I’m putting together some back-story for a novel I’m working on and I’d like to run a concept past you.
My setting is a planet that was colonised over a thousand years ago by settlers from a generation starship that dropped them off with all of their necessary equipment and then moved on to the next one. All was well for the first hundred years or so - they founded a few cities, got busy growing food and genetically altering some of the local fauna to suit their purposes.
However, the local star flared up into a solar storm of epic proportions, causing a massive EMP pulse that fried every single piece of electonic equipment on the planet. Everything even vaguely technologically advanced was rendered useless, so the settlers were essentially left with nothing. Nada. Zip. El-Zilcho.
So there they are - hurled back to the iron age and forced to make do without the advanced technology they relied on for so long. So my questions are as follows:
Would humanity be able to survive something like that? I’m assuming there’s be widespread panic and starvation as food supplies failed and the means to distribute them quickly disappeared.
If they did survive, what would such a society look like a thousand years after “The Fall”. Would they have re-gained the same level of technology or would they still be lagging far behind in a second Renaiassace or Medieval period?
I imagine the Fall itself would have been mythologised after such a long period of time, perhaps even going so far as to spark a new religion based on the the Fall and the eventual return of the starship…
Sounds like an interesting concept. I suppose the outcome would depend on the type of people sent to do the colonizing. If they were a small group of hardened, well-trained folks, they would probably be well-schooled in survival skills. Things would be tough, but they would persevere and eventually thrive.
But, if they were chosen for their ability to, say, write sonnets and do fingerpainting, they would slowly descend into barbarism and eventually die out. Or maybe a few tough ones would survive.
My assessment is that it’s up to the author, depending on the way you want it to unfold. Good luck!
The thing I’m not sure you’re considering is that even now in technologically advanced societies there are individuals with knowledge of the past, and skills in harnessing “primitive” techniques. As long as writing survived and the skills that these people possessed were preserved I think humanity could recover to a similar level (albeit perhaps with fewer people because of the upset/famines/etc.) fairly quickly. This would perhaps take a concerted effort which might not happen in the potential free for all that would ensue after such a catastrophe.
On this human colony do books not exist? I can imagine, even in a wondertechnical far future that somebody will preserve books even just as primitive curios. By the way, have you read A Canticle For Liebowitz?
I’m fairly certain humans would survive such a situation despite the initial massive loss of life - we are incredibly adaptable after all. But I suppose my question was not so much whether we would survive at all, but what society would look like a thousand years after such an event.
I’m sure books would be around but I expect that apart from a few treasured bits of literature and technical manuals on how to maintain all their whizz-bang mining, farming and terraforming equipment, there would be precious few books of practical use in a survival situation. Probably nothing on hunting techniques or how to cure and sew leather, for example.
If your settlers have already been on the planet for a thousand years or so, I would imagine they have developed mines and manufacturing. Assuming the raw materials are available, they should still have the knowledge, they would be able to rebuild. Yes, initially, it might be tough going but the human race has already proven itself to be very resilient.
EMP would hardly render everything useless. Would there be disruption? Of course. People dying? Yep. End of Civilization? Hardly. All it would do is kick things back to 19th century levels for a bit. Easily recoverable from.
One useful storytelling trick to get around rapid rebuilding might be to specify that there were no reference books on paper because their weight and bulkiness was deemed excessive for incusion in colony supplies. Instead, all knowledge is contained in now unreadable (or fried) solid state storage. Even when things were up and running in the initally prosperous phase, the creation of physical books was still rare and limited to luxury items because paper making and printing is too labor/materials intensive when the main industries are geared towards frontier taming.
If you are just talking about a frying of whatever has already been built, then I do not see this having much of a long term impact. Short term this would suck a lot, as I assume all the manufacturing sites for replacing electronic equipment would be broken as well. They would have to start from scratch. But they still know how to build things, and they have lots of examples (broken as they may be), so I think they’ll pick it up fairly quickly. I’d expect a generation or two will have a tough time of it, but 1000 years in the future it may not have made much of a difference.
Given the huge amount of resources, human and otherwise, that I’d expect to be thrown at engineering and scientific projects designed to get things working again, it would not surprise me if an engineering renaissance was instigated leading to more advances than there would be if there was no such pressure. You may find this society is even more advanced in 1000 years than it would have been if there was no disaster!
They would circulate a handwritten newsletter called “The Straight Dope Almanac.” People would read it, add their comments at the bottom, and then pass it on to the next person on the list.
Threadshitting would be literal, and strongly discouraged.
Well, I would think there would still be a lot of do-it-yourselfers, hunters, backyard farmers and the like sothat many basic skills could be preserved. What’s more, I’m sure there’d still be plenty of engineers and technicians who could hack together some kind of power grid and keep some kind of traffic going on the roads and in the skies. I’m not nearly as sure as you are that society would regress completely to a pre-electric or pre-steam level. Sure, there’d be a lot of chaos, but it’s entirely possible that they wouldn’t regress much farther than a 1930s or 1940 level of technology and would regain the printed circuit, digital electronic level pretty guickly.
I strongly recommend that you read SM Stirling’s Dies the Fire and its various sequels, both as a source of inspiration and so that you are familiar with the competition.
Considering all the EMP-Susceptible technology we have today was invented in the last 100 years, and that nearly all pre-18th century European technology can be recreated in a very brief period (now that we understand the concepts), I guess that your society woule be about 300-400 years behind where it would have been after 1000 years.
IF (and this is where you need to decide why you’re writing the story) there is a general spirit of cooperation and competence among the survivors and a clear and recognized leadershiping as in a military structure (like Star Fleet), you’re probably not going to be too bad off once you get the survival essentials covered. But if you have a bunch of computer yuppies then they’ll probably recreate Lord Of The Flies and back-bite & squabble themselves into viscious & clever monkeys.
The Amish girls would start to look pretty hot if all technology vanished.
The people in cities would die immediately and the suburbs would turn into one large victory garden complete with individually dug wells. We’d still love our pets but it would be the lemon pepper sauce that makes it so.
You might be interested in reading One Second After. This covers the topic you’re researching, only it’s a terrorist attack. Of course I knew that electronics would stop working, but in the book, a young girl with diabetes dies because they can’t keep her insulin refrigerated and it eventually runs out.
I’ll just note that an EMP blast kicks out any electronics that are in existence at that moment. It doesn’t render the world permanently incapable of having electronics.
I’ll also note that in a directional blast like something expelled from the sun, quite possibly the dark side of the planet would be shielded, meaning that probably a good 40-50% of all electronics would survive. Re-outfitting the other half of the planet with electronics and machines would be a large task, but with 40-50% of the world’s infrastructure running just fine, it really wouldn’t take all that long to accomplish.
The bigger issues would be the loss of electronic information like bank account information, and transporting food to people or people to food.
The futuristic novel “The Postman” by David Brin addresses a similar situation, except that the cause of the collapse is due to war, not a star flare. (And it was on Earth, not a space colony.) I would highly recommend reading it.
To answer the OP, I would think that such an event would in some ways be worse than just dialing back civilization to the year 1900 or so. Before electronics-based technology, information was stored non-electronically. But once you become reliant on electronics, you’re more vulnerable when you lose it. So in the short term, it would cause chaos. In the long term, I think society would recover. 1000 years is a really long time–more than long enough to recover, I think, unless some institution (like an archconservative church or government, such as the Catholic church of the Middle Ages or the Chinese empire a few hundred years ago) stifled innovation and enforced stasis.
That didn’t seem to stop our society from eventually advancing. Keep in mind most of the good stuff was invented in the past 200 years or so.
The tough part would be the first few years. Our society can’t sustain it’s current population levels without farming, transportation, manufacturing and information systems.