Strabo, writing ca. AD 23, spoke of iron being exported from Britain. The swordmakers who made Damascus steel famous were not making steel themselves; they imported ingots of crucible steel from southern India (wootz).
There’s like 1 Trillion tonnes of coal still left.
Yep. And water power too.
Ag can burn alcohol. Grow corn, then use for fuel.
Yep. I remember someone pointed out in Dies the Fire that stopping those reactions would likely stop animal life also. Of course later on it was explained that a Wizard Did It.
And fried or baked they are quite tasty. In fact we eat one every thanksgiving, not to mention at other times.
Oil doesn’t come from dinosaurs. It comes from ancient aquatic organisms. Algae, etc.
The Master Speaks:
I was assuming we are talking about after that stage. The complex (and fragile) world spanning networks that feed us breakdown, for whatever reason. The planet can support only a tiny percentage of the population it does now. Some time after that only that small percentage is still alive. What does society look like? 10000bc? 100ad? 1400ad? 1800ad? 1900ad?
Always a great cite!
One thing I liked from the “Dies the Fire” series is the notion of “Death Zones” around cities. It makes the point that population distribution matters as much as actual numbers.
The idea is, when food runs out, there’s a massive migration out of the cities, as people go looking for food. But there’s some maximum distance they can go before they run out of fuel, and walking while starving also reaches a limit. So there’s large areas around every city that have been completely denuded of food, and only people who were outside those zones have a chance of survival, even if they have their own sources of food. Local farms just outside of cities are ultimately just as bad off as the city neighborhoods.
And this is made worse by having several cities close together. Their Death Zones overlap, multiplying the problem. Areas like the east coast of the US are all completely wiped out because there are just too many cities too close together.
So most survivors will be in smallish farming communities that are far enough from major cities that the starving masses just can’t reach them. They’ll have what local tech they have, but not much else.
To avoid hijacking I responded in a new thread…
This has been widely repeated in prepper/survivalist literature.
Speaking of survivalists, the majority of these seem to be driven by political or religious ideology, rather than rational thought or analysis.
I wonder how many (if any) groups of these are actually organized in a way that would allow them to actually ‘survive’ a major collapse on a long term basis?
Seems to me that they radically underestimate the number of specialized trades and skills that are necessary to support a fairly technologically based lifestyle…
There are so many varieties of “survivalists” and “preppers” out there, it’s hard to generalize. I fall into the prepper category, with the proviso that I plan for one month emergencies at home, or enough to evacuate for a week.
Honestly, I share your concerns that the vast majority of even semi-trained individuals is going to do well much beyond those dates, maybe 2-3x for the top 2%, and maybe a year for the top 0.1%…
If nothing else, if you’re in a true collapse SHTF* scenario, you’re one slip away from some injury that you can’t treat (broken bone, or severe strain/sprain) which prevents you personally from doing anything outside a limited area, and even if you get through that, you’ll have vastly depleted your “savings” of resources while recovering.
(SHTF is prepper-speak for “Shit hits the fan” which has about as many variants as you can imagine)
I don’t feel this is accurate. We’re now experiencing much more temperature fluctuation than the world has experienced in historical times.
Admittedly this is a comic strip but it gives a good illustration of the topic. It shows that climate changes involving a single degree of temperature change used to take thousands of years. And that average global temperatures have risen more in the last fifty years than they did in the previous ten thousand.
And it’s worth noting that this comic strip was written in 2016. The rate has increased since then.
Right. I think that anyone who thinks they could sustain a somewhat modern lifestyle for any length of time with just themself and their immediate family is simply delusional.
It would take at least a significant village-sized community… eg, the blacksmith is probably busy most of the time making or at least mending essential tools and hasn’t got time to be a farmer.
And where do they think ammunition comes from… grows on trees? 
I’ve often thought that, if you were serious about trying to survive some kind of major social and technological collapse, what you should do is sponsor some kind of permanent reenactors’ camp.
Build a village somewhere, complete with a wall of some sort. Make it as off-the-grid as you can. Invite lots of skilled artisans to set up shop for a week or two, or a month or two, every year, get others who want to try their hand at historical farming, all that sort of thing. Have enough of each type of person so that it’s likely at least a few will be able to make it to you during the collapse. A built-in community of people you already know and trust, with hopefully enough skills and resources to survive long-term.
I was thinking about a shorter timescale.
There were apparently times between 1600 and 1800 (the ‘little ice age’) when the Thames froze over, for example.
On the other hand there was the ‘Medieval warm period’ from about 950 to 1250.
However, I don’t want to hijack this into a Climate Change issue.
Apparently that topic is forbidden on this board anyway.
My wild guess: no.
Because I’ve never seen any prepper literature that was about how to gather people together and work for a common goal i.e.staying alive through pooling resources. How to become a self-sustaining community.
Humans are tribal, have been for millions of years. They don’t survive alone, and it’s a testosterone-fueled fear-fantasy that makes some people believe they will be the exceptions.
That’s a bit reminiscient of Stirling’s “Dies the Fire” except that the survivors weren’t organised ahead of time.
Personally alas, I think Stirling’s scenario is too optimistic. I think the die-off would be too severe, rapid, and widespread to allow enough enough people with those skills to regroup. 
There was a YouTube video set in Japan where somehow inexplicably electricity stops working. The video followed a urban Japanese family as they left their city and ended up becoming farmers and fishermen in a small coastal community. Now maybe the Japanese are different but the video didn’t mention the hordes of people who turned cannibal before starving to death.
In the mid-term if you have the equipment to reload then you can recycle brass casings (though not indefinitely) and recast lead slugs. This means you can store just the primers and propellent. Yeah, but 20-30 years down the road either industrialism has recovered or you’re back to black powder.
See also:
TEOTWAWKI = The End Of The World As We Know It;
WROL = Without Rule Of Law
Finally found it: “Survival Family”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-B9qt78KaI
Eh, fiction is fiction, according to wiki (large grain of salt of course) I’d expect a “road drama comedy” to NOT be pushing for the darkest option (again, assuming this is a match, I’m not going to watch a two hour video right now). And yes, Japan is culturally different. Not saying we couldn’t have a best case scenario, but I don’t think it likely.
No matter what, I think a huge part of the debate comes down to how much of a community continues after the collapse du jour. An individual or family? Not going to do much more than survive, and not going to have the wide number of skills to preserve a larger tech base.
A community, or a commune, they’re likely to be more self-sustaining, but have little to no reason to preserve anything not immediately applicable, depending on the skills present at the collapse. Probably good animal husbandry, hopefully some pragmatic (up to light surgical) medical skills, agronomy, blacksmithing (btw, I’ve done this, it’s HARD, and the tools are surprisingly specialized and rare!), etc.
You’re going to need a web of such communities/communes on a cooperative basis, or something much larger (IMHO) to be able to allow enough surplus beyond survival to allow specialization, or (back to that web) enough trade to allow each community to support one or more specializations if there’s going to be a fast bounce back.
But again, that takes us back to the nature and severity of the collapse, which we’ve never specified.
As per the OP it’s simply that our civilization proves to be unsustainable, at least at its current level. Maybe no sudden collapse (unless political events intervene), just that everything gets poorer and lousier indefinitely.