[HN Gopher] Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apo...
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Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world
Author : robertwiblin
Score : 106 points
Date : 2022-06-10 16:56 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (80000hours.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (80000hours.org)
| alasdair_ wrote:
| 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 and re-smelted and will be
| perfectly usable. The point was it was a practical guide to
| rebooting civilization, rather than just a list of recipes for
| technology.
|
| As for the TV show premise at the beginning of the article (16
| survivors that have to scavenge things in an abandoned place for
| a long period of time), this was done very well in a show called
| The Colony (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1470018/) with fairly
| realistic hardships (roving bands of thugs that would mace the
| survivors in lieu of firearms, for example). Worth watching, even
| if just for the interesting tech they produce, like distilling
| their own ethanol to power a small engine to recharge some car
| batteries to power handheld tools and lighting).
| CJefferson wrote:
| 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.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| goatlover wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| hguant wrote:
| >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.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| They do open-cut mining in Wyoming, from what I saw.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I trip over coal in folks' backyards in Kentucky. You don't
| need more than hand tools to get at it.
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
| spekcular wrote:
| 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
| society go direct to building blast furnaces, ignoring the
| bloomery method of reducing iron ore that provided mankind with
| workable metal for two millennia as a cottage industry? Then he
| goes on to suggest that we build Bessemer converters to
| decarbonize the pig iron. Does he not know that the Bessemer
| converter is all but obsolete? Did he miss the chapter about
| the (chemically) basic refining furnace, which is a lot easier
| to build?
|
| He quotes a lot of interesting chemistry, then throws up a real
| laugher when he gets the simple and universally known formula
| for black powder exactly backwards!
|
| While the book skims quite a potpourri of technologies we use
| today, he omits almost entirely the tools needed to implement
| them. Knowing how an electrical generator or motor is assembled
| is all well and good, but where will the impoverished builder
| get copper wire? Or the special steel sheet necessary for
| laminating magnet cores? Or the tooling for punching out the
| laminations?
|
| He never even began to address the fundamentals of machine
| tools, on which about 99% of our modern technology rests, and
| without which you cannot build even an 18th century economy. .
|
| As a high school science project, this would rate a solid C for
| effort, and something less for the end result."
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Sounds like an opportunity for a 2nd edition!
|
| If Amazon commenters filed pull requests rather than
| potshots, the world would be a better place. :)
| aqsalose wrote:
| 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.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| That's the beauty of actual pull requests: that fat red X
| immediately saying a test case number 172 out of 42345
| didn't pass, i.e. you're talking gibberish mister.
|
| The beauty of publishing is that paper is patient and it
| may take literally centuries until someone draws a fat red
| X on point 172, that the Bessemer (or whatever) idea was
| always absolute and utter gibberish!
|
| This is true both for the book, for the review you cite,
| for the comment you wrote, and for this comment of mine.
| It's nice to pretend you have a compiler-for-the-reality in
| your head that keeps predicting right every time, where in
| contrast with a true compiler you are wrong almost every
| single time.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I read so many glowing reviews of this book on Mastodon and
| so I opened it up. I felt the same way as the above Amazon
| reviewer. The book just felt shockingly naive. His book was
| driven by his personal vision/ideology moreso than any actual
| accordance with scientific or social scientific learnings. If
| you're suffused deeply enough in the ideology I'm guessing
| Dartnell is evocative, but if you're skeptical, Dartnell
| doesn't do nearly enough work to convince you otherwise and
| often makes you giggle and lose faith with his inaccuracies
| (like the formula for black powder lol) and impractical
| takes.
| DennisP wrote:
| Sounds like we need a wiki for this stuff. If we managed to
| get a bunch of engineers contributing, we really would have a
| guide for rebooting civilization. Maybe include a button to
| print out the whole thing.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Why?
|
| Can anyone really foresee a collapse of civilization which
| somehow renders all our technology useless and
| unrepairable, but somehow leaves access to computers and
| printers available?
|
| I mean it's great to imagine if you want to be a pretend-
| prepper but the reality is that there will be millions of
| tons of food in the ground, tens of thousands of pounds of
| seeds available, oil, gasoline, kerosene, millions of cubic
| yards of fresh water. Lots of electrical generators, small
| and large, pretty much anything you need has already been
| built. etc, etc. You want to build a small house? Get
| materials from a large building!
|
| We don't need a post-apocalyptic civilization to know how
| to refine cast iron, we need them to know how to repair
| diesel engines.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Can anyone really foresee a collapse of civilization
| which somehow renders all our technology useless and
| unrepairable, but somehow leaves access to computers and
| printers available?
|
| No but I can foresee a number of different collapses of
| civilization which render almost all computers useless
| within a relatively short amount of predictable time and
| the ability to connect those computers before they become
| inoperable to printers where one would print out numerous
| copies of the books.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| OK, maybe I misunderstood the post, but I still stand by
| my last statement. We don't need to recreate the
| Industrial Revolution, we just need to be able to repair
| and use the stuff that's already built.
| plonk wrote:
| You could be ambitious and fund the effort with a
| nonprofit. Maybe a Foundation of some kind.
| WalterBright wrote:
| For a Cub Scout project, I built a DC electric motor out of
| nails, tape, and wire.
|
| No special steel sheet.
| [deleted]
| wmwmwm wrote:
| I'm a fan of that book too - though hoping I never need it!
|
| On a tangential theme, another one I read and liked at the same
| time was The World Without Us - all about what would happen to
| the cities and infrastructure if all humans suddenly vanished
| overnight. Kind of depressing but there's a lot of interesting
| and non obvious stuff in there
| myth_drannon wrote:
| The book has scathing reviews on Goodreads.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I can only say that those views are not universally held. I
| found it to be a lovely and engaging look at the technologies
| underlying our industrial civilization.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| Ishmaeli wrote:
| Also, it seems like just knowing some of the dead ends would be
| a huge step up.
|
| Like maybe we don't waste a ton of time and resources trying to
| turn lead into gold, or teaching left-handed kids to be right-
| handed, or trying to figure out which ritual to perform to
| which deity to make the crops grow.
| Archelaos wrote:
| > Also, it seems like just knowing some of the dead ends
| would be a huge step up.
|
| This makes me think, how Knowledge in a post-apocalyptic
| society would really work. Some fundamental and comparatively
| easy technologies might not need to be rediscovered (directly
| jump to iron and omit bronze). But more advanced Knowledge
| needs a lot of special training, dedicated institutions, etc.
| And even if they had access to tales from the Ancients, they
| would still have to distinguish between valid and invalid
| information. Otherwise, we could end up with a culture of
| Flat Earthers.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I find it a bit weird to have static analysis on that list.
| Other than that, I agree.
|
| Why static analysis?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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!
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Oh, _that_ static analysis. I, um, was thinking of
| something else with the same name. Yes, knowing how to
| build things that don 't fall down is pretty fundamental.
| YZF wrote:
| You gotta have `lint` in a post-apocalyptic world though.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
| datavirtue wrote:
| "bounce back faster"
|
| Why is that a concern to the survivors? Perhaps they decide that
| "bouncing back faster" is the last thing they want?
| wolfram74 wrote:
| because cholera, giardia, typhoid and measles are awful.
| laverick wrote:
| Related project & TED talk - Open Source Blueprints for
| Rebuilding Civilization
|
| https://www.opensourceecology.org/
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| My plan, in the event of civilizational collapse is to somehow
| make it to New Zealand and pitch start-up ideas like the bejesus
| to Peter Thiel until he lets me into his luxury bunker.
| azemetre wrote:
| You're better off becoming super fit and staying young. He
| might let you be his blood boy, way better odds this way.
| [deleted]
| alx__ wrote:
| I also recommend Ryan North's book, How to Invent Everything
|
| https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/
|
| Because you'll need a little humor if you're stuck in post-
| apocalyptic world
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I started writing "important experiments for kids" (on github
| somewhere) based a bit on this - just what are the base
| experiments (distance to moon etc) that we should all know - like
| what books should we all read.
|
| i think things like this should be part of the curriculum
| ForHackernews wrote:
| If you're interested in this topic, you might also be interested
| to learn about http://collapseos.org/: "It is a Forth operating
| system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single
| purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through
| civilizational collapse."
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| 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 want the people who can dig wells,
| practice permaculture, organize a farm, keep sheep, spin yarn,
| blacksmith, prep lumber, fire pottery and glass, tan leather,
| hunt, fish, manage woodlands. Doctors and scientists would be
| handy too, but now that we know so much about how biology works
| it wouldn't be so difficult to keep people living longer.
| Assuming antibiotics still work in 20 years and we retain some
| basic surgical skills, we're basically set.
|
| The most challenging thing after an apocalypse is obviously going
| to be government. If there's no law and order you can't really
| organize anything. Whoever has the most power, best strategizing,
| and most flexible morals will collect the most resources and
| gather the largest forces. It'll be "join or die", and slavery
| will come back. Just read your history to see what happens when
| societies crumble.
| akersten wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| 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.
| imchillyb wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| 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.
| ars wrote:
| > 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) life. They found coal
| because they had no choice, they were about to run out of
| energy.
|
| If you just want to kill lots of people and have a low
| population, I suppose you can advocate for that, but it's
| completely orthogonal to the type of technology we have.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| 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 fuels and enabling more sustainable ones.
|
| Producing more technology to keep swelling the population
| obviously isn't working either (hello, climate change). Human
| civilization needs downsizing, or at least more rational and
| sustainable resource use/management.
| imchillyb wrote:
| 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...
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| I think parent meant that absent the high tech and energy
| dense supply chains that underly modern society, people would
| have to do a lot of things to sustain a society that for us
| these days can be solved by going to Walmart.
| gen220 wrote:
| FWIW, 17th Century Europe didn't have access to the
| technology and knowledge that we have today, that do not
| require any fancy devices or technology to improve our
| efficiency of resource usage in the hypothetical scenario
| discussed in this thread.
|
| At the time, there were many incentives to deforestation, but
| the main ones were to procure wood as fuel, and to clear
| arable land for agriculture and animal husbandry. I can at
| least speak to these two.
|
| It was true in the past, that wood was an unsustainable
| source of heat. However, with modern wood-burning stoves,
| even in the nordic latitudes, this is no longer true.
|
| Sweden and Norway have done a lot of innovation in this
| department in the last 80 years, because it's a matter of
| national security for them. They've found that it's actually
| more sustainable, affordable, and environmentally-friendly,
| to use wood as the main heating source for homes, rather than
| oil or coal. Again, this is only true if you're using wood
| stoves whose construction is informed by modern (post-WWII)
| knowledge. But the stoves are cast-iron, their manufacture
| doesn't require nanotechnology, pure silicon, etc.
|
| On the agricultural front, it's difficult to overstate how
| far we've come in the last 400 years. Our caloric yield per
| acre on the same acreage of arable land would be much higher,
| today, even if you were to take away the products of modern
| industry (fertilizers, etc) that would presumably be
| inaccessible in an apocalypse.
|
| Especially given access to new world domesticated produce,
| like potatoes, maize, various nuts, squashes, legumes, yams,
| tomato, maple, rubber.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| This viewpoint is appealing, but the thing is: natural
| selection says it isn't possible in the long term.
|
| For every person like you, who thinks s/he knows how things
| would be better for the environment and others, and how to get
| there (at least approximately), there is another person who
| doesn't give a shit and who will do long-term damage in
| exchange for short-term gains all day long. That person will
| out-compete you and other people like you.
|
| We do, however, seem to be getting better and better at solving
| these sorts of cooperation puzzles. I just don't see a way out
| of the Malthusian problem (there will be more and more of the
| sorts of people who breed more, by definition). We might just
| have to live with a boom-and-bust cycle on this planet, much
| like other species, but on longer timescales. It's also
| possible we avoid the evolutionarily stable state and manage to
| successfully trap ourselves in some sort of metastable state.
|
| It's all going to be fine and your life will be really good,
| though :-)
| xaedes wrote:
| > We might just have to live with a boom-and-bust cycle on
| this planet
|
| Reminds me of:
|
| "The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or
| of summer sun does not prevent, the human race is always
| increasing at times, and at other times diminishing in
| numbers." - from Plato's History on Atlantis
| hutzlibu wrote:
| " I just don't see a way out of the Malthusian problem (there
| will be more and more of the sorts of people who breed more,
| by definition)"
|
| Why is that by definition? Even animals have more or less
| offspring, depending on the food offering/suitable habitat.
|
| It balances itself out. In nature by starvation. But humans
| could find other ways. But btw. there are many many people
| starving and allways have been.
|
| It is not like we are heading to a starvation crisis. We are
| already in it and always have been. The question is rather,
| of whether we can stop it one day and have all humans fed and
| cared for in a sustainable way.
| slibhb wrote:
| > 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?
| willcipriano wrote:
| Better question, if you can do that, why haven't you already?
| all2 wrote:
| The problem isn't technology. The problem is immoral people.
| Immoral people make immoral and greedy governments. Immoral and
| greedy governments wield power to acquire _more_ and survive as
| a parasitic organism. All governments move towards
| totalitarianism. No nation-state in the world has ever escaped
| this eventuality.
|
| Limiting technology won't limit the harm even one evil person
| can do. Take a look at Gengis Khan, for example.
|
| What limits immoral people is the moral people around them.
|
| The reason Western culture has fared so well over the last 500
| years is because it was largely Christian in nature. There are
| fundamental values embedded in the Bible that have echoed into
| what we consider to be "human rights" today. These ideas are
| _uniquely_ Christian in nature, and rely on a Christian
| morality in order to function.
|
| "Do to others as you would have them do to you", "love your
| neighbor as yourself", "you need to work in order to eat", the
| ten commandments (which are pretty common sense if you're
| looking for a stable society), a true/faithful set of weights
| and measures -- including a sound currency, lending for
| interest gained is illegal, and so on.
|
| All of these require a basis of people who are willing to
| adhere to them. The Western world lacks people who are willing
| to adhere to them. In fact, we've been taught to hate the West
| and its contributions to the world. We hate white people, we
| hate Christianity, we hate absolute truth, we hate moral law,
| we hate being accountable to the Almighty, and we scoff at
| anyone who loves those things.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| > Assuming antibiotics still work in 20 years
|
| The Soviet Union tried to create antibiotic resistant bacteria
| as part of its bioweapons program. They were able to increase
| antibiotic resistance but not make anything totally resistant,
| so I expect antibiotics to still work 20 years from now.
| notahacker wrote:
| Widespread resistance to particular antibiotics is also the
| product of an advanced industrial society where new variants
| of pathogens spread easily amongst billions of
| internationally-travelling city dwellers and widespread
| prophylactic use of the antibiotic creates strong selection
| pressures.
|
| Its a bit different after an apocalypse. In theory, an
| isolated post-apocalyptic community could roll a 1 and get
| bacteria that is resistant to locally available natural and
| stockpiled antibiotics in their community, but that's quite
| low down their list of concerns.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| This was taken seriously in 1950s US Civil Defense. Since Europe
| had already been through that process recently, there was a lot
| of knowledge available.
|
| There's a classic set of books, "Build Your Own Metal Working
| Shop From Scrap", on this.
|
| The kid's version: "A Boy and a Battery" (1942).[1] There's also
| "A Boy and a Motor", on how to build your own electric train set
| from old metal cans, some wire, a hammer and tinsnips, and the
| skills of a master machinist.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/boyandbatteryrev00yate
| hh3k0 wrote:
| I wonder, aren't virtually all "easily" available resources
| already dried up to such a degree that highly
| advanced/specialized equipment would be needed to extract
| whatever is left?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| After an apocalypse, if you survive and society has
| collapsed, resources will be abundant.
|
| You will just have to strip materials from cars and buildings
| instead of digging them out of the ground.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| "Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap" I have that on
| my bookshelf, it's worth a read if you're just curious about
| how machine tools are made/work.
|
| Might build the shaper out of there someday but currently it
| seems like it would be a better use of my time to buy an import
| lathe (assuming no natural disaster)
| teddyh wrote:
| See also _The Mysterious Island_ (1875) by Jules Verne.
| gavmor wrote:
| 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 alloys to leather,
| paper, and common fluids) accompanied by clear and precise
| mechanical diagrams. It's precisely the kind of book that would
| secure a time-traveller's position as court wizard, all geared
| (ha) toward the eminently practical domain of moving across the
| surface of the earth.
|
| 0. https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/bosch10/
| _jal wrote:
| Machinery's Handbook is similar, but sort of a step back on the
| production chain.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinery%27s_Handbook
| DylanDmitri wrote:
| Key element is probably less technology, and more
| social/political/religious unity. You need a stable and
| egalitarian social fabric to make consistent progress.
|
| Core beliefs: rebooting civilization is hard but will make
| everything better (promised land), here's the scientific method
| and why it works, here's how to setup and maintain a democratic
| nation state, here's how to incentivize and reward inventors.
| Here's fascism and why it's bad. Here's the Prisoner's Dilemma --
| everyone must cooperate with each other and identify and punish
| defectors. Here's songs and rituals and art you can participate
| in together to reinforce all of this.
| all2 wrote:
| Why is this getting downvoted? A stable society is an absolute
| must, and that means a group of people who have a common moral
| foundation. Else, how do we work together?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think the more interesting question than how to reinvent some
| technological gizmos is how to reinstate governance. It's handy
| to know how to build a solar panel but it isn't worth much if
| someone hits me on the head with a club five minutes later.
|
| It's kind of funny to me that so much post apocalyptic writing is
| so overly concerned with technology when technology without much
| wisdom was what likely caused the apocalypse in the first place.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _how to reinstate governance_
|
| And that's hardly something there's an easy how-to answer to.
|
| A primitive tribe or band tends have each member strongly
| connected each other member since with few resources, the
| people are the resources. Modern people don't have to care in
| the slightest about their neighbors and this is weakness in an
| emergency situation.
|
| Moreover, a "collapse" situation, in many instances, would
| imply a general social failure even more complete than recent
| problems we've seen (consider "I'd rather X many people die
| than the economy suffer [from Covid or limiting carbon
| pollution or etc"] a statement about non-community). I don't
| know how mainstream society would even come back from that.
| Perhaps the Amish would do well.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Technology on its own can't cause the apocalypse. It needs
| mismanagement or misuse by humans.
|
| Looking at the world today you see societies crumble while
| others thrive. This, despite having access to the same or
| similar technology. The difference being in how they organize
| themselves and their vision of themselves.
| jwithington wrote:
| I'm always impressed by 80k hours to surface answers to the most
| existential problems! They had another good one about spinning up
| the global food supply post-apocalypse.
|
| Dartnell seems to be thinking longer term than immediate (first 2
| weeks). Are there any guides for the first two weeks?
|
| I wonder if the US military's SERE (Survival, Evasion,
| Resistance, Escape) guides are the most comprehensive resources?
| While intended for stranded individuals, they assume you're
| dropped anywhere in the world with minimal gear.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| It's been a while since I read The Knowledge but I think his
| point was:
|
| a) Lots of books have covered this already (SAS Survival
| Handbook, etc)
|
| b) the first 2 weeks is going to be largely luck whether you
| survive or not, so he's going to jump ahead to cover the lucky
| ones
| hguant wrote:
| There are general guides to the first two weeks - FEMA has
| several publications about this [0]. You don't need to go full
| prepper or SERE for that period of time - just get a water
| filter and some freeze fried meals, or have a pantry with beans
| and rice on hand - they keep for ~1 human half-life, so you
| don't really have to worry about them going bad.
|
| I wouldn't view SERE as a useful resource, if only because the
| assumptions SERE makes (hostile territory, woodland survival,
| etc) aren't really applicable to someone living in an urban or
| suburban environment, which is what I assume most users of this
| website are.
|
| [0] PDF warning! https://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/f&web.pdf
| jwithington wrote:
| Thanks!
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| After the first two weeks, there's the first year then the
| first five years and so on.
|
| E.g. Living through the first winter will require a huge effort
| in stockpiling, which gets better the second year. Scavenging
| for the first 5 years turns to agriculture and animal husbandry
| and smelting.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Reality: You do what the local strongman tells you to do.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| > Are there any guides for the first two weeks?
|
| There are thousands of prepper guides around, depending on how
| much work you want to do. I'd say a good start would be to
| think about the pandemic and think about what stuff became hard
| to get and make sure you have more of that available.
| Medications are a big one - try to have enough spare to last a
| couple of months. Having actual cash is important too, as is
| having copies of ID and other documents.
|
| Also, make friends with your neighbors. You're far more likely
| to be okay if you have a strong community around you than if
| you try to build a bunker and live alone from the world.
| nescioquid wrote:
| > Medications are a big one - try to have enough spare to
| last a couple of months.
|
| I've always wondered about how to carry out this advice for
| medicines other than what's available OTC. If someone depends
| on prescription medication, is this possible? How do you ask?
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| I can think of three ways:
|
| 1) "Hi doc, I'm thinking about ways to better hedge tail
| risk as I get a little older. In the case of this
| particular med, obviously it'd be really bad to be without
| it for [2 weeks, whatever]. People were without meds for
| that long in [Katrina, other example disaster]. So, I'd
| like to have a supply on hand. Can you prescribe me [a
| month] extra?
|
| 2) Lie. "Hi doc, I'm going to [really far-flung place,
| Alaska] on a [long, 3-month] expedition. I need to have my
| meds. What should we do?
|
| 3) Skip the bullshit and, assuming they're not controlled
| substances, just order directly from an Indian / Canadian
| pharmacy online.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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 practice go
| on a couple of day long camping trip in the woods, it'll
| probably be fun.
| jwithington wrote:
| 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...
| ryukafalz wrote:
| FEMA has some good material on that. Here's a basic one:
| https://www.fema.gov/pdf/areyouready/basic_preparedness.pdf
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Waterfilters and salt are somewhat useful and easy to
| store as well.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I'd supplement that with a few bags of charcoal stored in
| sealed Rubbermaid garbage tubs and some cigarette
| lighters -- you need a reliable source of fire and wood's
| a pain in the ass to depend on outdoors.
|
| Also rice & beans gets old. Grab 50lbs of canned meat
| while you're at it.
|
| I took a couple cans of Chinese fried rice (yes, it comes
| in a can!) on a camping trip once: it was everyone's
| favorite meal.
| datavirtue wrote:
| If you value freedom you are going to have to be able to
| move fast at a moment's notice. Preppers do nothing but
| hoard liability. The local gang is going to own your
| shit.
| 13415 wrote:
| I've read his book The Knowledge years ago and it was an eye-
| opener. I wasn't aware how complex our agricultural and technical
| societies are and how much they depend on shipping and crude oil.
| Without oil and shipping, no chemical industry, and without
| chemical industry no advanced technology and no mass food
| production. People in supply chain management know that too well
| but I was simply not aware of how fragile our society is before I
| read his book. The premise of the book that just the right number
| of people die but enough remain to kickstart society is arguably
| a bit contrived, though.
|
| Unfortunately, my overall conclusion from this book was rather
| negative, which is definitely not part of the book itself. It
| seems to me that our current technological level with a focus on
| consumption and constant production of new goods for short-term
| use, without taking into account full energy and ecological
| lifecycle balances, is completely unsustainable. Even with
| recycling and under the assumption that energy could become
| easier to produce (e.g. fusion) our lifestyle seems to exploit
| too many finite natural resources like e.g. oil. This has been
| known by many people since the 70s and 80s of last century and it
| still amazes and depresses me how slow the overall rate of change
| is.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The worry is overblown. Oil is still used all over the place
| because it's cheaper than the alternative. When it's not, it'll
| be replaced.
|
| You can straight up synthesize an oil analog from biological
| sources, and even if you couldn't the oil necessary for non-
| energy purposes is far far less than that used just to burn.
|
| Solar is what is going to replace fossil fuels mostly, it's
| already cheaper than coal.
|
| Like it or not, most of the motivation for change will be
| economic. With the price of energy in the current times of war
| and inflation, solar is looking quite good.
|
| Industrial chemistry always has alternatives. Ammonia based
| fertilizers can always be produced with air and water instead
| of air and natural gas, it's just somewhat more expensive.
| Barrera wrote:
| > One of the ideas I played with in The Knowledge was what would
| you most want to whisper in someone's ear -- like 2,000 years
| ago, or if someone's having to go through this process again --
| that once you've told someone, it kind of makes immediate sense.
| ...
|
| This is a fascinating idea.
|
| > And for me, the one that stood out by far the most
| significantly was this idea of germ theory and how that links to
| the microscope. ...
|
| There's what you'd want to whisper and what the person (and their
| community!) would accept. History has shown people to be
| extremely resistant to the germ theory of disease.
|
| > And actually, one of my favorite maker projects when I was
| researching for The Knowledge was making some Robinson Crusoe
| glass from scratch. ... And there's nothing stopping the ancient
| Romans over 2,000 years ago building a microscope, if only they'd
| known what to do.
|
| I'm not so sure about this. _A lot_ of societal and technological
| developments happened between the first microscopes and the
| connection to germ theory. From a different article:
|
| > In 1676, Dutch cloth merchant-turned-scientist Antony van
| Leeuwenhoek further improved the microscope with the intent of
| looking at the cloth that he sold, but inadvertently made the
| groundbreaking discovery that bacteria exist. His accidental
| finding opened up the field of microbiology and the basis of
| modern medicine; nearly 200 years later, French scientist Louis
| Pasteur would determine that bacteria were the cause behind many
| illnesses (before that, many scientists believed in the miasma
| theory that rotten air and bad odors made us sick).
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-we-owe-to...
|
| You whisper in someone's ear "Things you can't see cause disease.
| The key is making and polishing glass. Now, get busy."
|
| Then, within a few decades, the person is dead. Depending on a
| lot of factors, that person is pretty likely to have taken the
| knowledge, and the drive to put it into practice, to the grave.
| Imagine the reaction to this revelation this unfortunate soul
| would be greeted with. Unfortunately, we don't need to imagine,
| because history tells us quite clearly what happens to people who
| are far ahead of their time.
|
| So the trick is to reveal something just far enough ahead to be
| useful, but not too far ahead to upset prevailing views and power
| structures. Not easy at all.
|
| Now, imagine the world as we know it has been destroyed by
| something that sets us way back. How long does it take us to
| revert to superstition and witch hunts? The sad truth is that
| we're already there, even at the technological high water mark of
| the species. I doubt it would take more than 10 years of
| sustained primitive living to turn the clock back 2 or 3
| milennia.
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