Lately a lot of people worry that our current technological civilization is doomed. That not only will we not manage to expand into space and continue advancing forever, but that it’s already too late for us to have retrenched to a sustainable steady-state; that we’re going all the way down.
My question however is just how far down is down? Some people think it will mean the extinction of the human race, or at a minimum reduction to nomadic scavengers in a desertified world. Some think we might barely manage to hang onto preindustrial subsistence agriculture. But even given resource depletion and the collapse of the global-scale trade systems our technology is dependent on, I think the worst case scenarios ignore that we wouldn’t completely lose all knowledge of technology, and that some things once invented are unlikely to be uninvented.
The primary example I’m thinking of is guns. Absolutely no one, especially in a barbaric anarchic collapse, is going to give up guns if they have any choice at all. And at bottom a black powder flintlock rifle firing Minié balls seems pretty sustainable; if you have iron smithing at all I would think you’d have flintlock rifles.
Electricity? The hardest part of that was learning enough about nature to understand how to build an electric generator. It could probably be done even if the copper wire had to be drawn by hand; and while large-scale power generation and distribution might not be feasible in reduced circumstances, it’s hard to see the very concept of electricity being forgotten or absolutely unimplementable.
IOW, would a post-global world look more like the Hunger Games than like Mad Max?
I think the post-technological world, assuming it ever happens, will take us back to the early to mid 1800s, depending on how much technology is lost. No electricity, no automobiles, no silicon chips? We survived those days just fine, and I’m not sure why we couldn’t do it again. Lots more disease, but that never wiped out the human race. If I am still alive during this collapse, I will keep my guns and gather up all the ammunition I can find so I can hunt for food and defend myself. It will will be strange not having electricity or the Internet, but I think I could survive, at least for a while.
Barring something like a nuclear war that destroys lots of infrastructure, some forms of electricity will survive long-term. I’m primarily thinking of hydroelectric power. Those dams and generators were built to last, at a time long before we were reliant on computers and other higher-tech stuff. They will stick around for quite some time, and any kind of industrial civilization, even if only late 1800s to early 1900s, should be able to maintain and repair them, or replace them.
Same with wind power. We might not make the huge wind turbines we have now, but smaller-scale wind power for local use should be practical, even if we lose most of our tech.
An important and unknown issue is what the climate will be like. We are heading into a “greenhouse climate”; humans, much less human technological civilization has literally never existed in one of those periods. There’s some speculation tat the new, more energetic climate might be too chaotic to permit agriculture, in which case we’ll likely go all the way back to hunter-gatherers. At that point we might be able to keep copper-working, but not much better than that.
And note; most of Earth’s history has been “greenhouse”. If things go that direction - and at this point it almost certainly will - the new climate will be for all human purposes permanent. Even if a new icehouse period arises in a hundred million years, humanity will be long extinct by then.
One thing I remember reading was how agricultural equipment only takes up a small % of the fossil fuels we use. Back when people were worried about peak oil, people would say it would mean we wouldn’t have fossil fuels to run agricultural equipment, but in a world with a fossil fuel shortage, agricultural equipment is going to get top priority right up there with the military. Civilian consumption will decline drastically due to electric vehicles, car pooling, public transit, work from home, etc.
Point being, if there is a shortage of resource X, we are going to end up prioritizing it and rationing it. We aren’t going to live in a dystopia where people go for 500 mile drives for leisure but combines and rice harvesters sit idle because we don’t have enough fossil fuels. Resources will be allotted to where they produce the most society wide value (one would hope).
As to how far back we’d go, I’d say pre-electricity. That’s probably about as far back as we can go. Maybe back to the early days of the industrial revolution if fossil fuels almost totally disappear. But again it won’t be like living in the year 1805. We will still retain all the knowledge we have now.
As far as keeping humans alive, keeping humans alive is really not that difficult. All people need is about ~3000 calories a day, enough vitamins/minerals, protection from predators and accidents, protection from the elements, protection from microbes, and basic health care. If you have all that, life expectancy goes up to about 75. But you still need the transportation infrastructure to spread the food to the right people. Again, trains and semis shipping agricultural products will take priority. Vehicles generally only last about 20 years, but in an emergency we’d probably prioritize fixing and repairing them to extend their lifespan, and reduce wear and tear to necessary trips. In Cuba they still have cars on the roads from the 1950s.
We could easily achieve that in a technological collapse. Agriculture seems like the big bottleneck, but if you assume it takes about 1 million calories a year to survive, there are multiple crops that produce multiple millions of calories per acre.
Sugarcane alone can produce up to 20 million calories per acre. Corn, potatoes, wheat, soybeans, etc produce 5-15 million calories per acre. Obviously you need protein, but soybeans supposedly provide all 9 essential amino acids. People can live off of water, cornmeal, sugar, potatoes, soybeans and vitamin/mineral supplements.
There are already books written about how to rebuild society after a collapse. I’m sure there is endless other info out there about how to start to rebuild.
You also have to take into account that in a collapse, getting out of the collapse will become a global emergency. In ww2 major nations were spending 40% of their economy on the war effort. After a collapse we will devote most of our time and money into rebuilding, rather than going to war with other tribes wearing football armor in the desert.
For that matter there was a brief era of steam powered Traction Engines before they were displaced by internal combustion engines. But the limiting factor would be the industrial plant necessary to produce machined metal parts. There’ll still be coal after petroleum is unaffordable, but it’s a question of whether the opportunity to retrench before rail-dependent economies collapsed would be there.
That’s another knowledge-based thing unlikely to disappear: that scurvy, beri-beri, pellagra and other such diseases aren’t somehow inherent to being lower class, but are preventable nutritional deficiencies.
I think a great deal depends on the precipitating cause of the collapse. Some sort of mass EMP event that kills the infrastructure? Melting of the polar icecaps and massive, uncontrolled flooding of the coastal cities causing the population to flee inland and collapse in sequence? Mass die-off due to the next pandemic?
Or just “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”? Different scenarios will likely lead to different collapses. I think given some sort of the final variation we’ll end up loosing large scale organizations beyond easy transportation (which may end up being shoe leather, horses, trains, or some sort of alcohol powered vehicles) though historical empires prove that you can control quite a distance even without technological transportation.
Without mass communication, we’ll lose a huge part of our knowledge base, and I’d guess we’d end up somewhere in the early industrial era. Even if we lack a lot of skilled ironworkers (my FiL is a blacksmith after his retirement, and it’s a LOT of work and skilled knowledge), assuming any sort of substantial population die off (which is probably a given) there’s going to be tons of junk to scavenge for a long time.
But, I’d worry more about any future resurgence. We’ve used up a LOT of easily accessible resources that given preserved knowledge could allow us to reclaim our technology quickly. That of course, is in and of itself an assumption, that we could or would do it the same way we did in this cycle.
And that’s a big part of what held people back, was the lack of knowledge. A nation can lift itself out of poverty and into first world status in ~50 years by using the knowledge and technology the world has already invented.
South Korea’s GDP was 11 billion in 1972, and 1.17 trillion in 2007. Per capita GDP went from $300 per person to over 24k per person. Their economy got about 100 times bigger in 35 years.
Granted, South Korean can import technologies manufactured overseas, which would not be an option in a post collapse society. But In a post collapse society maybe we’d see 5-10% a year GDP growth that the asian tigers saw, causing the economy to double every 7-14 years.
I don’t recall much talk about being unable to fuel agricultural equipment; most of the worry I recall has been about the lack of petroleum based fertilizers.
And no, we’d lose a lot of knowledge. Partly because so much is on decaying digital media, partly (given rising anti-intellectualism) because of attempts to destroy knowledge, partly because we’d no longer be able to afford so many specialists, and partly because such a collapse is unlikely to be peaceful so we can a lot of knowledge to be lost in the (likely nuclear) wars preceding the collapse.
It seems like there will be a double collapse. There will be a massive catastrophic.collapse when the delicate system of interlocked global supply networks that everything relies on break down. That is a chain reaction that will happen quickly.
But while that will suck and a lot of people will die we won’t be hunter gathers over night. There will still be a lot of technology around that will work, even if it can’t be replaced (or even repaired in many cases). Bicycles, guns, tools, anything that doesn’t rely on Wi-Fi or electricity (and gasoline for the most part). There are a lot of those around and they’ll last quite a while, bit by bit they will gradually stop working, and when they do the level of technology will collapse a long way. And I don’t see how we will recover.
For how long though? I would imagine that electricity could be generated without much trouble- there’s still lots of coal out there, as well as biomass.
The things that are going to be tougher are the ones that are basically built upon the late 19th century technology. Stuff like 1920s-1930s levels of technology and energy usage.
I think the biggest thing is that we’ll still have the knowledge, assuming that we don’t lose it in some sort of cataclysmic event like a meteor strike or something. Most technological collapse scenarios tend to revolve around the lack of ready or high enough density energy to do stuff. But we’ll still have books, and can still print books as things decline.
I mean, some trained engineers, a machine shop, and a windmill producing electricity could do a LOT of small-scale manufacturing, and scale up from there. Hell, if they’re smart, they’ll spend their efforts making/recovering more machine tools.
That’s the thing with small scale home built local manufacturing you are not recovering anything. While there are “pre collapse” generators, lathes, power tools, etc. (and spare parts) around you can use them. But anything much more complex than a shovel is not getting repaired once all the spare parts are gone*. The amount of technology that goes into even the most basic part of the most basic but it machinery is far beyond you could make without an international network of manufacturing and assembly.
And even a shovel is not going to be straight forward. Recreating the cheapest big box store shovel takes metallurgy far beyond anything you are going to have. The best you’d manage is a very flimsy delicate version of a shovel that makes the 10 dollar Walmart shovel it replaced look world class.
No, Der is right, it was the fertilizers fueling the “Green” Revolution that were the concern. Around 4% of global fossil fuel use is to fuel farm equipment, 8% is agricultural inputs - fertilizers, pesticides/herbicides, manufacture and transport to-farm
BUT
The agriculture and food system—from field to plate—can account for more than 30% of global energy use if you include processing, transportation, refrigeration, packaging, and retail. But strictly on-farm agriculture, it’s roughly 12% of fossil fuel consumption . But add in food processing (10%), distribution (5%), storage (5%) and then retail, cooking and waste management (5%) and suddenly it all adds up. That’s not all fossil fuel usage, of course.
I think you’re grossly overstating things. Looking past the power hammers and electrical equipment, there’s nothing advanced about the actual metallurgy happening in these shops:
I’m betting that pretty much anything pre WWI would be doable with what we found around, and what’s more, the existing tools could be used to produce more tools. Basically anything that’s essentially worked metal, wood, or stone would still be achievable. And early electrical stuff would also be doable, if the people of this time could set up the supply chains for what they needed.
Power/energy is going to be the limiting factor I suspect. A lot of what we do relies on cheap and abundant power. And in a situation like the OP describes, steam is going to be where we settle out for a while, I suspect.
In the award-winning book Lucifer’s Hammer, after the protagonist community decisively fends off an attack by technology-hating cannibals, the former Senator leading the community urges (with almost his dying breath) his battle-weary troops to the nearby nuclear power plant and defend it against other marauders.
The Senator points out that his community might now be safe but that they were currently awarding prizes to the child who killed the most rats every week. And that rebuilding civilization would only be possible with a reliable supply of power.
As noted by others, we’ll lose a lot of our capability to manufacture all kinds of things, from shovels to computers to vaccines. But if we can salvage electrical power, we’ll be decades ahead in the rebuild.
