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Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

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Re: Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

#151

Post by shanusmagnus »

gerdesj wrote: post #116
bluefirebrand wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure hope that the steel in skyscrapers and stuff is going to last a long freaking time though.

Steel does have a major use in your skyscraper but concrete is perhaps the main player. Conc is a wonderful and bloody complicated material and so is steel. Steel is basically iron+(stuff) - Fe 'n' that. If you add small amounts of carbon to iron you get steel and depending on how you do it you transform iron (brittle, hard etc) to a material that is "tough". Tough generally means that it will resist stress/strain mo…

This was super interesting. Any book recs with a similar flavor?

Re: Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

#152

Post by mateo1 »

Georgelemental wrote: post #149
mateo1 wrote: post #148

I'm always entertained by the optimism of the people who think they'll be the ones to survive.

Well, 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

You 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.

Re: Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

#153

Post by yourapostasy »

There 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.

Re: Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

#154

Post by occz »

gavmor wrote: post #9

If 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 allo…

For how long would cars really be practical in a "down in the bunker"-scenario, though? There wouldn't be any more fuel produced, probably, and cars require a fairly high standard of roads which also would be lost after not too long.

Personally, I would probably bring the equivalent book on bicycles, which I speculate would be the vehicle of choice for the end of the world. If anyone knows the name of such a book, I would be happy to hear it!

Re: Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

#155

Post by User23 »

groby_b wrote: post #65
goatlover wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

A wood fired still might be a reasonable way to turn biomass into fuel.

And while farming may seem like back-breaking labor to the Aeron chair set, it’s really not that bad. You are tied to the land, but in the scenario that’s under discussion a Disney cruise vacation isn’t in the cards anyhow. You’ll want to have draft animals though of course as tractor replacements.

Re: Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

#156

Post by User23 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #72
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

#157

Post by elboru »

occz wrote: post #154
gavmor wrote: post #9

If 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 allo…

For how long would cars really be practical in a "down in the bunker"-scenario, though? There wouldn't be any more fuel produced, probably, and cars require a fairly high standard of roads which also would be lost after not too long. Personally, I would probably bring the equivalent book on bicycles, which I speculate would be the vehicle of choice for the end of the world. If anyone knows the name of such a book, I…

The idea is not to build a car just after you are out of the bunker. But it seems like this book would be helpful for a ton of useful things:

> 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

Re: Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

#160

Post by Twisell »

Thorentis wrote: post #114

An aside, but the title sounds like the premise of Asimov's Foundation series. Highly recommended, I thoroughly enjoyed reading all three books.

I 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)

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