In this scenario there is now enough oil sitting at Cushing, Oklahoma to last a lifetime. There’s enough guns and ammunition to last the survivors decades. No need to go all Stone Age.
I suspect steam is right, but not necessarily coal. Plenty of naval ships were powered by oil-fired steam for a long time.
I suspect that eventually what would happen is that you’d end up with steam powered vehicles- probably ships and railroads. Steam powered wheeled land vehicles must have some kind of power/weight ratio problem, or we’d have seen more of them in current history.
I suppose if there’s enough food and labor to go around, you could use ethanol for motor fuel, although it’s not terribly efficient. You’d probably be better off raising oilseed crops and going the biodiesel route, which could be used for anything that normal diesel fuel is used for.
I assume this was before the internal combustion engine was an option. These aren’t ridiculously hard to make, but they do have the advantage that you don’t need water and they can power up and down easily. Steam is much less attractive in these regards, except that you can run it on coal and wood, unlike an internal combustion engine. There’s much more coal than oil and it’s much easier to work with: you can strip mine it and you don’t need to refine it.
Well, when the railroads came along there were no decent roads yet, and it’s much easier to lay down tracks than asphalt. I don’t think there’s any reason you couldn’t run a steam-powered vehicle on the road if you had to and other traffic wasn’t an issue. But of course the existing train tracks will stay around for some time, and repairing them doesn’t seem infeasible.
Right. But is it workable to grow enough of that to power big vehicles over large distances? Or maybe electric trains are the answer. Electrified tracks need more upkeep, but then you can use wind power and hydroelectric to run trains. Probably not feasible in a world with 7000 people, but probably doable with a denser population such as a million.
A world with abundant electricity but very little oil and limited battery technology would be different from what we’re used to now: in cities you could run electric vehicles of various types, but their range would be too limited to go much beyond a city, except for electrified trains. Electric farming equipment could be used in places with grid access.
But anywhere away from the grid would be very hard to get to except maybe by coal-powered steamboat. Biodiesel, coal-based diesel and hydrogen are possibilities, but all quite inefficient so they wouldn’t support transport of many people and/or large amounts of cargo.
Guys, you are ludicrously overestimating the industrial base that a group of a few hundred people could sustain. It just can’t happen.
People don’t maintain an industrial base to preserve knowledge for future generations. They do it to solve problems they need to address today. So you’ve somehow got a village of a hundred people gathered from all over North America, because the first thing people do in a disaster like this is get on the shortwave radio. But forget that. Even if you could cobble together a village of a hundred people, these people are not rebuilding anything.
The population would be too small for the next couple hundred years to maintain any sort of advanced technology. You’d be lucky to preserve literacy. Even if you have a few mechanics in your group that survived, they’re not going to be building anything. They’re going to be living off the scraps of the ruins. You’re not building anything you don’t need for survival. You’re living off canned goods. Or you walk a mile away from your village, wait until you see a deer, and you shoot it.
You’re not remembering how to make clothes, you just go to the ruined Target and get something new. You’re not remembering how to smelt steel, you need a knife or gun or shovel, you go to the ruined Home Depot and find what you need. You’re not going to farm, not when hunting suddenly becomes easy and there are plenty of grocery stores full of cans.
But there’s not going to be a gigantic population explosion either. How many women are going to react to everyone they’ve ever known keeling over dead by deciding to have a baby every year with some crazy guy they just met? Babies take a lot of work. Raising kids takes a lot of work. It’s going to be years before people start having children again. And those children aren’t going to be interested in preserving the technology of the past unless they can see some benefit to it. They’re going to grow up as hunter-scavengers. You’ll be lucky if you can teach them to read. If they want to know what will be in a can, they look at the picture.
To sustain a technological/economic base of even Renaissance Europe requires a nationwide infrastructure of millions of people. And it’s not just pure applied technology you need, but technologies of social organization. How do you resolve disputes among people? How do you make collective decisions? What happens when people disagree?
In a village of a few people on an empty continent, if people don’t like how things are going, they just move a dozen miles away to a new place, and you never again have to see Jeff with his annoying habit of arguing that we need to get the electricity running. You never have to listen to Alice and Bob go on and on about how this was God’s plan and we need to repent. Or even Gary, who thinks we need village meetings every week to talk and talk and talk about everything.
After a few generations, people are going to have an effective stone age technology, but worse because they won’t have the sophisticated traditions and physical culture of real hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherer technology will have to be reinvented from scratch by the grandchildren of the survivors, after the canned goods have rusted away and the clothing at Target has crumbled to dust and the tools at Home Depot have been used up.
Some of these ideas, like ethanol to keep engines running, or solar power to keep electricity going, might be workable in the short term.
But things wear out! And as Lemur excellent pointed out, these people are too few to maintain the base of technology needed to maintain this. When your solar panels get cracked in a storm, they gone. When your engine runs out of 30W oil, it grinds to a halt. Everything you lose is gone - forever. Whether that’s wear and tear or catastrophe, everything in the world is irreplaceable to a tiny community of people. Even canned food and gasoline have shelf lives - maybe you get five years of living off the local warehouse, but rebuilding civilization from near-extinction is a centuries-long process. Books and hard drives half a shelf-life too. Everything will wear out long before people have the capacity to rebuild or repair it.
I don’t agree with any of the conclusions upthread. In scenarios like the Last Man on Earth, or the stereotypical zombie epidemic, almost all the *people *are dead, but their *stuff *is perfectly intact.
All those solar panels and windmills that people have built? Still sitting around. All that fuel that doesn’t really degrade over time (natural gas in a storage tank, etc), still around. All those engines, for countless vehicles that people are not around to drive? Still in existence.
All the books on how to use all this stuff (and independent computers with onboard flash drives that can be powered independently) are laying around, with countless copies of those books. Sure, stuff will wear out…but there are so many redundant copies of so much stuff, it would take a while.
Yeah, stuff does slowly deteriorate. And, it’s going to take a while to repopulate - but population growth is exponential, so it’s possible to do it in a much shorter time than you might think. And, you don’t need vast amounts of industrial infrastructure. You could build some farms in areas of the country that have really good farmland (you only need to farm the best land, after all, with a far smaller population to feed), and drive your tractors with salvaged car engines and natural gas as the fuel source.
Or, just use diesel - a lot of that stuff doesn’t degrade as much as you think over decades, it just requires engines with bigger orifices to burn the sludgy stuff. Good thing there are entire warehouses worth of spare engines around.
I think success is more a function of the genetics and culture of the survivors. Does a group of really smart people with a broad range of practical skills survive? If that groups has kids, and their kids have kids, and everyone learns the practical technical skills, rather rapidly a group like that would outcompete everyone else.
I think reality might be somewhere between the “we could produce microchips” side, and the “we’d be as primitive as New Guinea tribesmen” crowd.
For example, if the community of a few hundred got together early enough, they WOULD have a lot of resources from the old world to draw upon. And with some foresight, they could set themselves up to forage and prepare for when the old stuff wears out. I mean, they’d start farming and have a cushion (canned/preserved food) while they learned. Plus they’d have a lot of basic knowledge (germ theory, etc…) that pioneer-era people didn’t. They’d have things that would be immensely helpful (glass thermometers, books, power tools, generators, etc…)
So they might not be producing microchips, but there’s nothing to indicate that they’d be wearing squirrel-hide loincloths and firing rude arrows at anything that moved.
The survivors would have beyond an abundance of time, scavenging would provide for them for decades and decades. I’m pretty sure they can teach the kids to read.
Funny you should ask this - I was just playing Plague at the allergist! Damn Greenland, it is always so hard to infect all of them. But I was wondering something similar, like how many people would it really require to survive an extinction level event. I know 2, 20, or 200 people couldn’t cut it. 2,000? 20,000? How many are needed? And what if it is something like Plague, wherein all of the survivers end up in one country (fucking Greenland).
Yes, you can teach your kids to read. But are the kids going to teach the grandkids to read? That’s the key part. You as a relic of the old world can see the purpose for reading and writing and arithmetic and science. How can you explain that to a kid who grows up breaking into WalMarts and scavenging for a living? To him all this stuff is just part of the natural world, it isn’t something that human beings created, because as far as he can see human beings never create anything, they just take and use stuff from the Before Times.
There’s a certain trade-off at work here. If it’s easy to scavenge a comfortable living from the ruins, then you can afford to spend time teaching your kids to read and that the world is round and stuff like that. But there’s no incentive for the kids to work for a living then, they just scavenge stuff. But if scavenging is difficult enough that people have to work for a living they won’t have time to teach their kids superfluous stuff.
Either way you can teach the first generation of kids all about the Before Times and all about the technology of the past. But if that doesn’t make their lives easier, then they won’t see the point of teaching it to the grandchildren.
And population growth is only exponential if more babies are born and grow up than there are people who die. How many babies are the shocked survivors of the holocaust going to crank out? Are they going to shrug their shoulders and get busy fucking? Or are they going to be so preoccupied with dealing with the new conditions after watching everyone they’ve ever known die that they’re in no shape to get pregnant, take care of babies, and raise kids? Some people will adjust, there will be new kids. But there’s going to be a secondary die-back as the people who are unsuited for the new reality get selected out. How many of the people who survive will be beyond childbearing years? How many pregnancies will end in the death of the mother? The re-population phase is going to have to wait for several years before people are ready to start dealing with pregnancy and babies.
One good thing is that with the small population it means the end of most of the communicable diseases that used to cause so much childhood mortality in pre-modern times. After a few years there won’t even be colds, because the viruses won’t have a large enough host population to mutate into new strains.
I think the population growth would be pretty rapid. World War II was the bloodiest war in human history, yet the world population in 1945 was greater than in 1939. As every GI knows, “I might die tomorrow” is the best pick-up line ever invented. 
Besides, in an agrarian culture, large families are economically viable. An extra pair of hands boosts food production more than it boosts food consumption.
H. sapiens evolved in an environment where half of the children died before they could walk. We are biologically wired for a high birthrate. Contraception requires a conscious effort. It was only during the last century or so that family planning was considered desirable.
At a survival rate of one in a million and a general spread, the biggest problem will be finding other survivors. Dwellers of mega-cities like London will have an advantage here.
Advanced technology will not be a problem because it will not be needed. Not for many generations. All the survivors will need to do is gather relevant books from libraries and read them. There will be plenty of tools for scavenging. Gather enough people and resources for an iron-age village and humanity is set for a full and quick recovery.
In terms of genetic diversity, estimates range everywhere from <200 to several thousand. It depends on a lot of different factors, especially the genetic diversity within the population, whether the survivors mate randomly or practice some sort of intentional breeding, and blind luck in avoiding harmful genetic diseases.
As I said before, it sounds to me like a loss of about a thousand years. I don’t see people preserving an industrial infrastructure without a base of millions to draw on, but if you have a couple of engineers and chemists among the survivors, you can probably avoid going all the way back to the stone age… assuming, of course, a peaceful transition that doesn’t have us killing off the survivors.
But my contention is that the skills of the surviving generation are meaningless unless they can pass those skills to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. How in the world can you pass on your specialist chemistry knowledge? You can teach your grandchildren how to make gunpowder, but are they going to continue to make it if there’s plenty of .22 rifle ammo knocking around?
By the time the store of scavenged material runs out people will have lost the ability to make the stuff. Nobody living in a village of a hundred people is going to spend a lifetime training for a skill that will only be useful to their great-great-grandchildren. Yes, I can imagine a technical minded survivor who tries to train the next generation in modern science and technology. How is he going to make the kids listen? Nobody is going to sit inside and read engineering books for literally years on end without some sort of reward at the end.
There’s no such thing as a one-man industrial revolution.
Or let’s put it another way. Take a truck full of engineering and math and science and mechanics books to a remote village in Guatemala, and set up a library there. Are the kids in that village going to start building their own steam engines and Bessemer converters? Or are the books in the library going to sit there, unread? Maybe you’ll get one kid who’s interested, but if he’s technically minded he’s either got to leave the village to go to a real school, or become the village’s jackleg mechanic who can get old trucks and tractors back in working order.
Hundreds of years in the future, preserved books might become valuable again, just as the preserved works from classical antiquity became interesting again during the renaissance. If those books survive, which they probably won’t. Books from classical antiquity were only preserved by repeated copying. And this was on durable parchment, not modern ephemeral paper. The only advantage is the sheer ubiquity of modern printed material. Even if 99% rots away, there will be scraps left behind.
But that’s for the far future, when civilization begins to rebuild for real. A few hundred people living as scavengers in the ruins of the modern world aren’t rebuilding anything, they’re too busy surviving and battling existential despair. And their great-grandchildren are too busy roaming the now empty earth as hunter-gatherers. The big advantage they’ll have is that finding new territory will be easy, just walk a few miles in any direction and you’ll come across places that haven’t seen a human footprint for a hundred years. But once the population of the continent is back up to a million hunter gatherers the frontiers begin to close and the easy life is over.
I’m with Lemur866. At a survival rate of 1 in a million, I’m not sure there would be enough humans left who could find each other to survive as a species. If I survived, statistically, I would be hundreds of miles from the nearest human, and hundreds of miles more from the next surviving human. And let’s say I find that nearest human to me, and she happens to be a nubile, attractive young woman of child-bearing age, and she says to me “Let’s make some babies and start a tribe!” Should I tell her I’ve had a vasectomy?
I think alot of it will come down to the people and leadership. Can you have a leader who will motivate people to work together?
I think you guys are probably right that one in a million wouldn’t be enough. I was thinking “7000 people would be a reasonable number” but then you’d have to get the entire world population close together. I do think people will cluster, it’s easy enough to leave signs and instructions at landmarks. But the groups are probably going to be too small to allow for much specialized knowledge/work, unless the process of near-extinction is orderly enough for people to plan ahead.
Suppose that half the population dies every year for 20 years. People will start to cluster in places that remain viable and plan for lower and lower population numbers. Industries will have time to build machinery that can be operated with fewer and less skilled people.
The “why would the kids bother to learn anything if they can scavenge” makes sense up to a point. That’s true today, too, in a way. But it’s not a binary thing: scavenge for 93 years and then you need make everything yourself. If you want fresh food, you’ll have to start farming pretty soon. If you want to keep away disease, you’ll have to train to be a doctor pretty much immediately. As a rule, advanced technologies will start to break relatively early while simpler technology will keep working longer. If you want to be able to go places, you’ll want to be able to repair ships and cars and bicycles and roads and maybe trains. If you want to have refrigeration, light, power tools, you’ll have to keep electricity generation running.
Maybe it would help to put some numbers on this?
If everyone after the apocalypse is getting a college-level education, then about 1/3 of your population produces nothing because they’re busy learning. And if you start a baby boom to repopulate the Earth, that number could easily double as children will outnumber adults in short order. So 20 years in, 2/3 of the population is getting an education as their primary function.
Assuming you keep internal combustion motors, you should get by with 1/3 working in farming and other food-related industries.
Oh, wait… in our fast-breeding scenario we’ve just occupied every person in the community with farming and learning. No one is available to build or repair anything.:smack:
My 5 speculative cents. If we concentrate only on North American continent. So, 450 survivors. They all start hundreds of miles from each other. 300 will go exploring / scavenging and in reasonable time (let say a year or two) bump into someone other. Other 150 will not (died from old age, diseases, suicide, accidents or just choose to be left alone). Let say half of them choose to live together somewhere (Main Place) and other half choose to live somewhere else (Secondary Places) or just choose to roam around in small groups. But we can assume all of them will have some kind of contact with each other.
I would expect some quick specialization would occur, more so for Main Place. Probably half of them would be professional scavengers bringing goods from whole continent in huge central warehouse for generations. But the other half could be something else, since their basic needs (you remember needs pyramid) would be more or less satisfied.