Is there really any *real world* way modern society could collapse back to pure survival levels?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In looking at some prepper videos like the one linked below (actually fairly well done production wise) I wonder how fragile industrialized society is. It seems pretty robust to me, but in most prepper’s view social collapse is a real and pressing risk. I suppose it’s easy the be complacent surrounded by tech, but random things do happen that no one plans for. Nuclear plant meltdowns, tsunamis, earthquakes, 9-11, etc. In the big scheme of things all of these were devastating locally but blips nationally and globally.

Short of a global giant meteorite strike what confluence of events might possibly (real world) completely break apart the governments and social organizations of industrialized nations? I’m trying to imagine scenarios but I’m not seeing anything powerful enough to fracture a powerful, industrialized nation or the world.

After the Collapse: The Beast Within | Canadian Prepper

2

Coronal Mass Ejection.

3

Several EMP space-altitude detonations over North America.

4

Global Thermonuclear War

Remember when that was the big fear? And it really was an existential threat (even if it couldn’t actually kill every human, never mind all life, it would certainly have knocked civilisation in the northern hemisphere at least back quite a bit). ISIS and Islamist terrorism in general is weak-sauce.

Though at this point I’m not sure how many nuclear weapons all sides have ready to go, its certainly not on the same scale or hair-trigger as the bad old days of the early 1980’s.

5

Trump presidency.

6

OP, have you considered a major truck drivers’ strike? Most people who talk about such things claim that the average city has at most a 3-day supply of food.

7

Along those lines, how about nuking the mouth of the Mississippi River? Sorry I can’t link to it, but sometime after 9/11 I read a piece pointing out never mind targeting the White House or Pentagon or heavily populated areas of the East Coast, the way to bring down America was to block the Mississippi, because most manufacturing still used that route.

8

A truck driver strike is going to cause a Mad Max style apocalypse?

That’s ridiculous for several reasons.

All truck drivers in America are going on strike together? For what purpose? We’ve never had an industry-wide strike like this in the history of the world, it’s alien space bats. So it would never happen. Even if there really were a general strike of truck drivers it would only be a minority of drivers.

Even if it really happened, there are tens millions of people in America who might not be professional truck drivers, but they could drive a truck. So every truck driver in America goes on strike, and the next day 3 million scab drivers are hired. If those guys join the strike, we just hire 3 million Mexicans. If the Mexicans join the strike, there’s always Bangladeshis.

Or if you couldn’t hire scabs, we could do it the good old fashioned Stalinist way. Mobilize the army and the cops and the national guard, and put the truck drivers back to work at literal gunpoint. As in, every truck has a soldier or cop or vigilante sitting in the passenger seat, with a literal gun pointed at the driver’s literal head. And every truck driver has their family members taken hostage, and if they don’t drive, we start shooting.

Or we could just give in to the trucker’s demands and give them their pay raise and dental insurance and flextime, that’s better than cities descending into cannibalism.

Or we call Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai and start implementing those self-driving trucks we’ve been hearing about.

Or we load food into trains and school buses and private vehicles and have a massive driveathon of alternative transportation methods to bring needed food to starving people.

Point is, that’s not a real world scenario, and even if it were, civilization is resilient enough to cope with it. In any real world scenario of a transportation strike, we’d find a way to resolve the situation with various levels of cost and pain and inconvenience.

Real world scenarios would be things like the Yellowstone supervolcano going off, or the Canary Island megatsunami, or solar events that fry the global electrical grid beyond repair, global thermonuclear war, or a planet-wide Ebola pandemic.

9

I’m skeptical of this. I never really took the time to look into it from a scientific and fact-based nature. But ever since I read the book One Second After, this idea seems to be gaining traction with a certain set of survivalist types. The book felt more like far-right, jingoistic propaganda, probably unintentional by the author, but his politics seemed to seep through and read less than just being speculative fiction for its own sake.

Of course a systematic and synchronized attack of detonating a canopy of nukes over the country might be devastating to electronics, but it wouldn’t bring the entire world back to pre-industrialized days.

10

The EMP idea (which is more “emo” in my opinion) seems intrinsically weird.

It’s like a guy is pointing a big gun at you, and you’re worried, because if he fires it, it might make you deaf. Yeah, it might…but that’s not what you need to be concerned for!

11

Sounds kinky.

12

I’m not sure what you mean, the nuclear weapons are going to be detonated so high that it will have no effect on the ground. Of course its going to cause problems among satellites as well.

There’s an idea, how about a deliberate Kessler cascade effect? No more satellite launches for quite some time.

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Destroying satellites wouldn’t collapse society. It would harm science, weather prediction, and some forms of communication, but it wouldn’t bring industrial society down. Not even close.

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Yes, I wasn’t clear on that, I only meant we could take out the satellite system with a deliberate runaway Kessler Syndrome effect rather than use EMP from nukes.

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Also, from a social groups perspective pre-industrialized societies (Roman etc) had plenty of rules, regulations and fairly complex sets of behavioral mores. That we immediately go feral without smartphones and air conditioning seems a bit of a stretch.

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I’d say the thinking of preppers (and this thread thinking) is on the wrong track. As long as a central government remains solvent and in control things will probably not break down. People in general are interested in things flowing smoothly for themselves.

An EMP might nuke the internet but mankind got along just fine without it for a long time. A breakdown of government and infrastructural system will bring on chaos pretty quickly. Especially given all the preppers and their attitudes.

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Biowarfare? Something like Stephen King’s “Captain Trips”- as communicable as influenza and 95+% fatal. Especially because a sufficiently apocalyptic terrorist group would have no qualms about releasing it.

18

Any chance of major pandemic occurring naturally, wiping out - say - 70% of the population? How much of a loss of population would make it so we simply did not have enough trained people to keep the infrastructure running, and keep adequate security over weapons and borders?

19

Well for a huge plague, we have something of an advantage now in pure numbers. If 70% of the USA died, we’d still have @96 million people. China would still have over 400 million. Even at 99% casualties, there’d still be over 3 million Americans. Yeah, we’d have to basically shut down and abandon entire cities, but those cities would also become salvage and mines for another generation or two. The knowledge base, or at least, a large chunk of it, would still exist and could be preserved and exploited as the population rose.

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If there was a pandemic that killed 70% of the people in the US, that would leave the country with around 90 million, about a century’s population growth. If it killed 90%, we would be right back to the beginning of the Civil War. If 99%, about the end of the American Revolution.

Depending on whether the pandemic was selective or not. If its effects were evenly distributed, there would still be enough smart people to keep things running somewhat smoothly. On the upside, there would be a lot less bad television.