Oh, big deal. Where is Africa today, uh :D… ?
If we have all the best experts in all areas, I would expect we would have too the best leaders, logisticians, organizers, judges of peace, etc…
And what happens when you start with a complete breakdown in social order and insert several fantastic leaders and organizers with fundamentally different approaches? Comparisons to Japan post-earthquake are completely off-base: there was a tremendous support system from the outside that helped out, and even before external aid arrived, people knew it was on the way.
There’s another leader I didn’t mention before: the person who thinks the best bet is to go looking for the technology that wasn’t destroyed, to go looking for the tech pockets that surely exist, or, failing that, to go find answers. After all, the people in this scenario don’t know whether the effect was global or localized.
When this group wants to take some of the best mobile resources (heads of cattle, cattle wranglers, people with tremendous outback knowledge, etc.) off on a mission to find answers or refuge, what happens? The benevolent dictatorship executes several thousand people a la Sulla?
Also, earlier there was the suggestion that the use of slings would make the military dictatorship incredibly effective. I disagree. Slings have been used by hunters and by military, but AFAICT not by policing forces, because they’re accurate either against still enemies (or prey) or in huge numbers as an opening salvo in a battle against massed enemies. When they’re used, we’re generally talking about slings made by people who’ve been making slings most of their lives using tools designed for the creation of slings, and used by people who’ve been using slings most of their lives. It’s yet another bit of hyperoptimism to suggest that hides and sinews scraped with sharp rocks by people who’ve at best made one or two slings before using steel knives and wielded by people who’ve never used one for keeps before will be superior to picking up a rock and throwing it.
I’d like to read that. Keep us posted?
I still think that using a single human baseline for time is foolish. Sure it would take a week or a little more for a lone person to construct a clay forge, (including drying and firing time) but two, three or more working together can cut that time in half. A simple drop forge along with open topped ceramic molds will provide you with basic iron tools. They won’t be great quality, but who cares? They will allow you to move the the next level and that’s making steel. Doing so is pretty much a full time occupation, so it requires a support base of other folks to help feed and shelter the smith who is in turn providing greater tools, ( and most likely training) to the community.
So why would there be a complete breakdown? No one dies in my original scenario, you just wake up and every human artifact is gone. The survivors would be confused, but basically ok, it’s summer, there’s fresh water to drink (there’s a bloody great river that goes through Perth), and piles of food lying around on the ground from where shops and supermarkets were. Remember the packaging disappears but the food is left. So really there is no imminent danger. Just mass confusion, hysteria to be sure but nothing like 30,000 people dying… which is what happened in the Japan earthquake and Tsunami.
People have time to work out a plan, so the military taking politicians and academics and marching to the Stirling Ranges region would be seen as a continuation of the current government under temporary martial law. Not a coup or a Dictatorship.
“Waking up” brings up a whole new set of issues.
First there are the deaths from people who wake up to a drop from fifteen feet in the air, as their second-story bedroom disappears. Then there is nearly everyone else who is probably injured in that fall. Hell, consider the fact that houses have foundations that will disappear–how many people will break bones or worse in the instant of the alien attack? Not to mention people on the highway whose cars disappear out from underneath them at 100kph.
And the prison walls disappear.
And people who are held in check from committing crimes because of fear of retribution suddenly see their chance.
And people who want the best for their children go crazy.
The social fabric depends on an elaborate system of communication, law enforcement, material-based class structure, and the like that falls apart in an instant. It’s not going to be fun.
You do realise that a city has about 2 weeks worth of food, right? And most of that is frozen, bottled, bagged, canned and in other ways dependent on its packaging. Moreover with both packaging and buildings gone, any food that is left is going to become a feast for seagulls, rats, dogs and crows.
In the scenario you describe there will be no food left within a week at best. That is imminent danger.
The same applies to water. Perth is a big city on a flat plain. It’s more than an hour’s walk to the river for most people. The immediate result will be people camping beside the river. People with no leadership. People who, within a week, will be reduced to eating unpackaged, spoiled food. Based on experience from elsewhere in the world, the water will be undrinkable downstream of the river within 2 weeks.
Food will not be abundant as you seem to think. The realistic scenario, again based on famine throughout history, is that once the food in an area is exhausted people will begin to migrate. As they spread out across the land they will devour everything they can find. All livestock will be slaughtered. All crops will be despoiled.
Trying to control this in the scenario you propose will be impossible. The military lacks weapons and the training to use the weapons it can make. It lacks communications and transport. There is no conceivable way to stop the plague of humans from spreading out form the cities and ravaging the countryside. Perth has a population of ~ 1.5 million. To reduce that to a manageable density of one person per kilometre you need to spread them across an area 1000 kilometres on a side. Perth is on the coast, so the area will extend 1000 kilometres inland. Of course the inland regions around perth will not support 1 person per kilometre in this sort of scavenging lifestyle. So for all practical purposes the whole of WA will be picked clean.
The only areas that will escape the scavenging hordes will be those areas that people simply can not reach. That rules out the Stirling Ranges, since you claim that it is easy to walk there. A mere 300 kilometres is nothing for a starving mob. Why would that stop anyone? People will move outside the city, consuming all the food they can find, and when it is gone they will move on. People will travel 300 kilometres in less than one month using this method.
In this scenario the survivors will have to become well organised within a week. They will need to identify themselves to one another without any form of mass communication in a filthy, crowded, disorganised panicky city fuill of starving people. They will then have to make up their minds to abandon >90% of the population to certain death.
Failure to do this ensures that they will not “find plenty of cattle, pigs and chickens along the way from the farmland they pass through.” The crowds will have consumed those if they do not move before the migration begins. Even if they do leave within the week, there will not be any excess of livestock or crops available in the long term. People will pick any undefended countryside clean, and then starve to death. The only chance your group has is to gather up all the food they can find and take it with them to a defensible area.
The only chance for your group is to stake out their area in the Ranges and defend it to the death by forming an organised army. This is pluasible enough, since the crowds will presumably not be organised, but the decision to kill starving refugees will need to be made if the group is going to survive the first six months.
If you can explain how any other scenario is possible I would lobe to hear it. I really can’t see how you arrived at this idea that people would not panic, that there would be no danger, and that there would remain a wealth of food both in the cities and in rural areas .
I don;t dispute that a well organised group in a perfect area with perfect organisation could manage to rebuild a lot of technology. But the idea that it would be easy or achieved without ruthless control and a willingness to kill refugees doesn’t seem to fit with either common sense or history.
Speaking as someone who has actually tried to live off the land (admittedly in Canada 
), I thing getting a reliable food supply is going to be really, really difficult and will occuppy about 99% of your colony’s time.
There simply will not be much surplus energy for making more advanced tools and things - which are, unfortunately, necessary for increasing the food supply.
The problem here is one of surplus accumulation and distribution. Sure, someone can make a primitive forge and find all the necessary supplies in a few weeks or a month, if they know exactly how and where to look - but each step in the process requires other steps, which also take time (need stuff made of wood? Better knap an axe!) - and people need to eat all the time, and people on the edge of starvation are unlikely to voluntarily hand over food to the flint-knappers and forge-builders - and the food is very perishable anyway. How to distribute this perishable surplus to your craft experts? How to distribute the products of your craft experts to where they are needed? Doing all that while everyone is scattered about hunting for food (need I mention that you will have to scatter to scavenge?).
I wonder if the hypothetical is trying to get at something that we’re refusing to discuss–not because we’re fighting the hypothetical, but rather because we’re running with it in its logical direction. Would a different hypothetical get to the core issues better?
We discover a planet in a different solar system that’s almost identical to earth of 100,000 years ago: plentiful game and wildlife, and even a species phenotypically identical to humanity. But this species doesn’t have any technology whatsoever. We also invent an awesome mind-transference device that allows us to supplant alien-human brains with our own brains. The transference is instantaneous (or happens at light speed, whatever), whereas getting any materials to the planet would be impractical and take way too long.
Being bastards, we agree to murder the species by taking over their brains. There are 100,000 of them. If we chose 100,000 humans and trained them with all the skills they’d need to undertake the project, and set up clear hierarchies beforehand, how long could would it take to reach the industrial age on that planet?
This hypothetical might get at the OP’s point without having all the other issues intervene.
If the planet already has resident HGs then the environment is already maximally exploited. If it wasn’t the indigenous HG population would increase. So once again, there is no surplus food. Finding enough food to stay alive will be a full time endeavour.
And that point is going to keep coming up no matter how you try to spin it. Obtaining food is hard work. In the technological world we only need one farmer to feed 100 technicians. But we only reached that point through millenia of needing 100 farmers to feed one technician.
If we have no technological base, we are back at that point again. If we require 1, 000 technicians to maintain technology ( a reasonable assumption) then we will need a 100, 000 full-time farmers. And of course we then need enough land for one hundred thousand farmers to farm.
There is simply no way around that. Prior to the industrial age most people were farmers because you need farmers to produce food. Even if you can re-create a working steam tractor within 10 years (once again, a reasonable time frame IMO), you still need a 100, 000 farmers for those ten years.
So can we save technology? In theory, sure. But it would require great management and commitment from everybody. Large numbers of people are going to have to do the dangerous and backbreaking work of farming and land clearing for at least 10 years for no reward at all beyond the salvation of technology.
And that is an important point to remember. There is no payoff for the farmers here. Once we get our steam age in 10 years time, the farmers are going to be out of a job, they won’t be rich. They won’t benefit at all from any of this. The only reward they can hope for is that their kids will grow up in a better world.
So theoretically it’s possible. Taking human nature into account, I am kinda skeptical.
Totally–but I’m not suggesting we add to the population, but rather completely supplant the population. However they’re maximally exploiting the environment, we can do the same.
How about 99,000 farmers–would that work? That ratio works perfectly, I think, since I suggested taking over 100,000 aliens (let’s say the entire alien-human population of a certain area).
Consider that we’re choosing people ahead of time. Maybe there will be some significant reward for the farmers once the steam engine is created. Maybe this is humanity’s last greatest hope. You’re right that human nature will remain what it is, but by making it a volunteer force instead of a sudden apocalypse, and by making everyone there a trained, prepared volunteer instead of having a starving civilian population in the background, things should be a little easier.
That’s the only reward for a lot of people slaving away right here and now…
Scenario that gets less interference from human nature (I’m having fun thinking of scenarios like this):
Tomorrow the aliens appear in the sky. “Hey, humanity!” they say. "How’s it going? Good, good…so listen, 75,633 years ago, one of our ships crashed on your planet. We really need to get it back, okay? It probably buried itself about a mile or so under the crust wherever it landed and went into hibernation.
"We can use our nanites to dig around and find it, but our nanites feed on carbon, and that won’t do wonders for your biosphere. So we thought we’d give you some time to locate it yourselves. Say, 30 years?
"Oh, and by the way, you DO know that you can hook up one of those iPods to an EKG machine to make a chrono-dimensional dataport, right?
“Anyway, see you in 30! Cheers!”
It turns out that a chrono-dimensional dataport (CDD) allows the mind-transference I mentioned before. However, it also lets you create a new dimension split off from our universe at any moment in history. Unfortunately, it only allows data to be sent: it doesn’t allow data to be received.
Humanity starts a feverish search for the spaceship, but an alternate plan based on the CDD: 100,000 of our best and brightest will be beamed into a universe based on ours 75,658of years ago, into the minds of the humans living then, and take them over. Their goal is, within 30 years, to locate the spaceship (using whatever technology is best suited–earthquake measurers, satellites, global recon stations, etc.–assume that its landing was pretty significant and could be detected by the tech level of the 1950s)–and then build a CDD themselves to send the data back to us.
Assume that all other efforts to find the spaceship fail for some reason or another (the spaceship is too deep, it auto-healed the ground above its landing, etc.). Could humanity start with nothing and build an iPod and an EKG machine within 30 years, if the fate of humanity depended on it?
That means we are going to remain HGs as well. In that case we have no hope at all.
The problem here is that you have no crops, you have no cultivated land, you have no cleared land. You have nothing.
Moreover HG population densities are low. The entire continent of Australia had a population of about 250, 000 people. What you have is 100, 000 people spread out in bands of 5-20 individuals at a density of one person per hundred square kilometres or less.
And you are going to try to produce surplus food within 30 days while bringing these people together across an areas the size of a small continent. I don’t believe that is possible.
What could that possibly be? The steam engine isn’t going to magically produce gold or 110 virgins or something. No matter what, this society is never going to be anything like affluent within a single generation.
If they exist, I have never met them. People today “slave away” for immediate rewards of food, status and money. If there is a person out there who works 50% more hours than they need to at backbreaking phsyical labour just for the sake of the next generation, I have neither met them nor heard of them.
An EKG. Sure, that is relatively easy. There were projects in popular electronics in the 70s that told you how to build one. So if your sole aim was to build a single machine within 30 years, with no need to maintain human life after that point, sure you could do it with the perfect starting point. Of course that would require sacrificing any sort of sustainability for the society itself, since you would be investing in the EKG rather than in building and educating people in how to build broadly useful technology
An iPOd? Absolutely no chance at all. To start with nobody alive on Earth today has the requisite knowledge to build such a machine. Simply memorising the plans for thedevice would require dozens of people. The truth tables for the chips alone would occupy volumes, and need to be memorised letter perfect.
Beyond that, you need to build an electric power plant to refine the metals, you need to mine rare earths. You need to crack and engineer hydrocarbons for the polymers, you need to build an electron microscope and so on and so forth. Anyone of those projects would take a team of engineers and labourers 10 years to do today. You simply don’t build an aluminium smelter or polymer lab or microchip assembly lab overnight. And that is using pre-existing 21st century technology. At the very best it would take over two decades to get to basic mid-20th century technology level of earthmoving equipment and electronic calculators.
And you can’t do those things serially. You need to mine the coal in large quantities before you can build the electric generators. You need to refine the aluminium and rare earths before you can build the electron microscopes and microcomputers. You need to build the electron microscope before you can start building you the first generation chips and you need those chips to build the first microcomputers to design the second generation chips. You need the second gen chips to produce the third generation chip lab. And so on and so forth.
You can’t just have part of the population start building your final chip lab on the first day while other part of the population are making flint tools. The people with the knowledge for the final lab will be sitting idle for decades until the materials exist to allow them to exercise their knowledge.
I think that an ability to make transistors or at least vacuum tubes for an EKG should be achievable in 30 years without too much difficulty. But aiming higher than transistors is being overly optimistic.
thanks for the info, yeah 30 years to reach 1950’s level tech (early transistors) was what I was thinking before I posted the OP. and then another 50 years to get back to where we are now give or take…
when past civilizations were devastated , it took centuries to rebuild to a form of civilization. the best they could do was leave clues of their history behind , most of these clues were destroyed with time and those recovered by the freemasons , they have kept for themselves . when we say we are developed , what we are actually saying is that we are technology users , the true knowledge is kept by a few chosen ones.
most of the humans have lost the skill of living off the land , this skill will be the first lesson to be learned . how long that will take will depend on what kind of people are left and how harsh the conditions for survival are .
food , water , shelter , clothing , women will be the priority of men. fighting over these resources would be the main goal to survival . as the years go by skills like reading and writing would be lost by most , so would concepts of the past . our basic history would become myths and legends .
for those who understand technology , without the infrastructure ----it is meaningless , you can make a wooden wheel from cutting down trees with the right tools , that is about it . you cannot make a tyre .
without the infrastructure ,even with the best minds . by 500 years we would have evolved into hide wearing humans with basic speech and concepts of life . we have even lost our basic sense of community .
the best we can do , like was done in the past , is for the chosen few to preserve the knowledge for some random new race to discover in the distant future
have you seen city of amber , the scientist built an underground city , stocked it with food . loads of can foods , a generator supplying electricity from an underground river . guess what ? the city still started going downhill . even if the aliens did not destroy most of our infrastructure , unless every part is in place . society will go downhill . even if you were left if an intact city , with time there will be a decline in the way of life as things gradually collapse , things would eventually break down and not replaced and knowledge will eventually slide away .
the social aspect of life will also decline , then transformed into something else . every empire that has fallen has produced new civilizations that at first degenerate , then follow different paths , they never replicate the past .
so for a global empire of today to be reduced to 100,000 would be bad news even if most of the infrastructure is in place . music , films , news , culture , innovation , the new concept would be a dying culture , it will take a lot of strength to rebuild . we would have to operate on a sustainable level , and encourage true education for the people , a life time of studies like monks totally devoted to the mastery of knowledge from identifying seeds , to space travel , also to living for each other , so that we could follow the path of enlightenment and peace , not selfishness and destruction .
what i could suggest is that some scientist should be put on an island for about ten years without radios , tv , computers no communication with the outside world , but we could monitor them and see how they get on . maybe about 500 humans
Archy, is that you?
no this is mastermoves from uk