Apparently the show The Last Man on Earth picks up again after taking quite a a turn for the worse a few episodes in. The premise of the show is that the human species is almost extinct.
So I wonder: what would be needed to survive this? Suppose there’s some kind of event that only about one in a million people survive. Obviously, there’s the issue of genetic diversity: if we get below a certain minimum, the species probably won’t be viable anymore.
But what I want to focus on is technology. With no people, pretty much nothing will work anymore: communications, energy, water, sewage, transportation…
Drilling oil is hard, but with very few people we can probably do pretty much everything we need to do using electricity, which is easy to generate. Building generators and electric motors isn’t too hard, if you have access to copper. Electronics are a bit harder, but if we have a few people who know about this stuff left, it’s probably doable to build transistors that are needed for radios and so on.
However, the problem would be computers. Today’s hard drives are built to impossibly tight specifications. I don’t see how the survivors can keep building those. I guess we’ll have to use SSDs. We can probably do without GPUs and complex communication chips (plenty of radio spectrum!), but if we don’t want to go back to a pre-digital age once all current computers die, we’ll have to be able to make CPUs using something in the neighborhood of a 250 nanometer process, which was state-of-the-art back in the late 1990s. Or better. Is that realistic?
And where would the survivors live? The Bay Area seems like a good spot: not too hot in the summer and not too cold in the winter, with plenty of farm land around.
I’m distressed that you think computers would be a priority in such a situation. The needs will be far more basic. The knowledge of how to make fire, for one; how to carve arrow- and spearheads, for another; how to live in the wild in general. If I were somehow in charge of a post-apocalyptic society of a dozen or so and you wanted to join, boasting of your computer skills, I am going to laugh my ass off at you.
Let’s see. A knowledge of chemistry would be good. Knowing how to purify water. Knowing how to hunt wild game and to butcher meat. (Anyone who objects to hunting is going to be not simply mocked but in fact invited to get the hell away from my group.) Knowledge of primitive farming techniques.
I’ll give it some more thought and post more later.
I’m not sure about the premise of the show and how closely they define “near-extinction” but I think you have to look at technology in a sort of percentage-of-population way. If you need at least 100 computer scientists to build a hard drive and they currently make up 0.1% of the population, then you need at least 100,000 survivors to maintain computer tech.
If the same percentages can be maintained in every industry, then the computer scientists still have the mining, refining, transportation, etc. resources needed.
I think my 100,000 number is probably too low. To maintain an industry like computers with so many specialized parts and skills, I suspect that tens of millions is more like it.
Anyway, one of the big problems you run into is that once minimums are not met and you lose technologies, there’s a domino effect. Just think about farming. At different tech levels, you may need anywhere between 1% and 95% of your population working agriculture. If you lose internal combustion engines and now need 25x as many farm workers, you’ve just lost those people from other industries as well. Losing those industries may need your need another 2x farm workers… and now you’ve lost even more tech. It doesn’t take much for this domino effect to send you back a thousand years.
Or, in the words of Skald: “I’m distressed that you think computers would be a priority in such a situation.”
The first is that a disaster that kills almost everyone is probably more survivable than a disaster that kills the majority of the population, but not all. This may seem very counterintuitive, but it actually makes perfect sense: in a disaster where almost everyone died quickly, like The Stand, existing food stores would be large enough to sustain the remaining population for decades if not longer, even assuming most food deteriorated. With a slower apocalypse, like The Road, mankind would have time to burn through all of our existing food before the population dwindled to a few survivors. That would make long term survival more difficult.
In the scenario you posit, there’s no real deadline. Once the survivors find a Costco warehouse or a cannery (or similar), they could take a few decades off, have some babies, and then begin the task of rebuilding civilization. As long as they keep the wolves away and the fire going at night, they’d be fine.
The next fact is a bit more dismal. Oil and other fossil fuels are the lifeblood of civilization and are critical to the existence of our society. Fossil fuel production requires the usage of large quantities of energy just to get the process started, and the existence of advanced knowledge of petroleum production and refinement. It wasn’t always this way–it used to be that the oil almost seeped out of the ground, and in some places production is still rather simple. But the problem nowadays is that oil production in the West is exceedingly difficult, and we may simply not be able to bootstrap the process. There could be a time, when oil is hard enough to get out of the ground but alternative energy is not advanced enough, where a societal collapse would be permanently devastating. Perhaps the apocalypse will simply feature Americans and Europeans floundering in poverty until we get crushed by Saudi Arabians with tanks and planes and ships.
Oh, I should also point out that my post presumes a non-violent transition to extinction (hah!) that affects people randomly (hah!)
In a real-world collapse of civilization, there’s a good bet that a bunch of thugs with guns kill all of your computer scientists without stopping to consider the long-term consequences to the world economy.
Actually the biggest issue with computers would be the programming.
You make a good point about domino effects, but I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as you suggest. We’ve had internal combustion engines for more than a century, it shouldn’t be a problem to keep building simple ones, and it’ll be a while before all the ones out there today stop working. A more immediate problem is going to be the fuel. Drilling oil isn’t too hard if it’s not to deep, but obviously all the good wells have pretty much been exhausted. The only way I see oil happening is one or two especially easy places in the world, but then you need transport unless there’s good farm land on top of that oil field.
Electric motors are much better but then you need batteries. Not sure how difficult lithium batteries are to make, but lead-acid is easy enough. And I guess you could run your electric harvester using an extension cord…
If today 0.1% of the population is computer scientists / hard drive builders, that doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way. There’s not going to be much art, sales, marketing, science and so on. Farming, engineering, teaching are going to be the growth fields. Also, remember that in the 1970s/80s computers were made by remarkably small teams, although of course they built on top of lots of off-the-shelf technologies.
Talking about fire and arrows is silly. Obviously we’re not going to be able to maintain 21st century technology. But mid-20th century shouldn’t be too hard. Certainly making fire is not a problem at all, and if you need to kill stuff, make guns. No need to go back to the stone age.
The reason I’m thinking about computers is that much of our knowledge is stored in them and computers are needed to design lots of different things and to control manufacturing. However, the trouble is that these days all this knowledge is distributed throughout the internet, and once the power goes down most of that will be inaccessible.
If we’re assuming the quick millimation (as opposed to decimation), then building computers, etc shouldn’t be a problem for a long time. Similar to Joker’s comment on food, there are going to be lots of computers available, many of them brand new.
Actually, even in a slow apocalypse, access to electronics in working order shouldn’t be a limiting factor.
I am offended by the suggestion that I and my fellow ruthless thugs are going to kill computer scientists without a good reason. There will ALWAYS be a completely rational reason for any murder I commit, or I’ll know the reason why.
Have you lost your fricking mind?
Civilization had fallen. Presumably that includes the power grid, and thus the internet. Who gives a fuck about computers?
You need to know how to survive. While it would be marvelous if YouTube how-to videos on purifying water, butchering hogs, starting fires, and so forth, they’re not going to be available, because the web will be gone.
See, this is precisely the thing I’m getting at. It’s easy to build a computer as long as you have a well-stocked Radio Shack. But a well-stocked RadioShack has an enormous supply chain. It depends on millions of people who all have to be fed and clothed and provided with power.
And while you downplay the importance of things like sales and marketing, I’m not quite sure how you think Radio Shack stocks those parts. Someone sells mining equipment to the miners. Someone advertises for labor for the miners. Someone sells ore to be refined. The refined metal must be sold to the manufacturers… and there’s a string of manufacturers selling things to each other long before you get to the one that sells to the wholesaler that sells to the retailer. These people are not a luxury overhead. They’re a vital part of making sure that a rock turns into a computer chip down the street from Steve Jobs’ garage.
If you have a shortage at any step of this supply chain then you have no chips.
But let’s also remember something: manufacturing, mining and farming have all been made more efficient by modern computers and networks. Send us back to the glory days of the 70’s and you lose some of that efficiency. There’s your first domino. While you figure out where the dominoes stop falling, Skald and I will be stocking up on bullets.
Well, one thing is that we really don’t need to build computers from scratch. On any college campus or in any city you could find thousands if not millions of self-contained laptops, none of which need spare parts. I don’t know how long exactly it would take before consumer laptop components break down permanently, but surely some computers must get lucky and last for a long time. However, there’s still a big difference between a consumer laptop and an integrated system that runs a factory. Maybe it could be bootstrapped, maybe it couldn’t. But long term, even if nothing was salvageable, we could still recreate computers via the exact same mechanisms that we used in the past. Agree on the importance of marketing–we all like to think that salesmen and baristas are worthless, but the truth is they play an important role in our economy.
The trouble with “I’m going to stock up on bullets” is that it’s actually a good idea, so everyone is doing it. Bullets have intrinsic value and are also fairly good for trade, so people who might’ve stocked up on gold are instead buying ammunition. This (plus Obama) have contributed to the price of ammo skyrocketing in recent years.
Once the warehouses and supermarkets have been stripped bare food production will be paramount. The old retired guy with his prize-winning potatoes and years of experience growing his own veges will be far more useful than any computer scientist. Knowing when to sow, how to collect seeds and the like will be more valuable than how to program.
Going back to the pre-computer age isn’t so bad, that is what 1970? 1970 wasn’t terrible, life expectancy was about 75 and medicine was good. I’m going to assume you could achieve 1960s era medicine pretty easily as I don’t think there was a lot of advanced technology in medicine then (correct me if I’m wrong). However I have no idea how hard rebuilding the pharma industry would be.
Thisbook supposedly talks about how to rebuild. I didn’t see all of TLMOE last night but I do recall when that one guy was building solar panels thinking ‘solar panels only last 20-30 years, what do you guys do then?’.
Let’s take that “one in a million” statistic and run with it. How many people are there in the United States? 300 million. Throw in Canada and Mexico, and it turns out that in all of North America there are now something like 450 people left alive. You’re imagining you can build computers with 450 people? The mind boggles. This isn’t even a village of 450 people, this is 450 people scattered over an entire continent. In my home area, the greater Puget Sound area, there’s probably ONE PERSON left alive. In New York City, there are 8 people left alive.
That one guy isn’t going to be making any computers any time soon, is he? He’s going to wander around eating canned food until he shoots himself in the head from loneliness.
To make computers, or internal combustion engines, requires a vast chain of interlocking industrial systems. You would need millions of people left alive before you could hope to preserve any sort of industrial economy. Anything less and you permanently revert to the technological level that your population can sustain.
One person in a million surviving, even in a cozy catastrophe where most people just collapsed into piles of ash over a couple of days, so there’s no worry about the corpses, or time for panicked masses to ruin what’s left of the infrastructure, most people are going to die, by accident or old age, before they ever meet another human being. There might be a few tribes that could form in larger population centers. Good luck creating breeding pairs out of those random assortments. For decades after the catastrophe you’re still at negative growth rate as more people die alone than babies are born from the few breeding populations. It seems probable that some tribes would form, and grow over generations to repopulate the Earth, but by that point they are at stone age technology. There’s just no way that modern technology can be preserved in a small village of a dozen people. There’s no way FARMING can be preserved at this level. Can’t happen.
If you want to posit a less severe die-back, then sure. The technology and history that can be preserved is a function of how many people survive, and how many specialists the new society can support. But larger numbers means you have to get off your ass and rebuild or starve. And lots of people are going to starve. Small numbers means you can scavenge for literally generations.
Well, the US has extensive distribution of shortwave radio technology and other forms of communications equipment. It only takes one person to set up an antenna somewhere that says “come to the South Street Seaport, any time, we’ll be there” and soon you’ll have collected most of the population that’s capable of driving. Once you’ve got a few hundred people, the main concern is having as many kids as possible and meeting up with the Asian and European groups to have more kids and ensure genetic diversity. Obviously you wouldn’t collect everyone, but I imagine you’d collect enough people.
Even if for some reason radios weren’t effective, a single person could easily meet up with others by leaving messages at famous landmarks (who wouldn’t want to kick back in the oval office?) or setting off fireworks. I think you are underestimating the depth of human ingenuity and the extreme wealth that every survivor would now have.
No doubt computers would take a long time to get up and running. But a 1 in a million situation is survivable.
One thing: even though the easily extractible oil has all gone, there is still plenty of coal that can be taken with open-cut mines. In addition, all the solar panels that have already been manufactured would supply a large amount of energy. A small population would have no problem satisfying its energy needs for a very long time.
Doctors is an interesting one. Is it worth it to have people dedicate their lives to medicine? Certainly in the short term that’s helpful. But in the long term, isn’t it more important to try to keep technology viable and make sure information isn’t lost?
Extremely high tech medicine is going to get lost because there won’t be enough people to transfer the skills or make the equipment and there won’t be enough patients that need it. But basic medicine and surgery can relatively easily be re-learned from textbooks, I’d think.
On the other hand, once computer chip fabrication is lost, good luck getting it back.
With only a thousand people on most continents, the amount of resources available per person would be enormous. But eventually stuff is going to break, and the survivors will have to be able to fabricate replacements to maintain a level of technology. A lot of that stuff is going to be crude, but as long as it gets the job done, that won’t matter too much. For instance, if solar panels are only 3% efficient, who cares? Just build 10 times as many.
Like I said, electricity is easy to generate and electric motors are easy to build, and they last for a long time. But for long distance transportation, you can’t use electricity. Keeping the oil economy running would require a large amount of effort, so I don’t see that happening.
So how would long distance transportation work? Obviously sailing ships would be one option. But what about balloons? Those also work above land. However, even more than sailing ships they require favorable wind directions. Perhaps it would be possible to run zeppelins on hydrogen, although having an internal combustion engine on board a hydrogen-filled zeppelin would be insanely dangerous, and I’m not sure it’s feasible to produce new helium.
Or maybe it’s back to the steam era and use coal for ships and trains? Or even coal-powered road vehicles.
