The sun is blocked out, how do we rebuild and maintain civilization

Great Debates
1

Assume a supervolcano or meteor blocks out the sun for an extended period of time.

Obviously the food chain falls apart, most plant and animal life dies. Most human life dies too.

How can humans using 2016 technology survive? Obviously not all 7 billion of us will survive, but how could a kernel of human civilization survive to eventually rebuild?

I’m thinking if you set up aquaponic or hydroponic food buildings, and powered them with methods of electricity generation that would still work (hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, fossil fuels, wind?, tidal, etc)?

Staple crops like corn, wheat and rice can be stored for decades. So start growing crops and storing them. I’d assume some kind of military establishment would be in charge because you’d need a monopoly on violence to keep this civilization stable and secure.

I put a ? behind wind, because isn’t wind due to the suns rays hitting different parts of the earth in different ways? Would there still be a decent amount of wind if the sun was blocked out that could be used for energy generation?

Also, even though I say the sun is blocked out, would there be enough visible light for people to navigate around? What if the sun was only partially blocked, could humans genetically engineer crops that requires less sunlight and still produced food? If we can genetically engineer crops to survive various environmental conditions, can we engineer rice, wheat or corn that can grow with only a fraction of the sunlight?

As far as healthcare, humans do not require much healthcare to be healthy and fit in their prime years (ages 0-60). Public health and a few medicines and medical devices (antibiotics, anaesthetics, bandages, etc) would do most of that, and even with most of our medicine gone as long as we had public health (clean water, sanitation, quarantines, vaccines maybe, etc) as well as nutrition most people would be mostly health. However senicide may come back.

how hard would it be to build a chemical factory to start making the chemicals necessary for industrial, medicinal and agricultural fields to operate?

Has anyone written a book on how a civilization can survive a meteor impact? I know there are survivalist books on how to do it as an individual, I’m more interested in how a nation state like the US, China, Japan, Russia, etc. could use their resources, monopoly on violence, legitimacy, etc. do it.

2

Fritz Leiber had a charming short story, “A Pail of Air,” where the sun is just plain gone. (The earth is torn from orbit and becomes lost in space.) Humans survive, in small numbers, by various extreme measures. He posited that advanced civilization endured near nuclear reactors.

Personally, I don’t buy it. Without sunlight and crops, humanity is done for. A Cichxulub impact would reduce us to the animal level, and probably extinguish us entirely, and ditto for a Long Night.

3

The book The City Of Ember addresses some of this (ignore the bad movie and stick to the book The City of Ember - Wikipedia).

Civilization has to go underground due to radioactive contamination. They don’t talk extensively about the technology since it’s a young adult book, but it’s an entertaining read nonetheless.

4

Aren’t there alternatives?

[ul]
[li]Hydroponic farming using grow lights and nuclear/geothermal/hydroelectric power[/li][li]Farming of life forms (like bacteria) that use thermal vents for energy rather than sunlight[/li][li]genetic engineering of crops that can grow in very low levels of natural light[/li][li]genetic engineering of bacteria that do not need the sun to grow and evolve. Maybe engineer some bacteria that can survive off of chemicals that are synthesized from the energy from a nuclear plant.[/li][li]use nuclear power to chemically synthesize sugars, fats and amino acids from simple molecules. [/li][/ul]

For points 2 and 4, the bacteria can be used to feed fish or other life forms if we cannot eat the bacteria directly.

Any one of these could be helpful

5

Yes, it might be technically possible for the entire human species to work feverishly to create a self-sustaining biosphere for a handful of people.

The problem is that humans won’t do it. Why would you work like a dog storing food in an underground bunker when you know that you and your family are going to be locked out of that bunker?

It would take the industrial output of most of the world to do this, all while people are literally starving to death. People are not going to be shipping their last bag of rice to Cheyenne Mountain, on the logic that they’re going to starve anyway, so might as well take that food out of the mouths of their starving children and give it to some politically connected fatcat.

6

It all depends on the timescale. The worst meteor impacts in geological history are thought to have thrown enough debris and dust into the atmosphere to cause a global winter for 3-8 years I believe. Even then you can still grow some crops, not everything dies.

Unless you define what percentage of solar output is blocked and for how many years it’s not an answerable question.

7

Does it really take the entire human race? Setting up hydroponic growhouses to grow staple crops near nuclear, hydroelectric or geothermal power plants doesn’t take 7 billion people. It would probably take a few hundred or a few thousand.

8

But how do you keep the starving hordes from overrunning your greenhouse and eating everything in it?

9

Because no meteor / asteroid / comet strike blocks out 100 percent of solar output, its a percentage dimming for a number of years, which depends on the size of the impact. The OP’s question is not defined so it can’t be answered. Nothing we know of will 100 percent block out the sun.

10

Where would they get the materials to build and maintain such technologies? Where will they get people with enough technical knowledge to build and run them? And Lemur is right; without excellent defenses, the plants would be overrun and looted. Think Rome after its fall.

11

That’s part of the plot in the book I mentioned. Technology is falling apart, people start hoarding food, skills to fix things have been lost.

12

Just added to my reading list. :slight_smile:

13

Hope you like it! It’s a YA book, but I enjoyed it.

14

I mentioned in my OP how a military would be behind this effort since you need a monopoly on violence to keep it running. So there would be a kernel of a military keeping the peace and keeping the marauders in check.

I’d assume once the civilization was up and running, then scouts for the military would go out trying to recruit people to join the collective.

15

I know, stuff like that is important to factor in. But can’t pretty much any artificial light source be used to grow crops? If need be, incandescent bulbs could be used. LED or CFLs will last for years and years.
As far as technical knowledge, I do not know. Stuff like that is a concern. However if it was a meteor, all the people who run the power plant will still be located in the same place. They will not disappear, they can be offered jobs running the plant in exchange for food and protection.

16

But “The Military” is just a bunch of people. The problem with this is that you can’t save everyone, so everyone who isn’t on the list is going to be fighting to take the stuff the people on the list are trying to save.

You can’t save the whole military, and even if you could, what about the families of the soldiers? You’re expecting the soldiers to shoot their own families. It won’t work.

Of course people on the list have an incentive to protect the infrastructure and supplies inside the bunkers. But there’s going to be a civil war to get on the list, and to get your family on the list. And the civil war over the bunkers will destroy the bunkers. Rather than preparing for the aftermath people will be fighting over the scraps.

The point is, no one has an incentive to prepare for the aftermath, if your preparations are just going to be taken by someone else to allow them to survive and you do die. And so if you’re on the biosphere list, you might want to work on the biosphere. But everyone who isn’t on the list is trying to grab the stuff you’re trying to preserve. So all your time is spent fighting those guys. And then you realize there’s no point in you building stuff, you might as well just take other people’s stuff at gunpoint. The social contract falls apart. People facing certain death won’t cooperate with you.

The point is, before you can solve the technological problems of building an artificial biosphere that will support X number of people for Y number of years you have to solve the social problem of convincing people to help build the biosphere when your plan requires them to die outside the locked gates of the biosphere.

17

We don’t. We die.

We could build a few nuclear-powered shelters, farms and so forth at great expense. But there’s no way we could build enough of them to sustain civilization. You need a certain of level of population in order to support the extreme specialization of labor necessary to have a modern society. There wouldn’t be a society around to supply the materials and replacement parts that you’ll need once the biodome starts to wear out.

18

As far as I know, we would need special lights to grow plants indoors. Incandescent lights wont work…at least they dont for pot. And they are difficult to make. Better to rely on animal husbandry and/or fishing is the animal population is still surviving. Maybe do what the Masai do and get nourishment from cattle without killing them.

19

As long as you can maintain aconstant source of energy, e.g. that nuclear reactor, you can grow crops in an underground cave. I know a guy that grew some “plants” in his closet with the help of a phototron. I don’t know if you could feed enough people to keep the lights on but I know you could probably keep them high enough so they wouldn’t care.

20

The trouble is that you can’t maintain a high enough industrial base to re-fuel the reactor, or repair it if parts break, or build a new one when the old one wears out. You need an extensive mining/fuel/transport/communications and education (damned important!) infrastructure. 21st century technology can’t exist without a really massive labor and intellect pool.