally get around to trying to rebuild civilization, sure there would be some scattered resource deposits around the world, but not enough to do anything with. You can't build steam engines without perfecting metallurgy and abundance of cheap, strong, metal. You need to produce many tons of cheap coal, not just scattered surface deposits. The industrial revolution started when deep underground mining became possible by pumping out water, and those mines are exhausted or lost.
- PythonicAlpha 12y ago
  It is most likely, that the state systems as we know them today will break down in many areas of the world. It all depends, how the survivors will behave. I think it is much likely, that living together will change its form very much -- up to the possibility that people will fight for the last resources or a return to Middle Ages state (but, when I see what is happening in our democracies, they might also do without nuclear destruction).

InclinedPlane 12y ago

Almost certainly a Cold War maximum nuclear war would result in collapse of industrialized civilization as we know it, concomitant with an enormous reduction in worldwide population. Nevertheless, a lot of things would almost certainly remain: literacy, agriculture, metalworking, the ideas of science and industry, and so on. Human civilization would be in a very bad state for a good long time, but it would mostly be a setback to previous eras, not complete destruction of civilization.

Houshalter 12y ago
That is far from certainty. Industrialization depended on having easy and abundant access to natural resources like coal, oil, and various metals. We've exhausted the easy deposits of these resources, the ones a preindustrial civilization could get to. If civilization were to collapse now, it may never rise again.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Nah. We've got information, which is more valuable than energy and not likely to be lost in a collapse. Civilization doesn't require pissing away prodigious amounts of energy on every little thing - that's just the way we do it when we have lots of energy. Also, there's plenty more available energy on this planet, many times the amount we've used so far in building this civilization. Methane Hydrate, Thorium to name a couple. We're just drunk on oil right now, but don't confuse that with 'using up all the energy.'
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Neither of your premises have much to support them. Dennis Meadows, of Limits to Growth fame, has noted that adding technology to his models does very little to shift the ultimate outcome. And information absent energy isn't worth much at all. The world as a whole has effectively equal access to information. What's it's got unequal access to are raw material resources, most particularly energy.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      What its got is different cultures, which makes all the difference. The Protestant work ethic has an entirely different outcome for a people than many other ethics for instance. Japan has little or no natural resource - look at what they accomplish. And what do you mean, absent energy? There's plenty of energy around. Methane Hydrate reserves are estimated at 6X all the oil we ever found for instance.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  It would be problematic for the rebuilders if we managed to vaporize everything we've built, but at the moment, pure metals are far more available than they've been in history. We've also probably evened out the geographic availability (so for example you can scrape together a few hundred pounds of copper pretty much anywhere there is a little bit of settlement). I agree that coal/energy would likely be a problem.
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    I'm not sure what book it was (I'm thinking it was something by OSC), but I've read a scifi story in which some mad scientists were intentionally "resetting" civilization to no-tech chapter one. They had no problems slaughtering billions of people, burning their possessions, and brainwashing their descendants. The major issue was removing all those convenient alloys from the reach of future metallurgists. They eventually settled on some nano-tech devices that melted everything into giant blobs and then sank the blobs thousands of feet into the Earth. There was a quip at the end about geology in future being doomed to failure, based as it would be on some harebrained explanation for the natural formation of convenient blobs of alloy. I wonder if the story itself is as fucked-up as my memory of it is.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  I've seen that argument made many times, to be frank it's not actually as well founded as it seems. This is because it confuses two very different things: ease of production of natural resources and cost effectiveness of production of natural resources. In the early stages of industrialization ease of production is paramount, but in later stages quality, production volume, and per unit cost is paramount. Early resources can be very much more expensive to produce and very much lower quality (as they were historically) and yet still be viable. Take coal for example. A small coal mine near the surface can be a quite viable source of coal in early industry, but such coal mines would not be economical in the modern era. Because modern coal is higher quality, much higher volume production, and mined out of areas where it is generally most amenable to industrialized production. There is an old abandoned coal mine within walking distance of me right now, I've been there and picked up coal off the surface of the ground. There's still literally tons of coal there that could be mined quite easily by hand. But compared to other sources of coal in the 21st century it's simply not economical to bother worrying about trying to extract it to depletion. And the same exact principles apply to essentially every other natural resource. For example, we no longer mine bog iron because it's a very manual labor intensive work compared to, say, shoveling hematite sand into rail cars. Additionally, this argument ignores the fact that vast amounts of resources will exist in the form of remnants of our present civilization (only the tiniest fraction of which will be vaporized by nuclear explosions). Huge amounts of iron, aluminum, glass, etc. will be left over, short-cutting the normal production process as for pre-industrial processes. Re-industrialization after a collapse will be different than past industrialization but I see no indications that it will be very much more difficult and certainly not impossible.
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    Civilizations have collapsed before from far less serious disasters. From Mayans to Mediterranean civilizations (several of them actually) to the 5 centuries of decline and stagnation of China, and probably countless more I haven't read about. And the industrial world is far less resilient. We depend on huge amounts of infrastructure and massively complex systems of trade and production. Very likely we would return to subsistence farming. There would be little or no remaining industry, and not enough resources to support it. Generations would go by with little technological progress. Metal would rust away, buildings collapse, forests regrow, and after awhile there wouldn't be much left of our civilization. (This is of course assuming a worst case scenario where the whole world is bombed or a nuclear winter happens.) When we did finally get around to trying to rebuild civilization, sure there would be some scattered resource deposits around the world, but not enough to do anything with. You can't build steam engines without perfecting metallurgy and abundance of cheap, strong, metal. You need to produce many tons of cheap coal, not just scattered surface deposits. The industrial revolution started when deep underground mining became possible by pumping out water, and those mines are exhausted or lost.
PythonicAlpha 12y ago
It is most likely, that the state systems as we know them today will break down in many areas of the world. It all depends, how the survivors will behave. I think it is much likely, that living together will change its form very much -- up to the possibility that people will fight for the last resources or a return to Middle Ages state (but, when I see what is happening in our democracies, they might also do without nuclear destruction).