# Is there really any \*real world\* way modern society could collapse back to pure survival levels? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [August 27, 2016, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-really-any-real-world-way-modern-society-could-collapse-back-to-pure-survival-levels/764172 "2016-08-27T18:45:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2016, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-really-any-real-world-way-modern-society-could-collapse-back-to-pure-survival-levels/764172/81 "2016-08-31T16:12:46Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > But cutting off electrical power to Los Angeles for six hours goes way beyond a minor inconvenience! Los Angeles is powered by more than one transmission line, I’m pretty sure. So, really, we’re shutting off electrical power to some subset of Los Angeles. Hell, Los Angeles was probably worse off a decade ago because someone designed a dysfunctional spot market for electrical power. We muddled through. It’s a minor inconvenience in the scope of this thread, which is about the collapse of civilization. ---
**Author:** ![butler1850](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/779978/32.png) [@butler1850](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/butler1850)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2016, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-really-any-real-world-way-modern-society-could-collapse-back-to-pure-survival-levels/764172/82 "2016-08-31T18:40:18Z")
> [@Martini\_Enfield](#): > > What I think people forget is that even if, absolute super duper worst case scenario and everything that uses electricity is fried - that’s not reverting us to the stone age; more like about 1890 (when electric lighting started becoming relatively widespread). > > Also, the knowledge on how to make electricity isn’t going to vanish; it’s just going to take a while to get power grids and the like back up and running. In the interim, people will have to manage with local solutions (solar, steam, rivers, windmills or whatever) for their energy needs. > > \ > > The point is, people throughout history managed without electricity right up until the 20th century (and there will undoubtedly be remote places in India, Africa, and China which _still_ don’t have it); so it would be difficult for the modern world to readjust to not having it, but not impossible or insurmountable IMHO. I would agree that the knowledge of how to rebuild from 1890 technology exists, but the infrastructure to build 1895 improvements doesn’t. The water driven mills are gone, replaced with factories and infrastructure that relies on electricity and fossil fuels delivered by modern machinery. The 1890s infrastructure would need to be rebuilt in some fashion simply to begin rebuilding the modern infrastructure. We’d be able to skip a lot of the development steps along the way, but the general public simply doesn’t have the knowledge or skills to operate without modern infrastructure. Food storage would be an immediate issue, as would the concentration of our population in dense city & suburban areas. Chaos due to food would spread quickly leading to losses of many of the engineers & highly skilled people. Manual laborers for farms, horses & oxen are in short supply, as are the plows and harvesting equipment needed to operate farms that now depend on modern machinery run by a very few specialized farmers using pesticides and herbicides to efficiently farm creatively small amounts of land with high yields per acre on purchased (instead of retained) seed. It wouldn’t be pretty in any way. Some have the skills and could survive, if they don’t get killed by those that don’t/can’t. IMO, it would be generations before a return to anything we’d recognize as “normal.” ---
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 7:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-really-any-real-world-way-modern-society-could-collapse-back-to-pure-survival-levels/764172/83 "2016-09-01T07:49:29Z")
> [@butler1850](#): > > I would agree that the knowledge of how to rebuild from 1890 technology exists, but the infrastructure to build 1895 improvements doesn’t. The water driven mills are gone, replaced with factories and infrastructure that relies on electricity and fossil fuels delivered by modern machinery. > > The 1890s infrastructure would need to be rebuilt in some fashion simply to begin rebuilding the modern infrastructure. We’d be able to skip a lot of the development steps along the way, but the general public simply doesn’t have the knowledge or skills to operate without modern infrastructure. Food storage would be an immediate issue, as would the concentration of our population in dense city & suburban areas. Chaos due to food would spread quickly leading to losses of many of the engineers & highly skilled people. > > Manual laborers for farms, horses & oxen are in short supply, as are the plows and harvesting equipment needed to operate farms that now depend on modern machinery run by a very few specialized farmers using pesticides and herbicides to efficiently farm creatively small amounts of land with high yields per acre on purchased (instead of retained) seed. > > It wouldn’t be pretty in any way. Some have the skills and could survive, if they don’t get killed by those that don’t/can’t. > > IMO, it would be generations before a return to anything we’d recognize as “normal.” I’m not necessarily disagreeing, just saying it’s not going to go straight to a Mad Max aesthetic either. Necessity is the mother of invention and while I can’t see people making new computers again for quite a while, they’re certainly going to be able to build windmills and things like that in fairly short order. ---
**Author:** ![Grim\_Render](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a87d85/32.png) [@Grim\_Render](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grim_Render)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 8:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-really-any-real-world-way-modern-society-could-collapse-back-to-pure-survival-levels/764172/84 "2016-09-01T08:35:32Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > Several EMP space-altitude detonations over North America. I’ve heard rumors that modern society extends beyond North America, and might trundle along without the landmass. Through a major economic depression and readjustment, but trundle nonetheless. As for the OP, multiple lethal viruses, such as might result from something bad happening in a bioweapons lab/storage. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-really-any-real-world-way-modern-society-could-collapse-back-to-pure-survival-levels/764172.md?page=4)