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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

#41

Post by colechristensen »

jwithington wrote: post #15
colechristensen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, preppers overdo it because it's fun for some people. I have a case of water bottles in the trunk of my car, a bit of camping gear in the closet, and enough dry pantry goods on hand to last a good long while. None of this is to "prepare" for anything besides the water in case of some incident that strands me in my car. Not that much special is required to survive for a couple of weeks. Maybe if you want to practic…

That's what I'm saying haha. I'm not looking to "prep" and the prepper manuals go overboard for what >99% of people are looking for. I'm looking for the practical things. An emergency action guide of some sort...

Go to a Costco business center and buy a bag of rice, a bag of beans, and some bottled water. Buy some camping gear and cook dinner once in a while over a fire in your back yard or a camp ground. Keep a go bag packed that you could pick up and live out of for a week at a moments notice. Take interest in the things around you and learn how to do things yourself instead of paying other people to do them, even if you don’t do them yourself most of the time.

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

#42

Post by JoeAltmaier »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #39
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #17

Simple 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.

I find it a bit weird to have static analysis on that list. Other than that, I agree. Why static analysis?

e.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!

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

#43

Post by Tade0 »

hguant wrote: post #22
CJefferson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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…

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.

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

#44

Post by imchillyb »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #34
akersten wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You 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.

> You don't need industrial machinery to produce penicillin.

Sooo. How are you going to grow enough of that, while /not growing/ any other type of fungus, mold, bacteria, etc...

There's a reason modern medicine utilizes things like cleanrooms and laboratories, instead of y'know a farm and a barn.

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

#45

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

CJefferson wrote: post #12
alasdair_ wrote: post #3

I 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 a…

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.

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.

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

#46

Post by aqsalose »

ethbr0 wrote: post #31
spekcular wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top review on Amazon is devastating: "The author purports to provide a blueprint to restoring a technological economy after a TEOTWAWKI event, but some his listed sources are from the realm of science fiction. Not an encouraging start. He goes on to pretend that he knows more than he actually does. It's as if he skimmed a few sources but only superficially understood them. How else can he suggest that a collapsed…

Sounds like an opportunity for a 2nd edition! If Amazon commenters filed pull requests rather than potshots, the world would be a better place. :)

Sounds like, if you want a capable materials, mechanical, chemical and electrical engineer to write your pull requests, you'd need to pay them a salary they request. (Them in plural, because it is unlikely to find a single individual good at everything.)

Software people like to say that software engineers is super complex and difficult. On the other hand, an enthusiast occasionally makes great FOSS contribution by filing a pull request. For some reason, that is?[1] quite rare in many other forms of engineering. If it is only because of capital cost differences of building things in physical world vs building in software world (which affects stuff like learning by experimentation), maybe we should acknowledge they are a part of reason why building things in physical world is complex and difficult.

[1] Or looks rare, I may be mistaken.

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

#47

Post by throwaway892238 »

imchillyb wrote: post #44
throwaway892238 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You 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.

> You don't need industrial machinery to produce penicillin. Sooo. How are you going to grow enough of that, while /not growing/ any other type of fungus, mold, bacteria, etc... There's a reason modern medicine utilizes things like cleanrooms and laboratories, instead of y'know a farm and a barn.

I can build you a sanitized laboratory with 16th century equipment. That's the great thing about how much knowledge we have now: we can do more with fewer things.

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

#48

Post by imchillyb »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #38
ars wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can dig wells, practice permaculture, organize a farm, keep sheep, spin yarn, blacksmith, prep lumber, fire pottery and glass, hunt, fish, manage woodlands I'm very confused by why you think this is sustainable - this type of life uses FAR FAR FAR more resources than modern living. It only works with a low population. England for example basically cut down every tree it has in order to sustain this type of (old) li…

I mentioned woodland management, which would have prevented deforestation. There's actually many practices we can implement to make more use of the land than we've done in the past. Just picking different crops would enable us to feed the entire existing planet with a fraction of the land area we use today. And we certainly know a lot more about sustainable climate regulation than we did in the past, requiring fewer…

SO... you think that the country of England had no woodland management?

The leaders of the day decided, that the protected lands would no longer receive protection, there was no populace vote.

You think post-apocalypse would be different from a monarchy /how/ exactly?

The strong rule, and without rule of the masses and enforcers of law, we're back to warlords and kings. Good luck with your processes...

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

#49

Post by slibhb »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #27

Weird 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 wan…

> Or you could build a new world that isn't the one that just plunged everything into chaos.

How are you going to get people to agree to "live sustainably" over thousands of years?

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

#50

Post by willcipriano »

slibhb wrote: post #49
throwaway892238 wrote: post #27

Weird 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 wan…

> Or you could build a new world that isn't the one that just plunged everything into chaos. How are you going to get people to agree to "live sustainably" over thousands of years?

Better question, if you can do that, why haven't you already?
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