A big factor in social resilience is cash, because the inability to
conduct commerce quickly leads to civil unrest. People will tolerate
no entertainment, heating, or light for weeks or months. The danger
is not with electricity itself so much as the tech that depends on it,
because when there's food in the shops, and fuel in the tanks, but no
way to buy it, force is quick to follow. Physical cash acts as a
buffer that can keep the world moving even in primitive conditions.
That's why I think the idea of a "cashless society" is one of the
stupidest ideas I have heard in my life so far.
How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
201–210 of 310 posts
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you going to do, nuke the hurricanes?
If you explode a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane does it make the hurricane stop?
Likely not, but there definitely will be interesting effects, some people probably would love to study in a live example.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine in a really long haul disaster, it would really depend on the nature of the local community and your distance from society. If the local authorities want to impose order and redistribute your resources, a single person with a gun (I assume that’s what you mean) wouldn’t realistically be sufficient defense. If you are far enough out and might only have to scare off, like, an occasional random drifter, that’s…
if the local authorities know they risk getting shot by every local they come to distribute resources from, they're far less likely to think that's a good idea in the first place
Unless they have the heavy weapons and someone with a high ego and determination to use the existing state ressources to become the new local warlord.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the experience you've described mostly works out because the infrastructure has developed (or not developed) in conjunction with unreliable power. It would be a pretty different story in a dense US city: there are no wells to draw from, no simplified infrastructure designed to operate with minimum power or water, etc. In other words: mature infrastructure is both our greatest strength and our greatest weaknes…
From Iraq, we went from zero power cuts in decades to no power at all within two weeks in the gulf war in 90, as NATO countries attacked all our civilian power stations. Life became horrible but we adapted. In some cases there were fights between people no different than the fights you saw in western countries over toilet rolls during covid, but I wouldn’t say it was a total society collapse. People will always find…
Similar story here - when NATO bombed Serbia (we were part of Yugoslavia in 1999) we had similar experience. We had 4 hour blackouts per day, not more luckily, as everyone had a lot of frozen food that could go bad if blackouts were longer.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine in a really long haul disaster, it would really depend on the nature of the local community and your distance from society. If the local authorities want to impose order and redistribute your resources, a single person with a gun (I assume that’s what you mean) wouldn’t realistically be sufficient defense. If you are far enough out and might only have to scare off, like, an occasional random drifter, that’s…
if the local authorities know they risk getting shot by every local they come to distribute resources from, they're far less likely to think that's a good idea in the first place
Or, they just treat everyone as 'shoot on sight'.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with those was that they were indeed very ecologically dirty, especially the lignite mines from Gorj. You can actually see the devastation that they have brought on the ecosystem even from satellite images [1]. I agree though, if one takes a step back and looks at the whole thing (i.e. if you add the socio-economic conditions) this was a very bad decision. I personally don't think renewables will be able to…
> transporting all the wind-generated power from the likes of Dobruja to Western Romania and Transylvania using existing power-transport infrastructure is no easy task Do you mean, lack of capacity in the power lines to that regions? > only cars with odd numbers which should be allowed travel during weekend That was also the norm in Italy during the oil crisis. It was done more recently as an anti pollution measure t…
> Do you mean, lack of capacity in the power lines to that regions?
Yes, more exactly reaching full capacity for the existing power/energy transport infrastructure. Which transport infrastructure is not bad per se, and that's another big plus for the government that used to rule until about 30 years ago, but most probably it wasn't built with this new energy source in mind.
I would have dug deeper for a source of the Romanian power transport network, but taking into consideration the existing geo-political conditions most probably that information is getting more and more sensible by the day, so I'll leave that sharing to someone else.
> That was also the norm in Italy during the oil crisis.
Yeah, I had a geography atlas published in 1982 who also had maps related to the major countries' economic infrastructure, so to speak, i.e. where most of their industries were located, where were they generating their power/energy, stuff like that. Being the kid that I was, with no internet access because the late '80s and no TV program to speak of, I of course devoured it, so that I can remember from those maps that Italy and France each of them had one tidal power unit installed, France somewhere around Bretagne or Normandy, Italy somewhere on the Tyrrhenian coast, near Grosseto (I might be slightly off with the Grosetto thing, though).
So, yeah, different countries were trying all sorts of unconventional stuff back then (in the late '70s - early 80s), but I do have the feeling that the cheap energy that I don't know how exactly (maybe Eastern Europe getting rid of its entire industry after 1990?) was available again starting with the 1990s made us forget almost all of that, on an institutional level.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a counter argument out there that individuals/small groups that self isolate during extreme events/collapse of social stability tend to do much more poorly than groups that prioritize mutual aid.
Thanks for bringing that up. I don't remember who said: "The answer is _always_ community."
Everyone who's been through true turmoil knows. Without a "village" around you you're dead. That's literally why villages formed as they did instead of people just spreading out.
This Death Stranding bunker meme is just clueless people playing survival.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it’s winter in the USA, houses could be wrecked since it could be well below freezing and the pipes could burst. Dangerously cold freezing temps also introduce a real risk of life and limb. Fires can be made, but if there’s a blizzard happening, keeping a flame going might be very difficult.
If it looks like your pipes are going to freeze, you bite the bullet and simply drain them, using the provided fittings and valves. And, you add some antifreeze to your toilet, after you flush it to empty the tank.
> And, you add some antifreeze to your toilet, after you flush it to empty the tank.
If we're talking catastrophic, persistant, total grid collapse, you won't want a flushing toilet. It'll be time to start doing nutrient recycling instead of relying on industrially applied fertilisers to crops -- because that infrastructure depends largely on the other and will inevitably collapse too.
You'll be wanting a composting toilet.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
The densely populated cities are going to be the hardest to transition - but in rural and suburban areas it may already be cheaper to generate and store your own power than to get it from the grid, most of the year
You need capital to be able to generate "your own power", the same goes for storing it. Most of the people from the rural parts of Eastern Europe don't have access to that capital and most probably will never have, for the simple reason that they are (relatively) quite poor.
I doubt it. I suspect they're thinking of bank loans, but resourceful fintech already have solutions for getting by without a loan. I see similar business models in Africa, so poverty is not an argument against it.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#210A lot of old Cold War preparatory war game scenarios start with EMPs blanketing the continental US. It only takes a few (like 1) nuclear weapon detonations in thin atmosphere (a few dozen km up) where the primary heat transfer mechanism is radiative (vs. convective, conductive) to cause enough EMP to take out pretty much the entire continental US grid. The military is fully hardened against EMP. Civilian infrastructu…
Is the military fully hardened? Seems like they have some more hardening to do.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/02/22/air-force-wan...