Actually, at least a minimal amount of salt is NEED to have. Your body requires it (which it does not pepper or tulips). And more than that is very handy for food storage; though it’s true that people living far from salt sources did come up with other methods.
I think we would spring back way faster than most anticipate …
Just think of PV … existing panels will still be available, (albeit, as you mention - batteries will will degrade over 10-15 years) - panels hardly degrade - IIRC less than 1% per year … and then there is still solar hot water, that you can even MacGiver yourself …
My house is passive solar (100%), so I have no artificial heating system to “go out” but solar intensity might be reduced and I might not sit in shorts at home in winter but with woolen trousers… but again that is vastly different than living in a hole in the ground …like 5000 years ago.
My point is: many things might be throwback-thurstay (back into the 1800s) … but we will spring back faster (my guess: 30-50 years) to where we were around 1980 (pre internet) - some areas more, some less (computer chips come to mind)… and alternative energies will help a lot … and while for many apects of our lives we might not have the materials and hi-tech tools, we still have the knowledge how to do things. Its the wrong iterations that makes any R&D costly, risky and slow - we could sidestep those iterations.
Things might be vastly different … e.g. a gutted Ford Escort with a 3000w motor from an industrial washing machine powered by 6 PV panels in series sputtering along at 30 km/h in the flat … along others with animal powered vehicles …
I live in LatAm and see on a daily basis how people keep old stuff functioning (lack of funds to buy new ones) … here is a truck that is older than the both of us, surely didn’t have an easy life and yet it still is running. If there is no diesel, they will get it to run on veg.oil, etc…
case in point: stuff doesn’t have to be perfect to work … but hunger is a good cook, as they say.
but, yeah … my guess is as good as anybody’s
Having worked on a solar car for competition, I can tell you that you will not get a ‘gutted Ford Escort’ going anywhere near 30 km/hr with towed solar panels. Getting a car to go at a speed faster than you can ride a bike, even with the Sun high in the sky, means basically having a stripped down tricycle frame with a lightweight aerodynamic fairing.
Although I am an advocate for methanol and dimethyl ether as synthetic liquid fuels, I am doubtful that you can get an industrial society working on wood or grain alcohols alone even using all forms of waste and natural feedstocks available, and I guarantee that you will never extract enough oil from corn, soya, rapeseed, or sunflower for ‘biofuels’ to be self-sustaining for even their own production, notwithstanding the land use and fresh water diversion from food production and impact upon biodiversity, and this ignores the use natural gas for synthetic fertilizer production that is obligatory for intensive row crop agriculture.
While it is certainly possible to keep pre-microelectronic automobiles going indefinitely with a good mechanical skill and an ability to improvise, they aren’t going anywhere without a readily available source of liquid fuel. Nor is it possible to extract or recycle mineral and metallic resources and process them into useable forms without an accessible and consistently available form of controllable energy such as coal and oil. Bootstrapping an industrial society from solar, wind, or hydroelectric is just not viable, at least not at anything like the rate that 20th Century industry advanced. It can be seen how difficult and slow it is to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy even though there are essentially no limits upon energy (mostly hydrocarbon) available for manufacture and transportation, and while that is partially due to institutional resistance and active shit-fuckery of entrenched business interests, it is also the case that even the best intentioned efforts to scale up renewables and energy storage has not come anywhere close to the aspirations of advocates, and except for solar at middle and lower latitudes hasn’t even proven to be generally cost effective.
Stranger
good points/discussion, overall …
It seems like we are implicitly projecting our environments into the new world order (and quite possibly our optimism/pessimism)… and yeah - life in new york will be vastly different from today …
Life in S-america/rural russia/scandinavia/n-canada/central asia and most of africa, not so much - as all the “thingies/machinery” that are there today will be there tomorrow. Admittedly not all will be functioning (e.g. internet) … but most should (not sure how much of a EMP-radius there is per bomb)
… and then you take and work with what you have …
my point being that for the (figurative speach) amish its gonna be less of a hassle than a tech-bro living in SF … and a blue collar mechanic will probably fare better than a MBA type of person with doble master in digital marketing.
what WILL probably we a factor with huge impact is the “formation of industries” (think IBM of the 50ies - 80ies, standard-oil in the 1st half of the 20th century, Siemens, GE, Tyson-Foods, McD, and international trade etc…) … and the efficiencies that came with them.
During the gas rationing era of World War II people were using wood gas generators to make gas to run engines so that is one possibility fo fuel.
Perhaps you’ve noticed some discussion about the issue of deforestation sometime in the last fifty-odd years?
The British Isles were devastated by the deforestation for energy, agriculture, and timber for shipbuilding from which they have never recovered (and would take millennia of ‘rewilding’ to come anywhere close to its original diversity). The United States and Canada did a massive amount of deforestation of old growth forest for lumber in the 20th century. Around the world in most developed or developing nations have reduced forest cover by ~90%, often clearing biodiverse old growth forests for single crop agriculture with what turns out to be low quality (for agriculture) soils. And even the monoculture fast growth trees planted for harvest (mostly poplar, pine, and cedar) are lower quality (especially in terms of energy content) and do not support biodiversity or the native ecology. An industrial society predicated on the use of trees harvested for gasification plants is even less viable than first and second generation biofuels, and frankly just a further progression toward unrecoverable devastation of the global ecosystem.
Stranger
We could do a lot of these things.
But most likely not at anything like our current population levels; or, at least, not for long.
So what life would be like really depends massively on what caused the collapse, as well as the precise location. And which locations could keep cars running – or would need to – is going to depend on what caused the collapse, as well as on the current population’s knowledge and skills.
I’ll add in that keeping an emergency vehicle, a transport truck, and a personnel transport running per community might well be possible for areas that couldn’t keep individual autos for all adults functional.
Again, it all depends on what type of apocalypse you are thinking of. General collapse everywhere, pandemic, nuclear, Lucifer’s Hammer, what have you. The natural resources we use today aren’t going to just vanish. Oil will still be underground. Coal seams will still exist. The big advantage we will have in rebuilding is that we already know all the ways of doing things that don’t work. Saves a lot of wasted effort on the rebuild.
Civilization 2.0 will take much less time to achieve than it did the first time.
The oil and the coal that were easy to get at are pretty much gone.
A lot of the other natural resources are depleted and/or polluted.
I suspect that Civilization 2.0 would happen eventually. But I also suspect that it won’t look a whole lot like what we’re doing now. It might, of course, be an improvement; but the chances of any of us living to the improvement stage are not large.
The mines will still be there. The bore holes aren’t going to magically close up. With a drastically reduced population most of the damage/pollution will go away by itself. I’m not saying it would be easy. I’m just saying it isn’t likely to be as bleak as some are hypothesizing.
Also, I expect that the survivors would “mine” existing manufactured goods for the metals they need, rather than looking for a seam of iron ore, digging it up, refining it and producing steel from it.
Readily extracted coal (within the United States, certainly) has almost been completely depleted and despite advances in mining technology and the cost efficiency of mountaintop removal methods most coal mining companies have entered bankruptcy or gone out of business. Coal production has been on a stark decline since the peak in 2008, and the energy value of bituminous coal being mined has also declined as the most valuable seams have played out.
The oil industry, similarly, has also long ago extracted most of the readily available petroleum of significant quantities, and while individual surface pumps still operate in areas their production is typical measured in terms of single barrels a day. US oil rig count has dropped from a peak of around fifteen thousand in 2014 to fewer than five thousand today, and while yields have actually gone up this is mostly due to the energy and water intensive hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) which produces “sweet, light crude” from oil shale which is bootstrapped from the existing infrastructure. Trying to recreate this essentially from scratch (or even having to rebuild from salvage) is pretty much a non-starter because it just wouldn’t be economically viable, notwithstanding the necessity to stand up a refining capability (assume refineries would burn up or degrade to uselessness in the interregnum of a civilization collapse) to be able to utilize this energy resource, and the lack of medium and heavy petroleum for many heavy transportation and industrial processes.
The one ‘fossil fuel’ that would still be available in large quantities would be natural gas. However, while natural gas doesn’t require the amount of processing of petroleum (with some filtration it can essentially be used as it comes out of the ground) and can be used for the industrial production of many chemicals and polymer materials it does take a significant infrastructure to transport and store safely. There are also potentially methane clathrates found in marine subduction zones, although that would also take substantial infrastructure to access and extract.
The rebooting of industrial civilization with renewables would be slowed by the fact that nearly all of these require substantial industrial infrastructure (producing carbon composite blades and structures, PV or high-intensity thermal solar, large concrete dams), and again, the development of all of our modern industrial infrastructure is predicated on access to cheap hydrocarbon energy and particularly petroleum, which was crucial to power the global commerce system on the modern scale and all of the economic efficiencies that come with it. Read Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization: A History to get a brief but relatively comprehensive survey of the role of energy in achieving the various developmental stages of civilization and the fundamental place of hydrocarbon fossil fuels in “The Great Transition” and technical innovations into 20th Century industrial society.
With the preservation of current knowledge and access to already mined materials, we could potentially reboot an industrial society based upon natural gas, methane clathrates, and renewable energy sources, but it would be a much slower and lower energy society with technological developments and industrial infrastructure limited by energy and resource availability; one without propulsive flight (or extremely limited), very limited global trade, and incapable of sustaining high density urbanization (at least without some equivalent of serfdom to provide the consumables and labor resources to sustain large cities). Of course, this all assumes that humanity exists on a planet that is capable of maintaining stable climate regimes that support agriculture and the necessary biodiversity to be self-regulating in terms of consumable natural resources instead of unstable climate regimes that compromise food and energy production resulting in cycles of famine and social instability, which is the path we are currently barreling down with no sign of abating.
Stranger
Actually, without active, resource-intensive work, most mines collapse or flood.
I’m thinking about what to do with large hydroelectric power systems, like Hoover Dam, or a lot of the power in Quebec. So long as the dams and generators are still there, these could produce a lot of power for a long time. If the population has been reduced significantly, a lot of that power will be unneeded for domestic consumption, and could be used to power a system for producing other green energy systems like solar power and wind turbines, which would give us more flexibility in where to install them.
So imagine a civilization built around Hoover Dam, that sells solar cells to everyone else around them.
Provided you have people that know how to keep the thing on line. My guess is there are quite a few very specialized people there. Your gonna need them. Not to mention all the smaller up stream damns that keep the water flowing.
Now I’m curious, how long would that continue to producing energy with out some interaction from people? Probably no more than a day.
Well, with regards to Quebec, its power stations are an interesting mix of well-distributed, and also some very isolated. So there’s lots of people who know the basics of how to run them, spread over quite
a large area, and some are located in remote regions that would be more likely to survive most types of apocalypses.
Dams are not inert objects that will endure environment degradation and corrosion indefinitely, and dam operations require constant surveillance and adjustment as well as regular maintenance. Power generating dams in particular require maintenance of intakes to prevent silting or other blockage, spillway adjustment, inspections of the dam structure and footings, and of course all of the electrical generation elements (turbines, dynamos/generators, load balancing and power transmission equipment, et cetera). Without round-the-clock maintenance a power generating dam would start to experience issues that could lead to failures in days if not hours.
Stranger
I once saw a picture of someone who had a large rubber bag, almost as big as the car, attached to its roof, full of natural gas to power a modified car. That picture was from the 1940s; this is from the WWI era.
https://blog.maryevans.com/2014/01/gas-bags-on-wheels-a-solution-to-petrol-shortages-during-ww1.html
p.s. I also saw some chatter earlier today about what the total eclipse would do to the solar power component of the Texas power grid. The answer, in short: Not much.
How bizarre - don’t such people realize that night occurs in Texas? If the solar power grid (such as it is) in Texas survives the night how the hell is a less than 5 minute eclipse going to do it any harm?
If enough people die, the ones who survive will form tribes which pool resources, make shelters, take care of the children, scavenge, farm, hunt, barter with other tribes. You know, the way humans lived for a more than a million years.
It’s amazing to me that so many posters think our particular level of technology and our particular economic system is both so desirable and so inevitable that the only question is, whether can we manage to return to it. It is the most destructive force since the asteroid hit. Maybe the collapse of it is our only hope. It is surely the Earth’s.