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

In My Humble Opinion
21

There’s already a shortage of truck drivers.

http://wdtn.com/2016/08/25/truck-driver-shortage-not-enough-kings-of-the-road-to-deliver-americas-goods/

It wouldn’t take even a majority of drivers going on strike to cause chaos. And it’s not so simple as you think to replace them. Driving a truck requires a totally different driver’s license – one that takes time and money to acquire.

Just out of curiosity, have you folks heard of Starfish Prime? The scientists were shocked at how much damage it did. Long story short, an EMP would do a LOT more than damage satellites and the internet.

And yes, it would cause widespread fear and chaos. Western society has long since forgotten how to live without modern conveniences.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/07/09/the-50th-anniversary-of-starfish-prime-the-nuke-that-shook-the-world/

22

Same problem: why would anyone do this? I’m pointing a gun at you, and if you don’t do what I tell you, I’ll fire it near your ear and harm your hearing. Huh? That isn’t how you use a gun!

If you detonate a nuclear warhead high overhead, above my country…my ICBMs are going to fly right back down your throat, and our bombs will not go off high in the atmosphere, but about 6,000 feet directly over the center of your biggest cities and your most important military bases.

EMP warfare is a weird fantasy. It isn’t a danger. A real exchange of warheads is a danger, and a scary one.

It’s like imagining that a major Chinese amphibious assault takes place…against Alaska. What a totally meaningless concept!

ETA: Another hypothetical for the OP: the natural eruption of a supervolcano, such as the explosion of the Yellowstone complex.

23

If the Yellowstone complex wiped out North America, Russia and China would start competing for hegemony.

If atmospheric contamination wrecked the entire Northern Hemisphere, then Australia and Argentina would start competing for hegemony.

You would need supervolcanoes erupting all over the planet to bring down the entire globe.

24

I’m not sure you understand the issue. In 1962, they discovered during several nuclear tests (Starfish Prime for the US and Project K for the Soviets) that high level nuclear blasts release an EMP pulse that could damage electronics for thousands of miles. Basically any point on Earth that has a sight line to the blast. Now those tests just blew out a bunch of street lights and tripped some circuit breakers and whatnot. Nothing permanent. The worse case scenario is that a weaponized EMP bomb of sufficient power could damage electronics across all of North America. The “big deal” is that it would do more than just knock out satellites and the Internet. Transportation systems, businesses, logistics, communications, everything runs off of electricity or complex computer systems.

So it kind of is like someone pointing a gun at you that would make you deaf. Also blind, paralyzed and retarded. It just wouldn’t set you on fire and blow you into little pieces.

25

I don’t think cmyk and Trinopus are disagreeing with the technical details of the effects of an EMP attack. Rather, Trinopus is arguing that an EMP attack will turn into a standard nuclear war before the EMP even happens. Nobody in the target country is going to say “It’s OK, those incoming ICBMs are set to explode at high altitude! No need to retaliate!”

26

A bigger problem would be the general breakdown of society. When the death rate passed 30% people would stop showing up for work and try to run or hide from contagion. At a 70% death rate the question would be whether there was any organized society left for people to rejoin after the pandemic burnt out.

27

Of course a major transportation strike or slowdown would cause chaos and massive economic dislocation.

But the problems caused by such a strike are solvable, they just take money and effort to solve. If you’re not getting enough new truck drivers, why is that? Maybe the working conditions are horrible and the pay is minimal? So how do we get people to choose to become truck drivers? It isn’t like the shortage of truck drivers is some sort of unavoidable natural disaster. It’s because truckers get paid crap wages and are treated like garbage by their employers. If you own a trucking company and can’t find employees, try increasing wages and improving conditions.

And of course the reason a general transportation strike wouldn’t happen is the same reason truckers are treated like garbage. They aren’t organized. Organized labor is dead as a political force in this country, the only effective unions around anymore are for high-paid professionals like airline pilots and football players. Before you could have a real transportation strike you’d have to have a massive surge in the power of organized labor.

Things like “you need a license” are for normal conditions. I’m talking about possible responses if there really were a crippling strike that couldn’t be resolved by just giving in to the striker’s demands. And the reason there couldn’t be a strike is that even if in normal conditions you need a license to drive a truck, when there are food riots in the cities that requirement can just be ignored, you hire scabs drive the trucks and forget the licenses. Or soldiers drive the trucks. It’s a national emergency, right?

The point I’m trying to make is that strikes and terrorism can cause all kinds of economic problems and disruptions, but they can’t destroy civilization, because there are too many ways to work around the problems. Cause an economic crisis on par with the Great Depression? Sure, maybe. Mad Max style wasteland? Nope.

28

Eh, the metro area I live in would still have @1 million people. Sure, there’d be a short term shock and period of adjustment, and a period of recovery involving mass burials and figuring out who is still alive and which companies remain operational.

When I lived in North Minneapolis many years ago and this sort of subject came up, it occurred to me that Victory Memorial Drive would be perfect. You could probably bury a few hundred thousand people there in mass graves.

Not that I’d ever want that to happen.

29

Most people tend to gravitate towards big, discrete disasters but, if we study history, it’s far more likely to due to slow decline. Political gridlock increases, civic institutions start to fail, people feel less and less enfranchised and more divided and we lose the sense of common unity. There may be some big event that will become the focal point but that won’t be the reason, it’ll just be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So much of modern society is fragile, it’s reliant on an incredibly tight interwoven net that must work and keep on working on the entire thing grinds to a halt. The more advanced we get, the more we build upon existing foundations to support such modernity. But what that means is that there’s not the possibility of just dropping down 1 or 2 levels in development. Either we keep advancing or, if we start dropping, we drop a whole lot of levels.

Say we get into a small trade tiff with China. All of a sudden, a part that used to be easy to get now becomes difficult. That part gets redesigned around in a way that makes the product slightly worse than before. Now, other products that depend on that product have to adjust to accommodate the reduced functionality. Multiply that across thousands of instances and your economy starts to struggle to provide for basic needs of the citizenry. Once you start to have things like food shortages, people start turning on the machinery itself and you start to see looting of supply trucks and increased crime and your supply chains start to become unsustainable.

If you’re thinking this is implausible and can’t happen, look at Venezuela as an example writ small. In one sense, the disaster in Venezuela was “caused” by the drop in oil prices 2 years ago. But, in another sense, it was caused by decisions made 30, 50, 100 or 500 years ago depending on how expansive view of history you choose to take which slowly brought Venezuelan civic society to the point where it’s ready to rip itself apart. Fortunately for Venezuela, there’s still room for the country to reverse its nosedive and there’s an entire economic community to help it on its road to recovery but that won’t be the case if it happens globally.

Personally, I feel the biggest risk to society right now is the vast increase in US political gridlock that we’ve seen just in the 21st century. It’s amazing to me that the Republicans managed to shut down the government in 2013 and nobody even seemed concerned about it a year later for the midterm elections. It would not be beyond belief for me that Obamacare might be the last piece of major legislation passed in the history of the United States and that all we will see from now on is obstructionism in every direction.

A big cause of this belief is because one of the worrying lessons that the world has discovered over the last 2 years is just how much of the modern civic compact is based on growth. The population is easily quelled so long as they believe their children will have a better life than they do but if that promise is taken away, there’s an incredible pot of simmering rage and violence underneath ready to erupt. It’s not just Trump, there’s been a rise of far-right movements in developed nations globally and if we don’t continue delivering growth in perpetuity, can we really rejigger our societal basis before such forces take over?

30

No, driving a truck does not require a different driving license; it doesn’t require a license at all.

Driving one LEGALLY does, but in a crisis like the ones proposed here, who cares?

31

Of course, all the fiendish and sly enemy has to do, carefully playing the long game, is to gain full access to one of our own silos and hack the weapon so that its ascent will abort at the proper altitude and detonate the warhead over our own country. It would be a difficult and perilous undertaking for them to accomplish, but it would be very effective. Our own system would therewith be crippled or defeated, and we might not even be able to figure out whence came the threat.

I personally believe this to be the case. The Apocalypse will not take minutes, hours or even weeks, but decades. We might well be within it even now.

Or at least as good a life.

But can we continue to deliver economic growth? Is the fundamental fuel of the economy inexhaustible, and what will we do if the engine sputters and we cannot find the means to restart it?

150 years ago, rapid growth may have made sense and been somewhat tenable, but today, I am not so sure. I think today there needs to be a realistic balance between growth and sustainability, with an eye toward reaching a stable equilibrium. Economics is the root cause of wars and revolutions, and until we can learn to manage that beast, the basic problems will persist.

32

Right.

Which brings up another point: As a military or terrorist strategy, it’s a non-starter. We’d retaliate with our nukes immediately, before their nukes ever got here. There would be time for many military bases, bunkers, and other institutions to shield their electronics.

33

EMP:

Here is the US government’s unclassified opinions: http://empcommission.org/ Read the executive summary or the detailed reports linked on that page. My one sentence synopsis of the executive summary is “A well-executed EMP attack could thoroughly trash the US and greatly reduce or eliminate our status as a global power.”

As to why anyone would launch an EMP attack (*pace *Trinopus, et al) it goes like this:

To comprehensively destroy the US with ordinary air & ground burst nuclear strikes would take a couple hundred warheads accurately delivered. Easy peasy for Russia and just recently doable for China. Impossible for any lesser adversary.

To comprehensively destroy the US with EMP would take a *few * (e.g. less than 10) high altitude warheads spaced roughly evenly along the US/Canada border. Each could be delivered plus/minus a couple hundred miles of the aim-point and still create insurmountable damage. This is well within the capability of NK or Iran within a decade or so.

Yes, in either case the US can and will promptly retaliate assuming our C[sup]3[/sup] systems are as EMP-resistant (and cyber-warfare-resistant) as we think they are. The difference is that with EMP attacks we’re being held hostage by insane punks with little to lose. Not by large scale mostly rational mostly *status quo *powers.

34

I’m not so sure; I think the dust-cloud would block sunlight and kill agriculture world-wide. There are smaller-scale precedents for this from other volcanoes, within recorded history.

Exactly and exactly.

But if the same little bad guy smuggled his bomb into Seattle, he’d kill tens of thousands, and bring our economy to a painful recession, and, overall, do to us more harm than an EMP attack. Why knock out our power and communications – which we can restore – when you can destroy a city – which we cannot restore.

If the little nutjob is going to commit national suicide, why do it in a way that only harms the U.S. non-permanently? As if the 9-11 WTC and Pentagon attacks had been against a key link in the power-transmission lines crossing the country. Instead of killing 3,000 people, they would merely have put several large cities into a two-day blackout. Bad…but recoverable. The 3,000 lost lives hurt us a lot worse than that.

35

There is no way any country or person or group aside from Russia, China or our allies could execute a massive EMP strike against the US.

Have we talked about solar flares wiping out our electronics?

There’s also the effect of losing all satellites being interpreted by a person or machine as a nuclear attack.

36

Kim Jong-un works up his scientists enough and they manage to pop an EMP along the west coast; not only will the gloves come off, we will soon speak of the myth that there ever were gloves.

37

Did you read the official US government reports I linked to? The ones that talk about it taking multiple *years *to begin to restore electricity to the bulk of the country?

Comprehensively destroying Seattle is a pinprick compared to taking out the entire electrical generation & transmission system of the country.

You’re exactly backwards about which attack is hazardous to the country as a whole and which is hazardous to a tiny fraction of the populace.

Don’t take my word for it. Read the experts.

38

If he’s going to turn NK into a glass parking lot why wouldn’t he just nuke Hawaii or LA and be done with it instead of dancing around with an EMP?

39

I think the post right before yours adequately answered that question.

40

Except that an emp off the coast …from NK is going to affect a smallish area. The example you are referring to is the entire usa