Did everyone forget the TV series “After Man?” It suggested Hoover Dam’s MTBF meant it would likely continue generating power for around 200 years. A civilization-ending catastrophe that did not result in human extinction would mean this and other hydro sources would serve as an emergency reboot capability. And an event that did cause human extinction would likely take out the rest of the biosphere.
After reading my first histories of World War 1 it was clear that humans are fantastic survivors. Even a Snowball Earth would have humans clustered around ice free zones at the equator …not many but enough.
On the other hand, as I look at the Iphone generation I remember the America of my youth where most every muffler shop was a mini-machine shop and every high school had enough Popular Mechanics (and a shop class!) in their library to jumpstart technology …today not so much. Reading the Doomsday pr0n™ thrillers of the 60’s-70’s I really couldn’t envision a scenario that would drive technology to before the Steam Age…
If there were some form of catastrophe that wiped out a substantial portion of the human population, those that survived would find themselves back in a preindustrial age pretty quick. There’s a famous article about no one person having all of the skills needed to make a pencil. Likewise, the number of skills and equipment needed to manufacture medicines or any piece of modern technology are such that you’d need a pretty large population to keep civilization as we know it going. The people most likely to survive would be those primitive groups who are still living like their ancestors did centuries ago.
Magpie’s point is that there’s enough stuff around that one could stay at or quickly get to the beginning of the industrial age just from the technology we have lying around today.
The “can’t make a pencil” paradigm is based on the “all or nothing” theory. Musk can’t build a city on Mars without building a complete replica of modern civilization.” In this case, a pencil isn’t a pencil without Eberhardt-Faber stamped on it. But I could build you a function pencil that met a more general definition, In any case, why do you need a pencil. Ink and quill pens are easy to make (I made both as a child).
The Fact is, if civilization was wiped out except for the northern third of Granville County, NC, where I live, it would survive and rebuild fairly quickly. It’s about 300 square miles, inhabited by about 20,000 people, mostly skilled farmers and various sorts of contractors. The big danger would realize what had happened and acting fairly quickly. Most people around here have generators and supplies of fuel, along with land, animals, and gardens (mine is small, I only own5 acres) but one of my abutters has a full scale farm, growing corn and soybeans at the moment).
The point is, a single US township could make it, depending on the nature of the catastrophe. Another abutter has horses (his wife’s) and heavy machinery (he’s a building contractor). The guy across the street is a survivalist, etc. Personally, I couldn’t make steel, but my land is sitting on a red clay deposit, and I do know how to smelt copper and tin and make bronze tools.
A further hint about civilizational recovery: Get any book by Gardner D. Hiscox. When I was a kid, my Dad had a copy of the 1939 edition of “Fortunes in Formulas.” I have a Kindle edition of the 1914 edition of “Henley’s Formulas…”. Apparently, Hiscox wrote books covering every aspect of industrial civilization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henley’s Formulas is over a thousand pages long. The files are available from various archive sites.
A good start would be the complete fifty year old Encyclopedia Britannica that I inherited. Or the CRC Handbook I bought at a freshman. Or the, and this really dates me, Versalog-II Slide Rule and its manual. Technological civilization in a footlocker provided you add a lot of hard work and skull sweat.
This stood out to me:
The vacancy rate for the 22 most important office towers in the Motor City is a surprising 11.7%, which goes against the standard conception of Detroit as an unpopulated wasteland. The Book Tower, one of the city’s great abandoned skyscrapers, is empty at present, but it’s being rehabbed. The Michigan Central train station, a Beaux-Arts hall with an 18-story skyscraper, empty and abused for decades—the most potent example of American ruin porn possible, perhaps—should be fully restored by this year. Many of the skyscrapers that stood empty for decades have been polished and renewed. This is almost a disappointment for some, because they prefer the aesthetics of elegant decay. The dilapidated state of old glorious buildings is a deserving indictment of our era, with its dull rote modernism and solipsistic glass towers.
They have a point. The old vocabulary of the buildings is no longer the vernacular. The classical styles speak of sophistication and skill, a rich and confident historicity that ties the American experience to the long parade of Western civilization, and we do not believe we could muster the will to do that again—or we believe we would not be allowed to praise it, since our history is full of sins. The modernism of the ’30s likewise seems from another culture, an optimistic zeitgeist when machines would be bent to the will of man, and new forms unleashed by the bonfire of the old world.
I wonder how much sooner Detroit would have rehabilitated itself without the massively corrupt, dysfunctional government of the past half century.
Did everyone forget the TV series “After Man?” It suggested Hoover Dam’s MTBF meant it would likely continue generating power for around 200 years. A civilization-ending catastrophe that did not result in human extinction would mean this and other hydro sources would serve as an emergency reboot capability. And an event that did cause human extinction would likely take out the rest of the biosphere.
After reading my first histories of World War 1 it was clear that humans are fantastic survivors. Even a Snowball Earth would have humans clustered around ice free zones at the equator …not many but enough.
On the other hand, as I look at the Iphone generation I remember the America of my youth where most every muffler shop was a mini-machine shop and every high school had enough Popular Mechanics (and a shop class!) in their library to jumpstart technology …today not so much. Reading the Doomsday pr0n™ thrillers of the 60’s-70’s I really couldn’t envision a scenario that would drive technology to before the Steam Age…
If there were some form of catastrophe that wiped out a substantial portion of the human population, those that survived would find themselves back in a preindustrial age pretty quick. There’s a famous article about no one person having all of the skills needed to make a pencil. Likewise, the number of skills and equipment needed to manufacture medicines or any piece of modern technology are such that you’d need a pretty large population to keep civilization as we know it going. The people most likely to survive would be those primitive groups who are still living like their ancestors did centuries ago.
Magpie’s point is that there’s enough stuff around that one could stay at or quickly get to the beginning of the industrial age just from the technology we have lying around today.
The “can’t make a pencil” paradigm is based on the “all or nothing” theory. Musk can’t build a city on Mars without building a complete replica of modern civilization.” In this case, a pencil isn’t a pencil without Eberhardt-Faber stamped on it. But I could build you a function pencil that met a more general definition, In any case, why do you need a pencil. Ink and quill pens are easy to make (I made both as a child).
The Fact is, if civilization was wiped out except for the northern third of Granville County, NC, where I live, it would survive and rebuild fairly quickly. It’s about 300 square miles, inhabited by about 20,000 people, mostly skilled farmers and various sorts of contractors. The big danger would realize what had happened and acting fairly quickly. Most people around here have generators and supplies of fuel, along with land, animals, and gardens (mine is small, I only own5 acres) but one of my abutters has a full scale farm, growing corn and soybeans at the moment).
The point is, a single US township could make it, depending on the nature of the catastrophe. Another abutter has horses (his wife’s) and heavy machinery (he’s a building contractor). The guy across the street is a survivalist, etc. Personally, I couldn’t make steel, but my land is sitting on a red clay deposit, and I do know how to smelt copper and tin and make bronze tools.
A further hint about civilizational recovery: Get any book by Gardner D. Hiscox. When I was a kid, my Dad had a copy of the 1939 edition of “Fortunes in Formulas.” I have a Kindle edition of the 1914 edition of “Henley’s Formulas…”. Apparently, Hiscox wrote books covering every aspect of industrial civilization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henley’s Formulas is over a thousand pages long. The files are available from various archive sites.
A good start would be the complete fifty year old Encyclopedia Britannica that I inherited. Or the CRC Handbook I bought at a freshman. Or the, and this really dates me, Versalog-II Slide Rule and its manual. Technological civilization in a footlocker provided you add a lot of hard work and skull sweat.
This stood out to me:
I wonder how much sooner Detroit would have rehabilitated itself without the massively corrupt, dysfunctional government of the past half century.