This strikes me as unreasonably optimistic. It’s true that there will be lots of excess stuff around. So probably no one is going to fight you for your Brita filters or used cars.
But a lot of those supplies only last a few months or years.
Once you start to think about what seeds you have, you’re thinking about investing a lot of your time and effort in food production. A lot of other people are going to have to do the same.
And there will be the temptation, among some, to use violence rather than labor to procure food.
And in anticipation of that future, people will start to band together for strength. Where the state once had a monopoly on legal violence, you’ll get lots of small factions using violence to advance their goals.
Or, y’know, not. As a species we survive because we cooperate and I don’t actually care how many dystopian Mad Max zombie movies and tv shows get made, the fact of the matter is that in general people find ways of getting along that have nothing to do with how many cops and courts there are. I already know the people I share my state with and they’re generally pretty cooperative people, pragmatic AF and once you get outside one or two metropolitan areas they’re pretty competent and know how to get by when shit goes adrift. Because it does here and people plan for that. Don’t see any reason why these sensible people would suddenly turn into slavering hordebeasts because some shit went really adrift. Says more about who you live near than any innate characteristics of humans, seems to me. Mebbe you need to move to a better neighborhood.
It is amazing to me that a claim that “The most dangerous thing after this would be the breakdown of civil order and government” is such a contentious point here.
It is frankly hilarious that it’s interspersed with ideas about set up a massive propane-fueled booby trap to kill trespassers. Do you really not see the disconnect here?
I’m not talking about a dystopia or a hopeless apocalypse. It’s not an indictment of humanity. It’s an acknowledgement of the fact that civil society actually does things, and one of the things it does very well is give people ways to solve their problems without violence. When it’s gone, violence will be more common.
Whatever, dude. There is an interesting discussion to be had here but yours is…not that discussion. I’ve seen those movies too, and read those books, and seen those tv shows and I’m not really interested in rehashing old tired plots endlessly.
Cooperation and seeking safety in numbers are almost as strong instincts as fear of others. The “others” would be as dazed and confused about the whole situation as I would be.
Getting the goddam electricity on is worth a lot of cooperation. Without it, we’re just camping out with no end in sight.
I’m in favor of functioning electric service and agree that it’s worth a fair amount of cooperation, especially since the cooperation would also be useful in a lot of other areas; but I don’t think it’s reasonable to describe living in the fashion of all of human history up until the late nineteenth century (and in many places well into the twentieth) as ‘just camping out’.
Exceptions to my hyperbole graciously noted. But if I’m cooking outdoors (wood won’t burn in my electric oven), washing clothes in a tub and pooping in an outhouse, I’m still working with whomever I need to get the lights and heat back on.
Well Una knows far more about this than I ever will so I defer to her knowledge. That said, from this distance the difference between my minutes and her hours isn’t great. One big plant failing more quickly than expected can/will start a cascade that will force many other plants offline before they fail on their own. Perhaps a nuclear plant won’t fail on its own for a couple of weeks, but the grid it feeds won’t be able to accept the power for longer than a few hours. Remember, the plant may be able to generate the power, but if there is nowhere to use it, the plant will have to shut down or destroy itself. To keep things going one has to maintain both the generator and the load. If either one fails both fail.
If 99% of humans suddenly died…90% of the remainder would probably follow within a year. Most people today simply do not have the skills to survive. (I include myself in this category.)
I haven’t thought about the book Earth Abides in a long, long time. Depressing as Hell, but if 99% of the population does die, that in itself is depressing!
Look for the TV series called “Last Man on Earth.” A lot of the topics mentioned here are covered in that series. Be prepared to laugh yourself inside out!
The main character settles in a mansion in Tucson, I believe. There’s no power. And water soon vanishes from the taps. He tries to use bottled water for his personal needs, but the accumulated bottles get to be too much even for a mansion. He finally solves this to his satisfaction by cutting a hole in the diving board of the mansion’s pool. The pool becomes his toilet.
Wait a minute. This guy can’t figure out how to go outside and dig a hole? Or even not dig a hole, but just go outside; there’s only one of him, after all. Sun and rain and soil bacteria will take care of one person’s waste just fine.
That pool room is going to reek to high heaven before long.
Not to mention, why Tucson? It requires huge amounts of infrastructure to make living there in any way feasible and there are SO many better places to go where survival will be much easier. You can’t grow squat for food there, the heat is punishing, the lack of water is extremely problematical–good grief, go find a nice off grid homestead somewhere and all the work will have been done for you.
Because Last Man on Earth is comedy about people entirely unsuited to survival being the last ones left. If they were intelligent, it wouldn’t be funny.
I watched a couple of the first episodes and didn’t really find it funny so I’m not the one to judge that show but yeah, by Hobson’s choice the majority of those left over are bound to be about as suited to life post apocalypse as the average gerbil is to life in the rattlesnake habitat.
It sounds like the end of the world, except there would still be 3.3 million people in the USA and enough long-storage food around to feed you for a long time. There’d still be 600 of us in my suburb. There’d be enough people to figure out how to shut down a lot of things although there would still be accidents and events.
Of course, if you’re in bumfuck Nebraska in a town of 600 that is a couple of hours away from even a small city, you’re kinda boned in some respects, although there will be a lot of food in your area even if you don’t recognize it.
Survival would be by congregating in small cities with local power facilities and attempting to clear them of the dead, house the remaining living and re-organize society.
You mean IF it’s gone. There are still 3 million people in the US alone. We’re basically back to the late 18th century. They had civil society in the 18th century. We fought and won a war, even.
Unfortunately, that’s not possible for almost everywhere. Power plants are huge because it’s less expensive to build a fewer number of massive plants than lots of smaller ones. There may be some local ones here and there, but mostly they are far, far too large to be run by the surviving engineers.
In the short term, the survivors will OK. There is plenty of food, some generators, and gasoline will stay good for a year. Some food will last 30 years in certain environments. Those foods include wheat, rice, some canned food, some dried foods, and certain types of powdered milk. It can lose flavor, but help you stay alive.
However, pretty much all manufacturing will stop. Without power plants, there isn’t going to be much electricity for most of the world. There won’t be any complex products manufactured anymore. All modern products depend on parts produced too far away, with a lot in China and other Asian countries.
As products break down, they can only be fixed by scavenging other products. That will work for some products, but not for anything complex.
Smart move would be scavenging all the solar panels possible–Oregon has some good sized arrays along the freeways to power the lights and signs and that. Lots of rooftop panels and most of it is fairly interchangeable and scalable. Dunno how long the wind generators will last without maintenance, but I bet the hydroelectric dams would be feasible for motivated individuals to suss out how to operate. The infrastructure is there, the really hard part that takes a lot of human work hours to set up has already been done, maintenance is much easier than construction. The part I worry about most though is the loss of information via the internet–so much of what used to be on paper in libraries is now digital only and THAT would be very hard to scavenge.
The most sensible thing to do would be to gather in suitable cities where people with specialized knowledge could not only get things, like power, back online in limited areas, but could also teach their skills to others. Then as the population grows, expand back out across the country very much like the westward expansion, but probably starting at both coasts this time around and spreading to the middle of the country. There might be exceptions for really important infrastructure items in the middle of the US that would warrant rebooting those areas early on…don’t know what those might be.
However, just the act of making the information available to the survivors would be Herculean with everyone without power. I guess you could have bus caravans that drove around blasting messages over speakers and leaving posters plastered all over likely areas people would go to scavenge for supplies. Good PR would be essential so it didn’t look like “Come to Terminus, everyone accepted.” Even if all that went well, there would probably be a large percentage of people, including those with the skill sets needed, that would prefer to just stay where they were isolated area or not.
This brings up another question. Suppose a stripped down functioning government managed to identify the steps needed to reboot our modern way of life. What incentives could they offer to encourage people to move to these new population centers? There would be so much surplus stuff just to be scavenged in the short term everywhere, that really the only thing I could think of is the government making an effort to get the lights back on and using that as an incentive…“Come to Cleveland - We’ve got electricity in 5,000 mostly vacant homes!”
