Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Are You Apocalypse-Useful?
An anonymous reader writes: "Young people, when choosing a profession, are often told to 'do what you love.' That's why we have experts in such abstruse fields as medieval gymel. But let's talk hypotheticals: if there's a worldwide catastrophe in which civilization is interrupted, somebody specializing in gymel wouldn't provide much use to fellow survivors. In a post-apocalypse world, medical doctors would be useful, as would most scientists and engineers. The bad news for Slashdotters is that decades without computers would render computer science and related professions useless. What do you consider to be the most useful and mostly useless post-apocalypse professions? How long would it take for society to rebuild enough for your profession to be useful?"
People can survive quite well without the care of physicians. Going without food is more difficult.
I agree a surgeon would be way more useful than an md l, as for me a comp-sci IT person like most of slashdot we could still make electronics with our trusty soddaring iron so not completely useless
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
This is why I practise my procreation skills every day. I could be the last man on Earth.
At least it will be cool for a big EPM to take out your student loans
The bad news for Slashdotters is that decades without computers would render computer science and related professions useless.
Says who? Are we talking about a magical scenario where all technology just stops working?
There is a massive cache of existing technology which can be repurposed to rebuild society. Whos gonna do it if not Slasdotters?
We can individually maintain libraries billions of times larger than that of ancient alexandria and provide that wealth of knowledge to others at the cost of suns rays.
I have a neighbour who is a weaver. She most certainly has skills worth sharing. The post-apocalyptic world would also need blacksmiths, potters, carpenters, farmers and so on. Not to mention someone capable of swinging a sword and lopping the heads off marauders intent on dragging off the young women and torching the village. The challenge is that scientists and engineers do not necessarily have the skills most critically required in the first decade or two of a new civilization, but their knowledge is critical to helping a society advance rapidly later. Hence, we'll need monks well versed in the scriptures of science.
Hams often build communications equipment fro scratch. Building a generator with enough juice is also not that hard. Especially given there would be loads of electronics around, cobbling bits and pieces together would be extremely useful.
Communication is key!
I'm an Apocalypse speculator. You might think I'd be at the bottom of the list; but we have been in business since ancient times. We're probably in the top 5 oldest professions. The people who run Slashdot are whoring out to something here, so apparently they will do well also.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Visit an ER or an ambulance with paramedics for half a day, you would be surprised of how much can be done for people even when you have no time or access to equipment and most drugs.
A nineteenth-century schoolbook addresses this question. Post-apocalyptic society might not be too different from that of a "colony." Farmers, millers, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, shoemakers, doctors, school-masters make the cut; barbers, just barely; silversmiths, soldiers, dancing-masters, lawyers, politicians, and "gentlemen" do not.
[note.â"Mr. Barlow one day invented a play for his children, on purpose to show them what kind of persons and professions are the most useful in society, and particularly in a new settlement. The following is the conversation which took place between himself and his children.]
Mr. Barlow. Come, my boys, I have a new play for you. I will be the founder of a colony; and you shall be people of +different trades and professions, coming to offer yourselves to go with me. What are you, Arthur?
Arthur. I am a farmer, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Very well. Farming is the chief thing we have to depend upon. The farmer puts the seed into the earth, and takes care of it when it is grown to ripe corn. Without the farmer, we should have no bread. But you must work very +diligently; there will be trees to cut down, and roots to dig out, and a great deal of hard labor.
Arthur. I shall be ready to do my part.
Mr. Barlow. Well, then I shall take you +willingly, and as many more such good fellows as I can find. We shall have land enough, and you may go to work as soon as you please. Now for the next.
James. I am a miller, sir.
Mr. Barlow. A very useful trade! Our corn must be ground, or it will do us but little good. But what must we do for a mill, my friend?
James. I suppose we must make one, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Then we must take a mill-wright with us, and carry mill-stones. Who is next?
Charles. I am a carpenter, sir.
Mr. Barlow. The most +necessary man that could offer. We shall find you work enough, never fear. There will be houses to build, fences to make, and chairs and tables beside. But all our timber is growing; we shall have hard work to fell it, to saw boards and planks, and to frame and raise buildings. Can you help in this?
Charles. I will do my best, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Then I engage you, but I advise you to bring two or three able +assistants along with you. William. I am a blacksmith.
Mr. Barlow. An +excellent companion for the carpenter. We can not do without cither of you. You must bring your great bellows, +anvil, and +vise, and we will set up a forge for you, as soon as we arrive. By the by, we shall want a mason for that.
Edward. I am one, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Though we may live in log-houses at first, we shall want brick-work, or stone-work, for +chimneys, +hearths, and ovens, so there will be employment for a mason. Can you make bricks, and burn lime?
Edward. I will try what I can do, sir.
Mr. Barlow. No man can do more. I engage you, Who comes next?
Francis. I am a +shoe-maker, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Shoes we can not well do without, but I fear we shall get no +leather.
Francis. But I can dress skins, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Can you? Then you are a useful fellow. I will have you, though I give you double wages.
George. I am a tailor, sir.
Mr. Barlow. We must not go naked; so there will be work for a tailor. But you are not above mending, I hope, for we must not mind wearing +patched clothes, while we work in the woods.
George. I am not, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Then I engage you, too.
Henry. I am a silversmith, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Then, my friend, you can not go to a worse place than a new colony to set up your trade in.
Henry. But I understand clock and watch making, too.
Mr. Barlow. We shall want to know how the time goes, but we can not afford to employ you. At present, I advise you to stay where you are.
Jasper. I am a barber and hair-dresser.
Mr. Barlow. What can we do with you? If you will shave our men's rough beards once a week, and crop their hairs once a quarter, and be content to help the carpenter the re
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The most important people in any survival situation are those who can secure or create the 5 C's of survival Cutting Tools, Combustion, Cover, Container, and Cordage. The hard part for many will be to start basic and rebuild the tech tree to more advanced tech. You will need to start with a camp fire then move up to a kiln then on up to a forge to make steel. Engineers may seem practical in a post-apocalypse situation but many engineers would also find their skills useless since the tech tree to apply their skill set may be disrupted or none existent. But those who can function at the most basic level will probably make it. I think you would find that the aboriginal people of Papua New Guinea are not particularly impacted if the global communication network goes down or the power grid stops functioning.
I'm in corpse disposal, so yeah, they'll probably be work for me after the end.
Knowing how to shoot and shoot well would be an invaluable skill.
Although my main profession is software, I also do circuit design, construction, metalworking, carpentry and most of the other building trades
I find that even though the specifics are different, the fundamental skill is the same..problem solving
Software, circuit design, carpentry or any of the other disciplines seem more similar than different
The steps are the same..clearly identify the problem, look at the tools and materials that are available, then find a solution using what you have to work with
Ham radio, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Math, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. Anyone with these skills has what it takes to improvise. By the way it's best to have all or most of the skills. Bring your own tools.
Concrete can be made out of sea shells. Bricks out of grass and mud. Rope, traps, and netting for food. Boil see water for salt. Find copper and tin for bronze. Move quickly into the Iron age. Boilers and Dams for Energy.
here's one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
You like to eat and have fire, right? Sure, something as esoteric as a "particle physics research engineer" wont help in this 'world', but science is in everyday life and helps keep people alive.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Computer scientists would still be useful, just not in the same ways. Algorithms are carried out by people, too, not just computers.
Correction: Algorithms will be carried out by computers, but the computers will be groups of women with adding machines, as they were up to the middle of WWII.
CompSci will be useful to the extent that it relates to handling large numbers, or if they can build robots using what is left. Losing Heathkit may well have doomed us to be recreated after the last living computer person has died.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -Robert A. Heinlein
I work with alternative/renewable energy sources (solar, wind, etc). though eventually battery banks will die, i've been working on making my own batteries as well. I live entirely off grid, coming into town irregularly for beer (being honest here, need to start distilling). I run a constantly online freenet node on open wifi, several neighbors connect through it, and it's powered entirely by solar at the moment. though in an apocalypse the internet would not be useful i maintain a modest database of survival guides and random useful information relevant to the surrounding area (desert, so rainwater catching/purifying, low moisture gardening, and electrical generation/storing manuals and the like). keeping this information open and available to anyone who can access it in the area, which is an entirely off grid area (no lines out here...) i'm hoping that in an apocalyptic situation we'd all do rather well :)
being a crazy person is astonishingly apocalypse-useful ;P
Dragon-Slayer
Table-ized A.I.
Sadly survivors with guns will dominate the scenery. Anyone who can farm skills will be important but dominated by unskilled morons.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Yes . As cattle.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Pace the implication of the article, medieval musicians and other low-tech entertainers would likely be in high demand.
If electronic technology magically stops working (somehow), then judging by the amount of purchased and pirated music today, one of the most secure professions would probably be musician. And if technology is low, medieval music (or some synthesis of it and modern forms like jazz) would be the go-to.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Pre WWII society thrived without high-tech electronics. Contruction was still possible. Transportation, communication, production of safe food and clean water were possible, etc. Even advanced products can be made without computers - machines USED to be controlled by skilled blue-collar middle-class workers (who earned wages good enough for a family to live on just one person's paycheck). Given that the KNOWLEDGE of everything post-WWII would likely not be lost in even the most-severe calamity, all you need is a generation of people who can do things manually to re-bootstrap and then society is back on its feet. As long as you do not let government get in the way with mountains of regulations that were not there the first time, the rise of high-tech the second time should be MUCH faster and easier. Therefore, what you need are:
1. Engineers (most-importantly: mechanical engineers, but also electrical and hydraulic)
2. Machinists, lathe operators, etc
3. Draftsmen (the pencil, T-Square and triangle sort)
Interestingly, geeky high-tech folks are perfectly capable of learning all these skills now as a hobby; If you have setup and run your own CNC milling machine, for example, you have probably already learned many of the things you'd need to know to run a milling machine manually. As a general rule, it's a good idea for younger people to get skills in more than one area now given that people have long careers and often end-up changind fields. Were I young and in college now, I'd probably double-major in something like EE and ME (two possible career options AND a good basis for a robotics career)
Which, it turns out, has very little to do with actual computers.
The intellectual skills involved in CS could, with not much difficulty, be turned to other kinds of problem solving such as operations research. Seriously, you're going to leave questions like how to most efficiently distribute scarce resources such as food to someone with a *business* degree? As a computer scientist, I'd create a model of the underlying problem, develop alternative algorithms, then show how those algorithms and model apply the real world problem. I use computer science every time I come home from grocery shopping. As I remove items from the bags I stage them by where they are eventually going to go. Why? Because efficient sorting algorithms eliminate lots of entropy early on. Consequently I only open my refrigerator *once*.
Computer science is essentially about figuring out the resources needed to accomplish things. If you want to figure out how much fodder it would take to move your draft animal powered army over a certain distance, you *could* consult a historian who specialized in the logistics of pre-mechanized warfare who'd tell you how Viscount Howe did it in the New Jersey Campaign of 1776-1777. Or you could find some CS graduate who pulled at least a "B" in algorithms to figure it out for you.
As for experts in gymel -- a technique for singing polyphony with one voice -- it's worth considering that the technique was developed in a period of human history that would be considered apocalyptically awful by modern standards. Even when times are violent, disordered, and desperately poor people still need art and music, and if we're stipulating that apocalyptic == "no computers", that means no iPods either. So it seems quite plausible to me that experts in gymel might find their services *more* in demand in a post-apocalyptic world.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I recently took Blacksmithing I and II at Tillers International for this *exact* reason. As a Network Architect, I'm the alpha geek for data transport and a Blacksmith is the alpha geek for a world gone straight to hell.
A larger point to make is that a number of occupations require problem solving skills. Most of these fields fall in the science or engineering category. Even if the problems of the day were to change to align more with survival and rebuilding civilization, I want a glut of people who are good at problem solving over those who are only good at things which would not be useful - like moving large sums of money around and taking a cut or staring at paint on a wall or canvas.
I was lucky enough I guess to have paid my way through school by working as a carpenter. I earned my degree in Comp Sci while working with my hands. Long story short, I can still build a structure without the use of power tools so I believe I would be exceptionally useful.
Yes, because renewables magically stop working.
Someone who can produce antibiotics would be absolutely amazingly valuable. Assuming that the fall of civilisation wasn't due to the evolution of broad band antibiotic resistance.
Its not hard to do; on the documentary 'Sliders' one guy made an antibiotic just out of mouldy bread and saved a civilisation.
But yeah, antibiotics is what makes modern civilisation possible, enhances population growth rate, increases productivity etc etc etc and without them we would be fucked.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
No electricity means your failing at basic engineering. A coil and a moving magnet is not that hard to come by.
No sir I dont like it.
So when you break your leg, you're going to have your witch doctor set it for you?
Vaccines and antibiotics are not high tech -- by which I mean something that requires an extensive and intact industrial infrastructure to produce. Crude replacements could be created by someone with 21st C scientific knowledge and the kind of technology that would have been available to 18th C gentleman scientists.
As for other drugs, a doctor could work with herbalists. Willow bark replaces aspirin; foxglove replaces digitalis; Ephedra sinica replaces pseudoephedrine; absinthe replaces anti-worm medications. A herbalist working under medical supervision is a lot better than nothing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Some studies like medieval gymel are barely useful now. Can you even make a living at that now?
Others like blacksmithing are nothing more than entertainment now but would be highly useful in a collapse.
I don't think you can discount computer scientists though. Not counting my hobbies, my primary job as
a computer programmer is repairing computers, fixing systems, and making stuff work.
If we did suffer a total collapse, the problem solving and improvising skills used daily by computer
programmers not to mention the broad knowledge base could prove to be useful.
Most computer programmers I know are also geeks so they tend to dabble in stuff like bee keeping,
appliance repair, blacksmithing, etc... which would also prove to be very useful.
So running a conductor through a changing magnetic field will no longer produce a charge?
Putting two lead oxide plates in an acid batch will no longer cause a chemical reaction?
My goodness, I was unaware that a catastrophe large enough to cause an apocalyptic event would change the fundamental laws of physics.
You sound young.
I bet raping and pillaging acumen would make a killing.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
What might be useful would depend on how bad the catastrophe is. If its something like the TV show "Revolution" where electricity magically stops working, different people would be useful vs a situation where electricity is still available.
You don't need electricity for soldering, all you you need is something to create heat, e.g. a fire, a needle, and solder: Last time I was on Cuba for a few weeks as a visiting scientists, the power supply of my laptop broke down. I was living in one of those casas particulares, and one of the landlady's relatives proposed to open the power supply (With a saw, because it was glued) . Then he found the bad contact and since they didn't have a soldering iron, he did the soldering with a needle heated in the gas flame. Two weeks later I had to repeat the soldering procedure applying some more tin-solder, but the power supply works without a flaw ever since.
If it is a true apocalyptic scenario, 99% of us will be dead anyway, so my plan is to not prepare at all. It's worth making preparations for scenarios that are more realistic, like bottles of water in case the water gets cut off after an earthquake, or food for a few days when transportation is interrupted. Those kinds of things happen in real life.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
n/t
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Frankly, as a sysadmin, it would take quite some time for my profession to be useful. However, I am not solely defined by my profession. My hobbies, such as firearms, cooking, woodworking, dabbling in a little gardening and other low tech stuff would end up much more useful, after the apocalypse. I actually enjoy unplugging and doing something that doesn't require a computer now and then.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
If she could reduce a fracture and sew up a wound; if she could diagnose the most common ailments and give the best advice you could get with the technology available, she'd be about 80% as useful as a modern doctor.
Hardly. Soldering was one of the first forms of metalworking.
All you need is a heat source; a candle will do in a pinch.
Mind you, in your unlikely world devoid of electricity, there wouldn't be much *point* to soldering electronics anyway.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The moment folk start arguing over who owns what, that's when there'll be lawyers. I don't imagine it'll take long.
"...decades without computers would render computer science and related professions useless."
The idea of graph theory is perfect for building social systems, that withstand breakdown.
The idea for example not to over centralize government for example to avoid disastrous consequences.
We know from graph theory nodes with too many edges are suspect and reveal design weaknesses in computer networks.
The same happens in human social/governing systems. Kings, Queens or many forms of government that are too centralized results in war, death and darkness.
One thing to do after the apocalypse is pick up that graph theory and get to work in building a highly distributed, non centralized society.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Are you forgetting that barbers were surgeons for hundreds of years as they were the only ones who could handle fine sharp instruments? Not saying they were ideal but they did it when no one else would such as taking off gangrene limbs.
Why flamebait?
Some doctors (many older doctors) are good at the clinical diagnosis. They can make some fairly simple observations (what we used to think of as a medical exam) and talk with the patient and make a diagnosis that's either correct or close enough. Those doctors would be quite useful.
Others can't seem to diagnose a cold without an mri, ct, a dozen blood tests and an ultrasound. Those would be totally useless.
I feel comfortable with an impending apocalypse. I know how to keep things working, how to fix them when they break, and how to get people numb enough to extract teeth without causing much discomfort. Yup, I'm good.
Buildings need to be built and fixed.
That never changes.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
The hipsters we'll keep around for the heavy lifting as long as they're useful.
I have actually been thinking recently about homebrew vacuum tubes. I guess this kind of hobby simply comes naturally to you if you're a fan of Eric Flint's 1632 series where the characters are facing mostly the same problem.
Ezekiel 23:20
Meh, a coder since age 10 - and currently involved with the national guard. I believe I would be plentiful-useful .. Not so much cause I know basic medical skills and can fire a rifle, more so due to the analytical skills i've been honing for the last thirty years in front of a computer.. I'd macgyver the shit out of that zombiecalypse in notime.
I transitioned from Software Engineer to RN. Med-Surg, then ER. Licensed. Also US Army veteran, so doubly useful. My wife is a pastry chef (baker) - and an amateur brewer -- as well as an Army veteran too (thats where we met) So if the worst happens, we will be well positioned to help.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
This is a Hollywood-type confusion, very frequent.
A catastrophic event, as the one clearly meant in the summary, is one where lots of people die, technology is damaged (ie, electric infrastructure is busted, telecomm stops working, etc.) and life as we know it is no more, but life goes on.
Apocalypse is an event of biblical origin (apocalypse is the last book of the Bible, meaning "revelation"), and it explains the end of the world, that is, the end of life as we know it, and the world as we know it, and humans in general as we know them. Apocalypse will be a time when the dead will live again, with different qualities, and Earth will be renewed.
So talking of "life after apocalypse" is a confusion of terms. It would be a lot more proper to talk of "life after a catastrophic event".
It usually churns my stomach -as a Christian- to watch movies like 2012, where we have an "apocalypse" (catastrophic event falsely linked to the biblical event) just to find out that now we have a broken up, backwards world, ruled by some advantageous morons, and inhabited by egotistical ciizens. My, what a world!
To keep things clear, the main event of the biblical apocalypse is the second coming of Jesus Christ, to renew everything and rule an eternal life of complete happiness. And, if you are not christian, or believer, if you are a person (a lot of them here on /.) who mock on religion, judging that it is a lie, or a loss of time, or such opinions, at least accept the "apocalypse" as a cultural-literary event, described in the most reproduced book in history.
Apocalypse will invove a catastrophic event, no doubt, but things afterward will be a lot different.
Although I think the Ancient Aliens will protect us from the apocalypse. Or until we elect the next Republican president.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Would be invaluable!
No electricity means your failing at basic engineering. A coil and a moving magnet is not that hard to come by.
I would agree. Unless we end up with something like the show "Revolution" where the laws of physics are turned upside down
then having electricity on a small scale isn't a problem. The most likely scenerio in a collapse would be no cleanrooms, no
rare elements, and therefore no NEW computers so being able to cobble together existing technologies to help with irrigation
systems, etc... would be a highly useful skill. Even in a collapse computers are going to be useful. There will be plenty of tasks
that people will want done on computers and they will want someone to be able to repair them and repurpose them to more
immediate needs.
If we end up in a scenerio where an EMP, nuclear blast, sun spot, etc... fries all the chips then repurposing old technologies
becomes harder but we will still presumably have electricity but might have to rely alot more on crude relays, etc... rather
than abandoned computers. In this scenerio a hardware engineer or electrical engineer would have an advantage but most
computer programmers have at least been exposed to some of this at some point.
Are you forgetting that barbers were surgeons for hundreds of years as they were the only ones who could handle fine sharp instruments? Not saying they were ideal but they did it when no one else would such as taking off gangrene limbs.
You mean we can look forward to this again? Gee, I can hardly wait!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Checkmate, suckers.
Perhaps if you all show enough deference, I'll take you with me to the top.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
If the effect is to kill a large proportion of the population, then the clothes left behind will mostly last forever, so there will be no need for new clothes. Actually the number of clothes that most of us have is FAR more than we will need for the rest of our life, so it's dubious that there will be much of a need for it, unlike food production, which will need to be restarted quite soon.
In either a sudden collapse, or gradual decay, much will be lost. Let me remind you that when the Roman civilization decayed, technologies as simple as the making of cement were lost.
Cement.
Not exactly what we'd consider "high tech." It demonstrates just how fragile our scientific advancements are. They can be wiped out by a few generations of relative illiteracy for the great mass of survivors. In three generations, electric lights are a distant legend and those ubiquitous round copper disks find their most frequent use as quick, easily made arrowheads.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Look, the post-apoclyptic world is going to need the equivalent of "peons" to work under a feudal lord, and who better to be that under trodden class than the Gymelists?
Indeed, they would be the new upper-crust. For under them, would sit the people really lacking in skill - the woman's studies or journalism majors. Those guys can't even sing to amuse the king.
The CS people would be fine because of the extensive study of primitive weapons through various anime, and years of working with computers having toughened them into being the ruthless bastards the new world requires in leaders.
The only question would be which faction prevails in the new lands - the Emacsamuri, or the Vimerpial Force.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Beekeeper, distiller, brewer, weaver, apothecary, farrier, metal worker, farmer and lots of other occupations in the same line. Without technology or reliable power all of this will become more critical and more labor intensive requiring above average skills.
>So running a conductor through a changing magnetic field will no longer produce a charge?
Sure, if you want to light a flashlight bulb. Rather a far cry from generating 10A at a regulated 120 VAC @ 60Hz, sport.
Mind you weve had water powered wheel for millenias and widespread electrification of western world took place on the early half of the 20th century. Not a insurmountable task for modern professionals especially if their and the lives of their loved ones depend on it.
Computer programming is 70% troubleshooting, 20% problem solving, 8% pure logic, and 2% typing. I'd think troubleshooting and problem solving would be VERY useful. Of course, I'm thinking of programmers who are actually good at what their doing, not copy-paste people.
I have a kerosene fuelled soldering iron somewhere in my tool pile. Was planning to use it for some artistic sculpture work sometime. Of course it still relies on availability of a suitable fuel.
More important to know, I think, is somebody like a friend of mine, who could set up a blacksmiths workshop with the most primitive resources we could find. Tools and machining facilities would one of the most sacred crafts mankind would need to retain - after medical capabilities and healthcare knowledge. Tools and equipment for the purpose of large scale food production would be next.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
In a post-apocalypse society, I will raid the nearest electronics stores then wander the land, repairing electronics with my knowledge and large stash of replacement electrolytic capacitors.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Butane torch (or methane/methanol from brewing), or a small sealed container in a wood oven at about 200F for a short time would heat the solder to the melting point. Sure, 200F is a ways away from the fire of a hot oven, but it's achievable. To re-solder the pieces, rosin from pine + tin/lead/silver from metal work (or saved from desoldering work) and the same hot oven box or a torch and a heat sink like a solder iron tip or screw driver. Heat tip, touch pad, repeat. BGA parts would be a beast, but who's going to need many of them?
old EM stuff can used people still repair old EM pinball games and there skills can be useful in building EM based hardware.
I full time work as a professional...who cares, I'm a good shot with a gun.
Lets just see how well those post-apocalyptic bands of cannibals can find their way between supply caches without someone who knows how to perform an A* search!!
I stole this Sig
Master Blaster!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
...When Bessemer went to push them into the ladle, he found that they were steel shells: the hot air alone had converted the outsides of the iron pieces to steel. This crucial discovery led him to completely redesign his furnace so that it would force high-pressure air through the molten iron using special air pumps. Intuitively this would seem to be folly because it would cool the iron. Instead, the oxygen in the forced air ignited silicon and carbon impurities in the iron, starting a positive feedback loop. As the iron became hotter, more impurities burned off, making the iron even hotter and burning off more impurities, producing a batch of hotter, purer, molten iron, which converts to steel more easily....He realised that the technical problem was due to impurities in the iron and concluded that the solution lay in knowing when to turn off the flow of air in his process so that the impurities were burned off but just the right amount of carbon remained. However, despite spending tens of thousands of pounds on experiments, he could not find the answer.[7] Certain grades of steel are sensitive to the 78% nitrogen which was part of the air blast passing through the steel.
I don't know precise formulas for 19th century steelmaking, but I know right where to look in a library. There's was a PhD in the family for metallurgical engineering. Now materials science. I'd feed myself, won't freeze to death.
I plan on being a zombie. I plan on leading the zombies. We are talking zombie apocalypse, right?
Slashdotters tend to have vaguely higher intelligence, judging by their impeccable skill at moderating posts and speed of typing "frist post". Completely ignoring science as any good zombie would, I deduce that their brains must be tastier and more wholesomely satisfying to my soon-to-be-acquired tastes for human brains.
Nobody asked which side I'd be on after the apocalypse. I plan on being on the winning side. Now, go make me a sammich... with your ears as bread.
Do I really rely on computers? I use them to execute hand calculations more efficiently and trivially manipulate large amounts of data. To be competitive today you need computers, but that doesn't mean I'd be dead in the water without one. Sure, some engineers only learn FEA once they start working and as such would be hardly more useful than when they came out of university, but they would still have a hand calc background.
You're question seems to come down to: What if the world changed so that a specific skillset I have in mind becomes invaluable? Well that is easy: The skillset you have in mind becomes invaluable. The real question becomes: Why would the world change towards that specific skillset and not to one of countless other skillsets? If an apocolypse does not pose some real serious challenges to our known skills, would we still recognize it as the apocolypse?
Like this guy.
Wow, that was quite a logical leap you made there! You must be really impressed with that uncited study you're referring to!
There was a study, only about a decade ago, that claimed vaccines cause autism! So make sure not to get your kids vaccinated - vaccines obviously do more harm than good!
#DeleteChrome
The ability to think logically and to analyze and solve problems would be highly useful.
Agreed. I have a magnifying glass that will heat a soldering iron... In fact a little tip for you is if you EVER see a rear projection TV sitting on the curb, GET THE LENSES!!!
I can also use a manual mill, lathe, drill press (all of those used to run on belts from water wheels, they are that old). People solid in science or engineering often have a grasp of the history of technology, having a grasp of historical technique is way more valuable. Problem solving is great but remembering HOW it was solved in the past is infinitely better. If you are serious, find old books and protect and store them... I wish I still owned the encyclopedia set I had in 1965... it had everything from gear cutting details to gun cotton recipes...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
What good would a medical doctor be without CAT,X-Ray,IRM, Ultrasound, antibiotics or vaccines? Go homeopathic?
a new study claims that 98% of the time doctors never run any of those tests but bill for them anyway. They also claim the something like 95% of the medicines they handout are actually inactive or contain sub MED (Minimum Effective Dose)! Bottom line doctors don't need them!
Bullshit. Link to this "study"?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
I'd be pretty useless post-apocalypse, outside of teaching professions (PhD in physics, working as a data scientist, very dependent on computers), but my wife, despite working in IT for a decade, currently works as a production weaver, is an expert knitter, can work a letterpress (and does her own type-setting), knows how to can and makes soap, candles and bread from scratch. Even assuming a Revolution-style apocalypse (no electricity whatsoever), she's got enough useful skills to float the both of us, easy.
Read "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M. Miller for a cautionary tale about the value of scientists and engineers post-apocalypse. In this book, "simpleton" mobs hunt down and kill anyone of learning as they are blamed for developing the technology that enabled the nuclear holocaust of WWIII.
Myself, I plan to play dumb and leverage my homebrewing talent to appease the simpleton mobs.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
A diagnostic mind would be the best skill to have and be useful to society Both post and pre Apocalypse.Troubleshooting cars, computers, electronics, structures, simple machines, repairing other tools... Without the internet or manuals, being able to figure systems out and use of correct tools in diagnosis and repair.
Because you simply won't be able to get new shit in such abundance, whatever world you think we are heading into.
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from Lucifer's Hammer. It opens ones eyes when first reading it...
In sorts, yes.
Not that they are useless, but they are useless to a struggling and handicapped society. Otherwise, they would be able to employ their own doctors. Doctors without borders gets their funding and resources outside the society they are servicing which is what makes them useful. They provide services which the local society cannot muster on their own. Take away that outside funding, and it's a cold hard truth that those communities will soon revert back to no or very limited doctors.
In a post-apocalypse society, I will raid the nearest electronics stores then wander the land, repairing electronics with my knowledge and large stash of replacement electrolytic capacitors.
In a post-apocalypse society, you'll have your skull bashed in and your stash confiscated by someone who hasn't the faintest idea what to do with it.
In other words, keep the candle under the needle while soldering.
You failed at being useful :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I guess I'm just lucky I have diverse skills. Sure I work in IT security and love to code and all things computer related, but I also know how to hunt and fish and various other stone age level survival skills.
Forget coils and moving magnets - In a post-apocalypse world there are alternators under the hood of every abandoned car. Some diodes, a windmill or waterwheel and you're in business.
Way back in the dark ages when I was in high school (the 70s) we had a project to select the people required to colonize another planet. I argued intensely with my group about a fundamental error they were making. They chose mostly science and engineering types. Not one farmer was included. A modern farmer doesn't just stick seeds in the ground and ride around in a tractor. He also analyzes the soil to know what should be added for a healthy crop along with a lot of other "sciency" things. On another planet, that is especially important.
When it came time to present our choices to the class, I immediately said that our group would be dead within a year due to starvation. Surprisingly, none of the other groups bothered to include a farming expert.
Also, I argued that every essential skill had to be duplicated. You didn't want to have just one medical doctor because shit happens.
-- Will program for bandwidth
No modern "career job" is useful after an Apocalypse. If you are involved in any kind of competitive (free market) industry, you are using the infrastructure to its best advantage. "Modern" farming knows little to nothing about how to farm without fuel or pesticides. Similarly, modern medicine isn't about basic hygiene or simple infection control.
If you want to be useful after an Apocalypse, take up survivalism as a hobby, learn to grow your own food, make your own tools, including weapons for hunting / defense, and do construction without power tools. But, don't think you can make a living in the real world with these skills, unless you are a promoting your hobby and selling it as a service to others - which takes: modern technology to effectively do your advertising and customer handling, competitively.
Also, the dominant early Apocalypse survivors will be all about Max Max style scavenging of whatever is leftover, you won't get down to the true basic skills until the stores are picked clean and structures have fallen to rubble - and the "natural world" may not resemble anything familiar... adaptability is key.
Could this question be any more vague? "Society interrupted" and "no more computers" is the total of the description of our situation? How is society interrupted, did we forget spoken language, or did Facebook go down for a week? What does "no more computers" even MEAN? Does it mean they all evaporated? Does electricity (like what keeps your damn heart beating) no longer exist? Did an EMP destroy all the transistors meaning we just need to make more?
If the technology suddenly poofed or broke (massive EMP, etc), fine, fix or replace them it. I think you'll find slashdot users to be invaluable during a global technology rebuild. Did humanity simply have all of their knowledge of technology erased from their minds? If that's the case, those doctors are going to be pretty useless as well seeing as 99% of medicin was discovered thanks to some sort of technology. Or is the "electricity no longer exists" BS scenerio where nobody's heart would be beating anymore, rendering the rest of you just as "useful" as the slashdot community?
This question is just stupid.
I write software, as I have been doing for many decades. However, I can rebuild a car engine, I know electronics including building a radio from scratch, I can frame a house, build weapons from scratch, I know chemistry, cook, sew, farm, and any number of other useful things.
It's not about whatever skill you currently possess. It's about intelligence.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Well, you also have to remember that the 20th century was a time when many people knew a shovel was used for more then cleaning crap up from your dog and wasn't afraid to use it for those other purposes. That is widely missing in today's society I think.
Sure, there are some who can and will pick up a shovel, but I think they will be in short supply.
You hang around the wrong circle of people if that is your perception of what people are willing to do when faced with prospect of starvation or death if you dont work to survive.
He would be a columnist for Huffington Post. Post-apocalypse, the Post would operate as a broadsheet until the geeks could get computer technology going again.
Without chemicals and modern equipment most industrial farmers at least would starve.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I have actually been thinking recently about homebrew vacuum tubes.
Do triodes count?
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
post apocalypse, the most important profession is going to be farmer. People got to eat. Skilled trades will be in demand, post apocalypse as before: carpenters, bricklayers and blacksmiths, for example. People need shelter and safety. After that, scientists or engineers who can make things happen, build things, fix things...
Why would you need a teacher for the next generation when there aren't any women around to need a hairdresser?
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
But an engineer would know how to problem solve, and we will need to have problem-solvers for a variety of things, not just mechanical, electrical, or software engineering.
Yeah, I'm screwed.
Their loss. Someone with the knowledge of the engineering process and engineering principles can be vastly useful in helping survive. Building shelters, forming systems to carry water, traps to save energy that would be used in hunting. Perhaps even cobbling together a radio from spare parts.
A soldier and a leader (not some run-of-the mill politician) can mean the difference between a successful recolonization attempt and a mini-"civil war" between farmers, engineers/builders, and doctors/faction infighting/dictatorial regimes.
Lol.. No, I am around a lot of different people. They are generally lazy or think manual labor is beneath them. That may change with starvation, but I think it is much more likely that they will just take your food while you do all the work.
Submitter has read too many bad books.
Remember, in stories, the world works the way the author needs it to work for dramatic purposes, not necessarily the way that it most likely would in reality.
The typical Mad Max scenario is unlikely. Just like SciFi authors thought we'd have flying cars and take our vacations on the moon, but didn't forsee the Internet and mobile phones, the real scenario will very likely be quite different from the movies you've seen.
Which basically means: Who the fuck knows which skills will be useful and which ones won't? Maybe computers will be worthless and shooting is important. But maybe supply of ammunition runs out a lot faster than electricity which we increasingly generate decentralized with solar and wind farms.
Maybe something entirely unexpected turns out to be the most important skill to have.
Also: Looking at history, civilization-destroying catastrophies are incredibly rare. Most civilizations enter a phase of decline and slowly fade away.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This book by John Ringo does a pretty decent take on it.
In a post-apocalypse world, medical doctors would be useful, as would most scientists and engineers
You're thinking of a weenie little apocalypse. The word kind of implies something a bit bigger.
A doctor, and engineer and a scientist are no use in a world that can no longer produce drugs or scalpels, construction materials or lab equipment.
Post apocalypse useful skills would be bivouac building, stone toolmaking, farming and animal handling. Rope-making from vegetable fibres and tannery would come in handy, and the single most useful skill in the world would be making a fire without a match.
But no engineer can build a combustion engine from magnetite sand, and no doctor can pin together a fractured bone with their bare hands.
In a post apocayptical world, you would have to have amniesia to not get a working electricity supply back fairly quickly. The obvious renewable is wood and with water that gets you steam which can drive a turbine which drives a generator. Would it really be so hard to ramp up to modern civilisation? Its not like we would have to invent things more reimpliment the things that already have existed in one form or another.
While i happen to have a plc that would run off 12 volts. its basically relay logic anyway so scavange from a few cars and i can automate from that basis. probably the two most important things needed are electricity and refridgearation. computers would be one of the best accelerators of recovery.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
No. Acetylsalicylic acid replaces salicylic acid, because the side effects are worse.
Yes, but in a post-apocalyptic situation where modern industrial processes have broken down (you know, the whole topic of conversation in this thread), it will be perishingly difficult to acetylate salicylic acid. So, given that we can't get acetylsalicylic acid, what do we do? Well, we'll replace the use of an impossible to obtain compound with one that's easier to obtain (e.g. willow bark). Do try to keep up.
I think in the event of total collapse, enough paper books would exist and enough nerds will be around to read then, and make use of them to get back to where we are. Or some reasonable faximile.
So it's less about chosen profession, and more about hobbies. What a paradox.
You know, like all those people that nerd out on steam engines. They could prove useful, no?
You get the idea.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
The challenge is that scientists and engineers do not necessarily have the skills most critically required in the first decade or two of a new civilization
Not true. Many of the oldest trades no longer exist so you need someone to develop the techniques and skills again. As a physicist I've never made a steam engine or a large scale electrical generator but I know the basic principles behind them and given time could get one working or figure out how to repair one which breaks. Put that together with a chemist who can figure out how to extract copper and steel from ores and a biologist who can figure out the best crop rotations and dietary requirements and you have the skills needed to greatly increase your survival odds in the first few years.
The advantage of scientists and engineers is not that we are trained for some task but that we have the training to figure out how to do many, many different tasks. We routinely build and do things that nobody knows how to build or do because they have never been built or done before. In modern society it is more efficient to have individuals trained for each special task but without that scientists and engineers will be the ones who will need to reinvent everything which is missing and in the longer term teach the next generation.
That's interesting. It's from Saturday Night Live. I'm in America, YouTube says I can't view it in this country.
I just love the Internet.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The poster must be a guy and a nerd at that. Some of the most intense music making of all time happened during the bleakest periods of human history, including the Middle Ages. So, a medieval gymel expert might well find better and more lucrative employment compared to someone who services a machine. Gymel is not so abstruse after all, unless one listens exclusively to bad classic rock... riffing on what your voice can do, the first human instrument, may have occupied a lot of talented people back in the day. Bards, jesters, poets, writers, and other creative types made it big in tough times, as they do now sometimes.
I build custom electronics (prototyping and the occasional small scale run). I expect that depending on the type of apocalypse, a McGyver type would do well, especially one who can also sail. However, realistically I'd end up shot or in chains, for I am rubbish in a fight.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
We actually had events happen that killed 40 to 50% of the population, its called a plague. These unrealistic scenarios happened every 500 years or so. Even in our modern society if a plague kills so many that medical infrastructure is overwhelmed you can have a vaccine available but lack the means to distribute it or the quantity necessary to vaccinate most of the population.
Or could just make some nasty eletric traps and surveilance system to outsmart the invaders.
Oh well, you can always eat the rats that outnumber the population in cities by about three to one...
The reason there was a massive reduction in the number of farm animals and viable crops during the Black Death is because it killed those who farmed them. Seems like your studies weren't that extensive if you didn't pick up that major point.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
My supreme skill is calculating the intersections of triangles with tetrahedrons with highest possible accuracy at the lowest computational cost. I am sure there is a job for me in the post apocalyptic world. But, in the odd chance there isn't, I certainly will be useful, may be as food.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm surprised no one mentioned musician - there have always been bards, usually people who preferred to avoid actual work. That would be my contribution.
When I gather wood or water or food, I won't be walking.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
You only need a stick and to know which direction south is (for Northern hemisphere) to tell the time during the day. Trust an engineer to over complicate things.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Either find them on highways, or peoples houses.
Or make a hand powered generator , or wind powered generator.
Preserving the highest hitech of the day, and keeping whats left working is damn important.
Next step.... find your way to the nearest Intel fab plant, if theres any place to settle down its a place like that full of tech.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
In the 1700s, people started seriously experimenting with electricity, magnetism and general chemistry (as opposed to alchemy).
By the late 1800s we had thermionic valves and semiconductor rectifiers.
In 1949 we figured out how to combine semiconductors in order to make a "transfer resistor" (trans-istor). Followed rapidly by integrated circuits and avalanching into sophisticated nanometer circuitry.
There are still people alive who grew up on farms thinking that diodes and triodes were pretty neat new technogy and you can almost construct stuff like that using bear skins and stone knives. The hardest part, in fact, is the glass-blowing technology required, assuming you don't opt for some other similar vacuum-tight container.
A lot of modern civilization wouldn't be that hard to re-construct if we had the resources available. The knowledge is what took us so long to get here, and unless we lose all the knowledge and the knowledge about the knowledge, recovery wouldn't be a problem. What would hurt more is if we lost our transportation services. Most of what goes into modern electronics is not locally produced where I live.
So one of the most valuable professions might very well be landfill-miner, since the easiest way to get materials would be to extract them from what is now often buried as garbage.
It's a good start, but alternators are terribly inefficient so you'll want to learn to wind your own generators.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
Here's my opinion on apocalyptic planning. You're wasting your energy. We've been predicting that the apocalypse is right around the corner since the dawn of civilization.
Prepare yourself for _likely_ (mathematically probable) scenarios. If you're 40 or under, prepare yourself for the possibility of dying or being seriously injured in an automobile accident. Buy the safest vehicle you can afford, because this is your leading cause of death. If you're over 40, take measures to prevent yourself from dying of heart disease by eating right and getting more exercise.
A cache of guns and a bomb shelter full of provisions won't do you any good if you're obese and you die of heart attack at age 55. Nor will it do you much good if you're in your late 20's and you die in a car crash on the way to Wal-Mart to purchase rifles and canned food.
Continue doing whatever you're doing because if something serious like an asteroid hits Earth, you're already dead. Anything serious like that will completely rewrite all the rules for life, and you can't predict what you will need. Maybe the only thing you will need is genetic resistance to the diseases that will run rampant. Or the ability to hide. Or the ability to relax and not worry. Or the ability to accept death.
And whatever happens, don't forget your towel!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Without laying down what we mean by this "apocalypse" (What happened? Where? Why?) no useful discussion can result (well, this is Slashdot, so perhaps I am being redundant).
Is industrial civilization just going to sort of evaporate? Really? How?
Why would we revert to pre-industrial society, rather than to an earlier form of industrial civilization, or more likely a hybrid of early and later technology?
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I've got a nice old book on telescope making. It's amazing the quality of lenses you can make with some math, technique, and a bit of abrasive powder.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The chemicals and equipment make it more economical and profitable but you are greatly underestimating the knowledge and abilities of farmers. Most of them would have little difficulty getting successful crops using old fashioned methods. They know very well how to do it with readily available fertilizers and labor.
Simple mechanical linkages. Easier to build and repair. Welcome to the steampunk apocalyptic aftermath.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Visit an ER or an ambulance with paramedics for half a day, you would be surprised of how much can be done for people even when you have no time or access to equipment and most drugs.
Not to belittle what paramedics do, but I'm pretty sure all they ever do is attempt to quickly triage the patient(s) and injuries, and then stablize the patient(s) for transport. That in itself is pretty amazing, but stabalization is neither diagnosis nor treatment, but buying time to get the patient to hospital emergency staff that can (better) diagnose and treat the injuries, or if nothing else make the patient far more comfortable. It is quite a good idea to have medical personnel such as paramedics specialize in this way, as they tend to get very good, very confident and very fast at what they do, wowing the squeemish such as ourselves.
Indeed.
I'm an EE. If the grid goes down and I've got carte blanche, I could get some semblance of electricity up and running in under a week. (Which would enable you to plug in your standard appliances.) I could get solar USB chargers working in the same time frame.
First you get the electricity, then you get the... power... uh... then you get the wom... can I start over?
I know how to make beer.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Being a bum.
No, I'm dead serious. In a post apocalyptic world, you won't need woodworkers and blacksmiths. We're not suddenly back in the middle ages. Everything we had will still be around, but society will break down. And that doesn't mean you have to learn how to make bow and arrows so you can go hunt for deer. It means find the shotgun so you have an upper hand over the other looters in the local Wal Mart.
Why everyone thinks that "post apocalypse" means that everything we did in the last 500 years goes poof over night and we have to fall back on feudal technology is beyond me. It's very likely that at the very least most of what we have will still be there. What will be lost is probably everything that requires some kind of central organization. I.e. don't expect gas, water, power, sewage or any other municipal or other central service still to work. But the stuff will still be there. Your car will still run at the very least as long as there is gas in it. You might not get to refill at the next gas station, but there's still gas in your tank! You might not get power from the power grid anymore but batteries still work. And while you might not know how to build new firearms, there's still plenty of them around along with ammo for them, so there's no need to rely on the ancient art of war. By the time you need this, chances are that YOU won't need it anymore.
Because until we have to fall back on "old tech", I'd guess that a good portion of us would no longer exist. The first ones to go would be the ones that rely heavily on medical treatment. Like dialysis patient. They'd be gone in a week or so. People with severe allergies won't last long either. If society as a whole breaks down, I would not rely on surviving if you're by some stretch handicapped, i.e. if you can't move or if you can't survive on your own. People who need hearing or seeing aids might get by, depending on their disability, but one thing's certain, your glasses better not break. My guess would be that about 5-10% of the population in our "civilized" world is simply unable to make it without said civilization.
Another 10% loss is to be assumed for looting, pillaging and general "I don't like you and no cop can force me to" behaviour. This would of course depend on the amount of firearms that are around. The more, the merrier. Yes, if both sides are armed it means that the other one can shoot back but face it: When you have food and a gun, and I have hunger and a gun, I will attack. Whether I die of hunger or by your bullet, do I give a shit? Attacking you gives me a chance.
So with fights and accidents, I think it's conservative to assume a total loss of personnel of about 50% before we have to think about moving away from living "off the land" (i.e. sustain ourselves by looting and pillaging) and actually have to pick up ancient skills like farming.
So the most apt "profession" to even GET to that 50% phase is, oddly, bums. They already know how to do that. They don't have to learn anything. They know all that is necessary. Where can you scrounge successfully. Where do you find stuff you need to survive. How do you approach others and how to gauge their reaction. How to get the hell outta some place if things get rough.
It's nice if you know how to plant fruits and vegetables, how to build your own tools and how to hunt game, but unless you somehow manage to GET there it's moot.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On a post-apocalyptic, post-industrial future, if you get ANY sort of computer, it will be either manufactured out of scavenged transistors or components too old to be fried by EMPs like 6502 CPUs, microcontrollers etc..
So, not even close to the required computing power to waste with inneficient interpreted languages.
Except basic of course.
I know someone who dreams of post-apocalyptic scenarios for that exact reason.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well lights after dark would be one great reason for electricity as would radio so as to communicate with others. Motors would be another great use. security camera or alarm systems. Using preexisting power tools would be another great one. And as for transmitting power over a distance I would far rather use electricity it is much easier to splice a cable than repair a couple hundred yards of mechanical linkages.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You can thank the MPAA for those restrictions. I love the internet too - maybe look for another thing on the internet called a free proxy.
That's always in demand, and probably more after the apocalypse. Whiskey and ammunition...
So running a conductor through a changing magnetic field will no longer produce a charge?
No it won't. It will produce an electric field which can be used to push charges around, but will not produce a charge.
Putting two lead oxide plates in an acid batch will no longer cause a chemical reaction?
Nope - no electrochemical reaction. You need metals of differing electronegativity, like Pb and PbO2.
My goodness, I was unaware that a catastrophe large enough to cause an apocalyptic event would change the fundamental laws of physics.
You're right it won't, but you might want to brush up on what they are before the apocalypse.
You sound young.
...
Homeo-don't-play-that.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I don't think that would even stop them form collecting debt.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I know how to make beer.
...And we have a winner folks!
Loved everywhere, supplier lively elixirs including ordinary hard apple cider for safe hourly consumption and likely to be the person to run the local waterworks as society then progresses.
While they waste their time hunting with primitive bows and arrows, the engineer sits back drinking beer and reading tech articles from scavenged magazines. His traps yield him plenty for meat, and any thieves or raiders are snared into pits.
However, reproduction and the continued survival of the human race may prove troublesome a problem for the engineer to solve. I'm pretty sure they don't teach you about dating in STEM preparation courses in high school.
It might be a good thing for 'civilized' countries to die out.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
We're getting close to what could be the start of World War III. It looks like a land war between Russia and Ukraine is about to start. Reuters: Ukraine prepares armed response as city seized by pro-Russia forces. This is not about Crimea. Russia has now taken over cities 150Km inside the eastern part of Ukraine.
WWII started very much like this. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland.
Power tools actually encourage shoddy construction, and then you might actually need stupid things like nails, useless things.
You need to properly understand the real COST of something before you understand that electricity for everything is not the answer to a sustainable future.
Security cameras? Seriously? See how much of a security system you need when you're surrounded by animals.
Though I would keep a quad-copter for reconaissance. I could easily fit that into the energy budget.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Apocalypse in current usage means the end of the world. By that definition - no skill will be 'Apocalypse Useful' - because no one will be around in the aftermath of the end of time (with the possible exception of an intrepid band of our great grandchildren who might figure out how to jump between multiple universe branes at the precise moment of the 'big rip' - a very remote possibility imho).
Really what we are talking about are events that while devastating, are short of the level of destruction needed to end the world. The very nature of that definition means that there will be locations that are not directly impacted by whatever happened. The most key struggle would come from dependency on things that moved by long distance transport; various foods, fuels, technology, and other manufactured goods. As a result, local replacements would have to be found and developed.
In those areas harder hit - it would be very bad, if not impossible to survive after the initial event. I can see migrations of people from these 'hot zones' to more habitable areas. Refugees might put too much pressure on less impacted areas - causing a crisis in those areas. The first few years after the event might be very chaotic due to these population pressures and migrations. The very best way to avoid a humanitarian disaster would be to make sure all of the surviving zones have good communications - and plans in place for relocating and organizing the influx of survivors into their communities. I think you would also want to move as quickly as possible to restore technology to society - maybe not in the exact forms that we are used to - but restoration just the same. Having running water, food, medicines, heating and cooling, and energy in general are critical to sustaining life. As a result, I think all disciplines will be useful to society in that situation in one way or another. One example: artists and story tellers would be useful in bringing entertainment and beauty into the lives of the survivor communities - and might be very important in keeping human knowledge alive until information systems can once again be restored. Ultimately, people would be so hard pressed to survive that it would quickly become apparent that the survivors will do better by banding together rather than fighting among themselves.
Overall - I think if the event was large enough to depopulate the world significantly, I think the survivors would be very busy indeed, with little time or energy to waste of the staples of post-apocalyptic fiction: warlords, societal breakdown, and descent of our humanity to that of the animals, leading us to prey upon our fellow man. While there may be a few sociopaths who try to benefit from the situation, I expect the rest of us to quickly control that. Essentially, humanity has lived through these sorts of things in the past, and I am sure we would make do and get on with living in the aftermath of whatever mother nature sends our way again.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
someone capable of swinging a sword and lopping the heads off marauders intent on dragging off the young women and torching the village.
I doubt a post-apocalyptic world will be much like the mediaeval times portrayed in Game of Thrones. In fact the medieval world wasn’t much like that.
Swords were very expensive and used only by the nobility. The peasants use staffs or slings - i.e. sticks and stones, or long bows at certain periods.
As others have pointed out, there can be expected to be plenty of rusting machinery available, so the economy & warfare would be different. It's a lot cheaper to get iron by melting a car engine block - no matter how rusted - than smelting it from iron ore.
So maybe weapons would be different, too. Perhaps with more metal available everybody would have a metal bow, or perhaps with fewer forests and less firewood, metal would be more expensive and nobody would have swords.
Moderated Usenet
But, would be nice to develop it before-hand; from: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
---
Self-replicating technical artifacts such as dogs, corn, and trees have been in use by humanity for thousands of years. While humans cannot lay credit to the original creation of such systems, they can claim the adaptation and selective breeding of these for defense, food, and building materials.
In the past few millennia, many people have become dependent on technology that is not self-replicating. Primarily this technology involves fairly pure forms of metals, plastics, and crystals. These technologies have expanded the earth's human carrying capacity in the short term, but are not sustainable in the long term. Such technologies lack the closed resource cycles, independent operation, redundancy, and resiliency found in natural systems. A symptom of the use of such non-sustainable systems is the fear that a single problem (like Y2K) could cause a major disruption of life-support infrastructure in the developed world.
For example, both Brittle Power (Amory and Hunter Lovins) and Energy, Vulnerability, and War (Wilson Clark and Jake Page), make clear how vulnerable our energy infrastructure is. As Brittle Power (pg.391-392) mentions, this vulnerability also holds for food and manufacturing production:
"The production and distribution of food are currently so centralized, with small buffer stocks and supply lines averaging thirteen hundred miles long, that bad weather or a truckers' strike can put many retail stores on short rations in a matter of days. This vulnerability is especially pronounced in the Northeast, which imports over eighty percent of its food. In a disaster, the lack of regional self sufficiency both in food production and food storage would cause havoc, but no one is planning for such possibilities."
And in reference to energy production:
"The Joint Committee on Defense Production notes that American industry is tailor made for easy disruption. Its qualities include large unit scale, concentration of key facilities, reliance on advanced materials inputs and on specialized electronics and automation, highly energy- and capital- intensive plants, and small inventories. The Committee found that correcting these defects, even incrementally and over many decades, could be very costly. But the cost of not doing so could be even higher -- a rapid regression of tens, or even hundreds of years in the American economy, should it be gravely disrupted."
In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on earth is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space.
The heart of any community is its library, which stores a wide variety of technological processes, only some of which are used at any one time in any specific environment. If an independent community is like a cell, its library is like its DNA. A library has many functions: the education of new community members; the support of important activities such as farming and material extraction; historical recording of events; support for planning and design. And the library grows and evolves with the community.
The earth's library of technological knowledge is fragmented and obscure, and some important knowledge has been lost already. How can we create a library strong enough to foster the growth of new communities in space? How can we today use what we know to improve human life?
---
The development of the Oscomak infrastructure will be an ambitious undertaking, requiring the involvement of tens of thousands of knowledgeable individuals over a period of years. There is no way one single entity can fund this work. However, there is a way to allow such individuals to cooperate -- as an "open source" community, sharing knowledge and building a distributed repository over the internet.
The revolutionary aspec
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Who says an EMP is a necessary part of an apocalypse?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
This is all true... But people with a grasp of the history of, well, history, will know that the people most useful to themselves while be the ones (1) with familiarity with whatever weaponry still functions and (2) with a glib tongue to unite likely minded people.
It won't be an apocalypse if we can feed everyone. When we cannot feed everyone, there will be violence. When there is violence, the people will be triaged into three groups:
- the tough and glib (lords)
- the useful professionals (craftsmen)
- the manual laborers, when needed (serfs)
Those who can't cut it as thugs, and do not know something useful will be lucky to be allowed to pick at the dirt and retain enough to feed themselves. In highly populated regions, about one in a hundred will be lucky to be needed as a serf.
This does not apply to regions where the population is sparse enough and the land productive enough so that food is not an issue. But without modern tech, there will not be enough food for the everyone... and big cities will be littered with the dead and dying within a week.
Twenty years ago, I would have tried for lord. Today, I think I may still qualify for 'craftsman'. Twenty years from now, I probably will be a good fit only for 'dead'. So can we not have an Apocalypse, please?
No good deed goes unpunished...
It would be stupid to chose your profession based on something which has low probability of happening.
Doesn't mean that I can't do anything else.
Provided I don't lose everything in the apocalypse:
I think that the following will work out:
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The first soldering irons were not electric. Just metal heated in a fire.
You don't even need diodes because there is a rectifier, and usually a voltage regulator, built right into the alternator. Connect it to a steam engine, and a battery to prime the field coil, and your good to go, most alternators generate about 60 ~ 100 amps @ 13.8 ~ 14.2 volt DC. You can wire the DC output from multiple alternators in parallel for more amperage.
You would also have solar, wind, and water power that you can use to charge a battery bank, 12 volt batteries would become a hot commodity in a post apocalyptic world. DC would be king, AC would be hard to generate because it will be difficult to sync multiple generators so the phases don't cancel each other out, the AC output on automotive alternators is 3 phase.
A computer power supply typically only needs -12, +12, +5, and +3.3 volts DC. In theory, you could rig two alternators in series to generate -12 and +12 volts with a common ground, this would also give you 24 volts across the terminals. You can produce all the voltages by simply MacGyvering a computer power supply, since they all have DC-DC converters.
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics for 2009, there are 254 million registered passenger vehicles in the U.S. alone, and the U.S. population is 313 million. That's almost enough for every person to have one, I like those odds. That's enough power to keep the lights on at night.
Civilizations have rarely ended in abrupt catastrophes. The most analyzed ending of a civilization is probably the Fall of the Roman Empire, and that ended over hundreds of years of debauchery and neglect. It takes a while for a major civilization to collapse.
Modern Western Civilization could end faster. A nuclear power plant dies much more quickly than a Roman aqueduct, and fluctuations in the market for crops in America have destabilizing effects on governments in the Middle East. On the other hand, the widespread travel and communication among nations' elites seems to be making them less likely to disrupt the channels of commerce.
In general, survivalists are ready for civilization to end suddenly. They are not prepared for civilization to continue.
Have a nice time.
But let's talk hypotheticals: if there's a worldwide catastrophe in which civilization is interrupted, somebody specializing in gymel wouldn't provide much use to fellow survivors.
Are you kidding me? Without electronics and industry, all performance arts are live and local. There's no high-quality music on demand from iTunes or YouTube, no recorded music playing at restaurants, parties, or festivals, no constant background music in television and movies. Maybe you can get crappy records made out of wax if you're lucky.
During the day, when most people are doing grunt work, the gymel expert might not be anything special. (Or they might -- people are not solely defined by their profession.) But at night, when everyone's sitting around a fire relaxing? I bet someone who can make strange and beautiful music would be very popular indeed.
Visit the
As long as we keep good backups, we'll be fine.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
For 25 years I was a computer programmer (software designer) (systems engineer) (ehh, pick your own title). Then I got laid off and fell back on my hobby, which was brewing beer. I think I'd do okay.
"The chemicals and equipment make it more economical and profitable but you are greatly underestimating the knowledge and abilities of farmers. Most of them would have little difficulty getting successful crops using old fashioned methods. They know very well how to do it with readily available fertilizers and labor."
You're forgetting the fact that farmers need electricity to run the water pumps to irrigate the feeds. Those in the arid southwest are screwed. Also I'd like to see you harvest 3000 acres without a combine, there will in fact be a major food shortage if farmers don't have fuel to power their equitment.
If you click on "read the rest of this comment" and you will find barber is also a doctor.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
This presumes you have access to magnets. That's...not a given, since you need iron working. Iron working is actually hard to bootstrap - it's why the bronze age preceded it.
I don't know about near you, but near me every woodcrafting, gemcutting etc group is stocked with retired people with incredible skills. There's one old guy I know that makes furniture, he has to stop every twenty minutes or so when his hands start shaking, but he still turns out better work more quickly than a young professional cabinetmaker.
The other thing is to take a look at real disasters instead of disaster movies (which is how most posts here seem to frame it). What you've written above only makes sense when you have a bunch of unconnected individuals thrown together, which is why that is a common plot point in such movies. In reality someone is going to at least try to look after old Mr Smith and hothead Jim the tough and glib is going to be told to pull his head in by a dozen less tough people if he tries to take over.
People are not so that stupid that large numbers are going to stay where there is no food. Once again it's the disaster movie premise - nobody can get anything done or work together until the hero tells them what to do. In reality disasters turn just about everyone into "heroes" - people find a way to help. Skills that do not seem disaster related can be critical, for instance the people that communicate between teams can have a hand in saving more lives than any one of the people in those teams. Those that do nothing but boil water to make it safe to drink save lives.
Personally I see this article as somebody making a big deal about how they can camp, hunt and maybe some craft skills. They neglect that you can't keep a society running like a camping trip.
If you guys want a skill useful for a disaster that destroys civilisation there are plenty. If you want to get incredibly basic take a look at how the Hittites made iron from iron ore, read that and it's only hard work and the skills of others to deliver that iron ore to where you have your hot fire and hammer between you and a useful metal. Meanwhile however the unskilled guy picking at scrap has also earned his bread.
Obviously, you are not a farmer. Modern farming equipment and chemical fertilizers are helpful in multiplying the quantity of crops that can be grown, but are not necessary to grow enough to feed your own family.
How much food do you need to grow? For your own family, you can till and prepare enough soil with a pick and shovel. If you plan on sharing your harvest with multiple families, you probably need a horse or ox to pull a larger plow. Depending on the crop you select, you can probably plant enough seed or starter plants by hand. Harvesting is another time when you will need to some help to get all the crops in. If you grow grains, you will have to cut, stack, dry, thresh, and store the grain. This can be done by hand, or with hand tools (a flail to thresh grains) without needing powered equipment.
As a mental exercise, pick a 20' x 20' section of your lawn and imagine what you would need to do to turn it into farmable land. Dig up all the grass or till it under, test the soil for acidity and add lime or sulfur to balance the Ph, fertilize with animal manure, plant something (example wheat), irrigate it, harvest it with a scythe or sickle, thresh the grain, then store it. No modern equipment is indispensable, but it still takes a LOT of hard work.
~~
Rather a far cry from generating 10A at a regulated 120 VAC @ 60Hz, sport.
Which isn't that hard either given all the junk that would be lying around.
Silly boy, from where do you intend to mine your lead and synthesize your sulfuric acid? Lead acid batteries do have a lifespan.
Used lead acid batteries.
We shouldn't need such rubbish, however it is a good workaround.
IMHO a better workaround is an IPv6 tunnel so that the GeoIP thing blocking you becomes completely useless (until some fools put lats and longs in the IPv6 packet header as had been proposed). Some parts of the world may still have a lot of IPv4 numbers to play with but we're going to have to go that way eventually. Plenty of phones (via LTE for example), set-top boxes for internet "cable TV" and others are already on IPv6 so the content is unlikely to be blocked even though the provider doesn't have a clue where you could be.
You are describing my childhood fairly well :) However when things get very basic there are plenty of roles available for those that only know how to pick up things and carry them to other places or drive a wheelbarrow. Even Mr Superficial Bastard in Advertising can be sent out to collect firewood. If a huge disaster causes a collapse of society we won't be short of things to do.
That's reminding me of a town (I think it was in France) that was built on the floor of a Roman stadium and didn't outgrow it for well over a thousand years. They had their ready built wall and plenty of dressed stone to build houses.
Thousands of homes have gas generators, especially out in the country, that the parts can be scavenged from/they can be retrofitted to meet blackest_k's idea. Back in the blackout of '03 I was working in a video store in a small town - we had our best days ever because of it. Everyone seemed to have a generator and a lot of time on their hands.
Also, near where I live there are dozens of small to medium solar installations and up to 75 megawatts of wind power - it'd be a fairly simple matter to isolate the area from the main grid and, inconsistently, power 2,000 to 5,500 homes. Not perfect but far from having to go back to bronze age tech. That's the great thing about a lot of our infrastructure - while some may need specialized training (nuclear by example) some is designed to last a long time. Sure it will need maintenance and repair but it's fairly easy to figure it out with a highschool level of education.
I am an MD, PhD. For many, many situations the diagnostic performance of an expert clinician with basic tools (stethoscope, diapason etc) is up to 80-90% with all the rest of the technology bringing this up to 95-99% (diminishing returns). Furthermore, in an apocalyptic scenario, the very hard, very complex medical conditions would not be a priority: people dying from cancer at age 78 or from complications of diabetes at age 68 would not require the huge resources we can afford to give them in modern society. We would probably be much more preoccupied with helping women give birth, protecting neonates from infections and hypothermia and doing all that stuff that could save millions of lives in the third world today (like hydrating infants with rotavirus infection).
Obviously, modern doctors are not perfectly prepared for such a scenario, but the basic training is there. So, yes, I think a significant part of medical knowledge would be useful in a post-apocalyptic world, even if the infrastructure is not there.
To be big enough to be called "apocalypse" it would probably need something like nukes taking out all major ports etc so that it's a global disaster. Thus the EMP assumption is no more silly than any of the others about this "apocalypse". You may prefer "death of grass", a supervolcano, meteor strike, gamma ray burst frying one hemisphere or whatever but the above poster seems to prefer nukes for his choice of unspecified nightmare.
It's all very silly anyway and answered well by the guy quoting an old book about colonists.
No, we just raid a drug store.
-- Cheers!
So every mother is about 70% as useful as a real doctor.
-- Cheers!
It depends how the magical scenario goes as to whether you have access to lead or copper. It's probably just worth ignoring everything here apart from the 19th century "colonists" quote above since we all have different assumptions about what we have or haven't got access to.
For instance, it's a bit of a stretch to imagine a situation where for some reason electric motors are completely unavailable but metallic copper, lead, zinc etc and acid that doesn't require a lot of work to produce are available.
Personally I think if we hit a situation where society has a massive collapse we will need as much manual labour as we can get so not only a use could be found for everyone but we'd be wishing for more people to help out.
Maybe get out a bit more :(
If the apocalypse were to come in my lifetime or a couple centuries after, there would be plenty of bicycles that would be tremendously useful if there was someone to keep them running.
-- My Weblog.
Here's your study. Hope this helps!
http://goo.gl/UcjhQa
here's another with even more proof!
http://goo.gl/fXQ2eD
I know how to make a rope making machine with sticks and a nail. While I'm a software engineer right now, I think I could make a pretty good living as a rope maker, this assumes if rope suddenly becomes a lot more valuable than it is now.
It's good to have a fallback career because it would probably be quite a while before anyone makes computers for me to program.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...that computers wouldn't survive the apocalypse ?
Depending of the cause of the apocalypse many computers could survive it and nerds would be needed to use them.
Food - make a solar cooker. Super easy with some tinfoil and cardboard - or anything shiny you can direct to one spot. Boil water in a pot in minutes and can do crockpot style cooking simply.
If it's a no electricity apocalypse I'd find a local Amish community to fill any gaps in the skill pool. Sure they don't necessarily trust outsiders but they do trade. Although I have 2 nuke plants within 100 miles of me. Depending on why there is no electricity I may not be around to bother. If it's simply a catastrophe then it could be like lucifer's hammer and a nuke plant would be the place to bootstrap civilization - it has power, weapons, tools.
Now zombies...that's another matter. Although a nuke plant may be a good idea there also. They've been made very secure since 911 and electrified fences may help.
Imam - it already works well in the most desolate parts of the world, and has for hundreds of years.
For example, my mother was a housewife but she volunteered for the local ambulance for years and grows her own garden every summer. So, she knows how to handle triage and grow food.
I'm into kayaking, hiking, sailing, and used to go fishing with my Dad all the time. I even know how to make flies for fly fishing. I'm also a good shot with a gun or bow. All of these are skills that could come in handy during an apocalypse. None of these are skills learned as part of my profession, but more as a part of growing up in Canada.
Doesn't everyone try to pick up every skill that might be useful in a disaster situation, given the slightest opportunity?
I've helped built houses, I've done plumbing and electricity - I can build a generator, but I forgot how to build a radio - I've done basic car mechanics work. This is just from things I needed to do while helping out, or because I didn't have time or money (or could be bothered) to hire someone to do it for me. To me it seems like most people with a brain could pick up that quickly, maybe not be good at it at once, but still.
I'm training Aikido and medieval swordfighting. That might be useful, but I really hope not.
I can't lift heavy things, due to a disc that doesn't want to stay put. That is not so good.
My current profession is embedded programmer/software architect. That will be utterly useless, I think.
But, in the end, I think the most useful skill I might try to use is to get people together to help each other.
(For something interesting on the line of what you can do with very little at hand, I recommend the BBC/Open University series Rough Science, especially the first season.)
The Amish would survive rather well, I expect. Add a few young surgeons and you're set up for survival.
Dating is easier when you have resources, such as ample food, that are in demand. However, you may not want to be so quick to disregard the primitive bow and arrow factor, as such projectile weapons are also capable of dispatching you when used by competing males. Arrows readily traverse pits.
Write failed: Broken pipe
What's all this stuff I read about you trolling people here with sockpuppet fake accounts you made to do so and getting caught?
"You are in a maze of twisty AC posts that all look alike."
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
That's interesting. It's from Saturday Night Live. I'm in America, YouTube says I can't view it in this country.
I just love the Internet.
For folks looking for a chance to use the "ironic":
Yes, this is pretty much a textbook case of it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I just did a blacksmithing class and it's not that simple and certainly not done on that small a scale.
Today's mass-scale manufacturing will collapse, and needs will change, so my bet is that it will be very useful to be the guy who can design models to be fed to 3D printers.
This is going to become a useful skill anyway in the next few decades, so it's not a bad investment for a hobby today.
Will lawyers be useful? (I know many slashdotters will laugh and say we'll be better off without them, but the new forms of society will need new rules and a new justice system - and programmers would do this as badly as lawyers would program.)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
This presumes you have access to magnets.
Did the apocalypse stop all the magnets working? There are probably a few dozen within 20 feet of me right now.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
As geeks, we need to assume the worst and plan from it. Besides, a Carrington Event makes electronics useless.
Mod this up and all of the rest down!
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Supposing the event is indeed apocalyptic in scale that it would destroy the very foundation of civilization, then indeed on a short to medium term the more practical skills and knowledge sets will be way more valuable. However, from medium to long term onwards the scientists, the engineers, the historians and also the knowledge they have or have salvaged in some kind of material, eventually recoverable form will be of much greater importance for the restart of the civilization. Libraries, data banks of any kind will be of great importance, while relics, artpieces and historical sources of information of and about the "old world" will eventually come to hold great value for those who managed to protect such artefacts (just as we praise today artpieces of the past epochs). Unfortunately it may take some time until the focus switches from "immediate survival" to "planning for the future" and it will be important for those knowledge holders to be protected until their skills can be again used. How to protect the knowledge holders and knowledge containers ? That may be the the greatest challenge of all, and I myself don't know what kind of social entity could have the vision, the power and will to find,recover,keep, guard and evolve them until the world is able to use them again. The church ? The remnants of the state ? Other social of economic organization(s) ? We'd better not get in this situation at all,rebuilding stuff is not as easy as breaking it in the first place.
Your car will still run at the very least as long as there is gas in it. You might not get to refill at the next gas station, but there's still gas in your tank!
All the gasoline will be shitty within a year and worthless within three.
The diesel will be shitty in about three years and worthless within, say, ten.
How long do you think it will take after a major upset to get refineries going again?
And while you might not know how to build new firearms, there's still plenty of them around along with ammo for them, so there's no need to rely on the ancient art of war. By the time you need this, chances are that YOU won't need it anymore.
The ammo will keep a hell of a lot better than the fuel.
You know, once a car battery has been run down, it is permanently damaged... Which usually only takes a few months. Sometimes you get lucky and a car starts after years, but rarely any of these fancy new computerized whatchamajiggers.
So the most apt "profession" to even GET to that 50% phase is, oddly, bums.
The people who are going to do the best are those who figure out how to mob up without falling apart due to internal power struggles. Ironically, your first point is probably the most incorrect. People will recentralize.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People can survive quite well without the care of physicians.
I am not a doctor (but will be in a few more months ;)
In this matter, you are certainly correct. In the past (and in some places, even today), there were human settlements in which there has never been a doctor -- at least not in the modern sense of a doctor. And for the most part, life went on. Humans managed to be born, grow up, and grow old. Occasionally those lives might be cut a bit shorter and harder than otherwise -- but on average, these occurrences were infrequent enough that we could be assured the younger generation would survive to repeat the next turn of the cycle.
Yet, in each of those villages, you would find a healer. A shaman, a medicine-man, or maybe some weird old lady living at the edge of the settlement. Sometimes their herbs and potions would actually be useful; mystical incantations probably somewhat less so. Regardless of how primitive these healers were, they would be summoned to offer up what they could. They were a source of comfort that could be turned to, when a loved one was sick or dying. And they were also one of the few educated people (whether formal education or by traditional teachings) in the village that could be turned to for knowledge and advice (clergy being the other major source).
Many of us on Slashdot do not have families of our own, or at least that's the stereotype. We often have only a dim understanding of what illness can do to the structure and functioning of a marriage, a family, a clan, or even an entire village. When people don't understand what is happening and begin to fear, when they believe nothing can be done and begin to despair -- the social bonds that hold us together fray and rip apart. This dynamic is why healers exist and are so highly valued in society, even in a modern age where miracles are commonplace and expected to occur on demand. And why post-apocalypse, they will continue to be valued.
That being said, I would agree that some doctors would be more useful than others. Rural Medicine, Wilderness Medicine (an uncommon specialty), General Surgery, and Veterinarians would be the most immediately useful. As for the rest of us, at least all doctors go through medical school and internship, have studied anatomy and physiology, dissected cadavers and such -- it might take some retraining, but it should be possible to get at least the more adaptable ones back up to speed on how to remove an inflamed appendix or gallbladder, perform a Cesarean, or set a broken bone. As for our other skills -- the skills of compassion, comforting, and guidance -- hopefully they practice these most basic Physician's skills on a daily basis (although sadly enough, I know not all of us do).
Heh. My dad made his own, shortly after WWII. See, the vacuum tubes available all had crimps in the wire which shortened their life span. And since the design he was working needed about a thousand vacuum tubes, the planned obsolescence of the commercial designs made it useless. So he learned to blow glass and make his own.
I really miss my dad's workshop. I wish I could have shown him my work workshop before he passed away, I think he'd have liked it. My dad did nuclear medicine for cancer treatment: I customized neurological implants. I think Dad would have liked my approach to some issues. "The clamp on that surgical tool is slipping. Let me see what I have in the scrap bin...."
The twenty minutes will turn into a few hours when people have to walk out of the traffic jam. This might give you some time to flee.
For the shits and grins I actually tried the walking part for my particular city and the 20minutes turned into 2-3 hours. It was an incredibly pleasant day for the hike, but my feet hurt like hell afterward due to inappropriate footwear (sandals).
Je me souviens.
There are lots of ways to generate electricity, hell there are how many millions of solar powered walkway lights each with a small rechargeable battery and solar sell.
No sir I dont like it.
Yes, there's scrap from cars. Duh. Less and less each year though - most cars are recycled, and the steel quantity in each individual vehicle is dropping with each model year to save weight.
But you still need someone to strip the car and transport the material to the forge site. You still need fuel for the forge. Etc... etc... Here in the real world, that's called infrastructure. I have no idea what it's called inside that piece of rotted shit you call a brain.
You're the one following people around ranting about "destroying" them, not me.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
As for other drugs, a doctor could work with herbalists. Willow bark replaces aspirin; foxglove replaces digitalis; Ephedra sinica replaces pseudoephedrine; absinthe replaces anti-worm medications. A herbalist working under medical supervision is a lot better than nothing.
Yes, just grab a cab to the nearest willow tree, and then ask him to wait and take you to some foxglove. I would rather have an army medic than a doctor if I was stranded in a post-industrial civilization, or on a desert island.
"computer science and related professions useless"
Hardly. All this does is show an assumption that the life of the modern geek is wasted on frippery such as social sites, etc.
Maybe we won't have electricity for a while. We'll remember, and recreate it. Meanwhile, a knowledge of computability, efficiency and optimization, security and ethics is transferable to other fields.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
From mobile life, major immediate problems encountered:
- staying warm and healthy
- moving around; fuel
- clean water, staying clean
These are major, major problems. If you've lived in a campervan for any amount of time, lived in a swat, a yacht or on the street you'd know it. Desalination is too inefficient. Carrying the water in a squat is the biggest chore. Bums are usually dirty.
Electric is less of a problem these days.
Other stuff beyond this is more interesting - can anyone locally remember how to be a blacksmith or carpenter? That kind of thing. But you can muddle through it because it's not an immediate problem that's killing you. The water, warmth, fuel thing is the big problem.
Maybe it's not so far fetched either. There's a war breaking out over fuel right now on the edge of Europe.
Main things I think to learn are how to stay warm without heating and how to clean water.
Most of the professions are surely going to go out of the window-irrelevant. Would hobbiests come to the fore or is that disillusion dreaming?
Poor people are going to be best suited to this. Anyone who knows how to sew their own socks. So to that matter then the less professionally successful then could that be a good thing? It's difficult to simulate, we'd have to look to history. If someone is successful in a company environment then there's an advantage there to organise people - no change there?
A blog I run for the wealth
Stone knapping, obviously, along with fire making. Familiarity with local sources of rocks exhibiting conchoidal fracture would also be good.
I'll make your arrowheads; you provide me with rabbits.
-Gareth
He didn't say there would be no women. He said there would be no "ladies". Think "Lady Diana"s. He also said there would be no gentleman--but that doesn't mean everybody would be rude. Remember, this is a 19th century reader. The language is a bit different.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This presumes you have access to magnets. That's...not a given, since you need iron working. Iron working is actually hard to bootstrap - it's why the bronze age preceded it.
Umm... why would we need to bootstrap "iron working" again? There are hundreds of billions of tons of high quality refined steel (compared to the iron of ages past) laying around to be remelted and reworked. Do you believe it will all evaporate?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
This AC is a seriously disturbed individual.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I often think that Mexican day labours have a heads up on this game. Even when they choose a skilled profession, they tend to pick things that will make them money over their lifetime, i.e. plumbing, HVAC maintenance, auto-repair, food service, nursing (mostly female) and landscaping.
Unlike most of my fellow lower middle class college mates who cannot find jobs in their professions even in a good economy. I know of guy why is in "Forestry". Shit, I did not know that one has to go to college for that. After all, isn't that a career that you can learn on the job. Lets not even talk about the ones in Film and Communications.
Let's see, wife having a baby in the ruins. To deliver the baby I get to choose between a general practitioner and.... you.
I'll go with the GP, thanks.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Many people claim that rebooting would be hard because all the nice easily available resource sources (iron, copper, and so on) have been worked out.
Yes, they were worked out.
And moved to where we live in already purified form.
Cars man. fucking cars.
Tons of useful metal lying all over the place.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Yeah I agree with this. I think it was Zimbabwe (?) where they threw out the white farmers and gave the farms to people who just didn't know anything about it, and as a result the agricultural sector basically collapsed. There's a whole lot of skill to farming.
Show me a quote of me posting off topic on hosts where they did NOT apply... go for it!
How about *all* of them, pretty much?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Ok, I know that some kinds of marketing are a pain, but seriously:
Solar cell.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
In a fraction of a second it would cool too much to melt lead.
It's a good thing we don't use lead for soldering, then.
Melting point of lead: 621.5F (327.5C)
Melting point of solder ~370 F (~190 C)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Yeah, its still more or less like that every time I get a haircut.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I would choose a lot of people from "the lower classes", as they have been accustomed to making do with what they can get.
Nope. Replace "the lower classes" by "the third world" and you'd be getting close.
Did you know there are people who hand-rewind electric motors?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
So boil the willow bark in vinegar.
Big fucking deal.
(you have started wine maiking, right? Priorities, priorities...)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The people most likely to make it through any kind of collapse are ones who can organize or join a social network that functions despite the new challenges. They would willingly watch the backs of their friends and receive the same benefit from them. They would shut up and work on the projects of the group, even if they suspected a "more optimal" strategy was available.
The first people to starve or die from infections would be the individualists who think that as soon as things get tough, they have to retreat to bunkers with their guns. People with social skills, people who are easy to like, people who are good with kids, people who evoke sympathy from others, people who are hard-working, open and jovial - they would be the ones that are in the best position to benefit from the cooperation that will become necessary when things get tough.
The way I see it, the fact that we can survive without the explicit beneficence of others is probably the biggest luxury of our age. We work for money, trade money for necessities and comforts, and this works fine even in the complete absence of exchanging favors. But this kind of lifestyle is a complete anomaly in human history. Actually, even now, the majority of the Earth's people do not live this way. This kind of informal social reciprocity is what we would need to return to. We would become tribal again. On Slashdot, people are under the illusion that the individualism of late-industrial society can somehow survive its collapse. That would be a fatal mistake. The right strategy is to give up a great deal of our autonomy for the sake of being useful to others. What you're ultimately doing after you subordinate yourself to the group will probably not involve much of what you learned in your jobs and hobbies. A lot of it will involve digging, carrying, sawing, gathering and socializing. Grit and attitude are far more valuable for these necessary things than skill and knowledge. Even complete non-experts with the right work ethic will contribute a great deal to their collective group, because of the sheer amount of extra work that will be necessary in a post-collapse society.
I've no need to "back up" anything, because anyone who cares can check the posting histories of those whom you've targeted.
The pattern is easy to see, and your actions follow this pattern again and again:
-As long as you think you're "winning", you post as a "friendly" AC and flag yourself prominently as "APK".
-When someone who's logged in disagrees with you, points out that your "contributions" are not relevant to the discussion, or offers the opinion that you're acting like a lunatic, the attacks begin. Typically, you commence tracking your target's posting history and post attacks against them in response to every new post they make. (You even went so far as to follow several days' worth of my history and to post troll responses to a large swath of my posts, in reverse chronological order. Perhaps you think that disguised what you were doing, but in actuality, you just made what you were doing very obvious, in addition to petty, and a bit silly.) These attacks appear to increase in frequency and venom in proportion to the perceived vulnerability of the target. Again, these posts are AC but signed by you.
-When someone calls you out on this, there follow a string of poison-pen AC posts trying to discredit them. For some mysterious reason, these posts re-use your favourite catch-phrases and links, but conveniently omit any mention of the fact that they're (very obviously) being posted by you.
You tolerate no disagreement whatsoever, and you appear incapable of admitting when you've made a mistake--every one else in your world is always wrong, but never APK--and you go on endlessly about "beating" people. These are not the marks of an intelligent/rational individual engaged in civilised discussion or debate. What they are is pathological.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Wow. Way to go proving one of my points before I'd even finished writing them.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I think sterile needles would probably be the weak point. Other than that I agree that vaccine and antibiotics are low tech and among the most important things to have.
This. I recently read remembrances from people living in post-Soviet countries after the USSR breakup. It was little like the fantasies most others are envisioning in responses here, and imagining from fiction.
They all talked about economic collapse, anyone who had savings, became destitute.
Muscle ruled, thugs obviously took whatever they wanted from those who could supply, starting with factories and businesses. Obviously thugs wouldn't harm those they needed to the point of those individuals not being able to provide.
However supply lines/travel were problematic. Someone spoke of a store that sold two things: salt, and vinegar.
Some posters are pointing out their wives have skills, completely forgetting that many wives might be taken into sexual slavery. Desirable women became commodities.
Which isn't to say there was complete lawlessness, but what would you do for protection from the gangs/law? They are younger, stronger, well-armed, more numerous, and don't respect intellectual debate. Their "tax" structure won't be logical, or necessarily sustaining.
I'm also amused at those imagining recovering information from libraries. Have you been to one recently? Many libraries won't cull books donated to their collections for fear of offense, but patrons don't check out resource books that many assume they'd find there, stuff that doesn't circulate gets culled. Older titles get culled all the time. Patrons check out DVDs. Particularly new releases. Shelf space has been yielding to computer workstations. There's a growing trend shifting from housing dead trees, to serving as community centers, particularly in more online services.
A lot of people have been suggesting they are capable of producing electricity from car alternators, as if electricity is valuable when there's a dearth of food. Not a single respondent remembering post-Soviet times mentioned electricity. A recurring theme was getting something from elsewhere as being hugely problematic--IE, transport.
On the idea of lawyers becoming irrelevant, who else will we turn to when we want to appeal to get our wife/daughter/son/sister back? Who else will we turn to point out that the amount of food left to us, won't be enough for us to survive and supply their wants? There will be need of objective arbiters who understand the "language" of the gangs/thugs/law, and can translate the needs of the common person to petition for "fair" judgment.
Society will continue to interact, move forward, and all the same existing needs will recur, including less base forms of entertainment. Here we are over a generation after the Soviet collapse, and society has rebounded. The people who came out ahead were the ones with connections, who saw opportunity and capitalized on it, exactly the same as the ones who come out ahead in any form of society.
Well first you have to build the arrow :)
Technically every human can be considered an engineer
There's money to be made burying corpses! Yihaa!
Correct, but if you're skilled with electrical gear, you can make electricity.
A car alternator, belt, pulley, a bit of wood, and a running river, can give you constant power.
That power can run our soldering iron, refrigerator/freezer, or other useful things.
The guy who knows all the in's and out's on a car, can give you reliable transportation. In the case of the recent walking dead episodes, he can give you a way to drive down the tracks quickly, rather than walking for days. (Hint: a Chevy S10 has the correct distance between wheels to sit on the rails)
A big enough mini power plant can run arc welders. Building foot thick steel reinforced concrete walls is better than hiding in almost any house.
And for the record, I'm a long-term IT guy. I also have experience in electronics, refrigeration and HVAC, automotive work, firearms handling, and farming. I'm also spoken for. My friends and family already know where to meet up if there happens to be an apocalypse. They have the written plans and maps. If an apocalypse happened, we'd be set back up and having LAN parties within a few weeks. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Is that before or after disassembling stuff? :)
And for some things, you don't even need the magnets. There are plenty of cars out there with self-exciting alternators. All you need is something to spin the pulley.
I think in his universe, all the magnets, tools, vehicles, and stores simply disappeared.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Is that literally all it takes to make ASA?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Funny, I recently bought a place and I'm planting a garden. The soil is so clay heavy I could throw it on a wheel, and fire it to at least earthenware temperatures. This also means a rototiller is useless, so I've been using a shovel to remove the grass layer, which I pile up around the edges of the bed, a fork to break up the top 10 inches of clay, and then a wheelbarrow and shovel to cart over topsoil from a pile I had delivered. In a post-apocolypse world, we can omit the delivered dirt, because you wouldn't choose such crappy soil to start with.
I'm 45, not a weightlifter, runner ... not even a regular exerciser. I'm a little chubby from sitting at a desk all the time. In about about an hour and half I can dig up, till with a fork, and wheel barrow over a 10" layer of top soil to do a 10x10 area. This gives me about 20" of planting bed, the 10" I broke up with a fork and the 10" I dumped on top, the grass clumps act like the frame for a raised bed. If this was done in good dirt without the need for added topsoil, subtract half an hour because of easy digging and no dirt hauling.
If I did two of those beds per day, one in the morning and one in the evening, I could dig up 1400 sq ft in a week.
It looks like I'd need about 23,000 square feet to feed myself, but some of that can be made up with space devoted to animals -- most though still goes to garden.
http://www.treehugger.com/gree...
I started this post feeling sort of positive, but tilling soil in this manner burns 4-500 calories per hour. Do this for three hours per day on a 2000 calorie/day diet, and you're going to turn into a rail fast. If it was only 400 calories to dig 100 sq ft of easy soil, and I had to dig 15000 sq ft, I'm going to need an extra 60,000 calories to make it -- an extra month's worth of food to invest in labor to plant a garden. It is sounding increasingly unrealistic to hand dig a garden in the absence of outside inputs, i.e., food for the digger.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
No idea, I was just going off the name.
Sorry, one beer to many.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
well older farmers from just a few decades ago were not just farmers they had to have more skills to make a living. A (small farm) farmer had to have experience as a mechanic,wielder,plumber,electrician,carpenter and engineer/problem solver. I grew up on a small farm with old failing equipment.
Essential - cooking, baking, bread making.
Brewing is another basic skill that produces a product that can be used for barter.
Farming / growing crops - how else will you get the grain/fruit for cooking?
Hunting - obvious one there. But the other side of that coin is butchering. How many butchers do you know?
Sewing, to repair clothes that won't be replaceable for a while.
I could go on.
Weapon dealers > [insert essential good here] dealers > paramilitary related jobs.
Medics aren't really a necessity when having enough food for whoever is alive is the main issue. It will be a bonus for oneself to have such skill, but it will only take a medic so far before he faces more serious problems than his health.
Pretty much anyone who has an eye for social manipulation will have a huge head start in any state of social disarray, such as those in an apocalyptic dystopia.
People might argue the question was about usefulness, but well, since we are doing the "what if" possibilities, we might as well speculate on the most successful and/or having the most life-expectancy. Criminal activity will surely boom and kingpins will have a field day (or years).
I am a problem and puzzle solver who applies those skills and abilities to computers, networks, and electronics. My skills are infinitely transferable.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
A lot of us build from our parents work. Some of it we don't, because technology caught up sufficiently to the mainstream. Like, before my father tired, he was working on bleeding edge work with lasers and thermal imaging.
I don't need a ruby rod and flashtube to fire a laser, at some huge gov't expense, and $10,000 (if I remember right) for an infrared thermometer. Now I can get a $20 that does both.
He quite literally had a truck filled with gear that was cooled by liquid nitrogen, to do thermal imaging. I believe the truck was the cheapest component. Instead, I can spend $2,500 for a handheld camera that does much better quality imaging.
There are some things that really don't change much. I do my own work around the house. I work on my own cars. I've built electronics. Some techniques I learned from him. Some I've improved on. If he was still alive, I believe he would be impressed.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I think the first AC below is right. Without a good support structure, including people to defend you, you most likely won't survive the first few weeks. I'm fairly sure you're not the only person around (or even on here) that can identify and replace a bad cap. :)
It's ok though, if you make it to our compound, you'd be welcome and protected. You'd better know more than just swapping electronic components though. Everyone is a soldier first, and their specialty second. You won't do us much good dead.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
> medical doctors would be useful, as would most scientists and engineers
A small subset of them would be able to apply a small subset of their skills and knowledge. Without infrastructure and technology, very little of what scientists or engineers learn is remotely useful, and most of that is stuff they learned in high school. The medical doctor only fares little better unless they specialized something like trauma surgery.
Without electricity and advanced industry, we're nothing but particularly clever monkeys.
I farm. I use some technology but everything I do I can do without any of the modern tech falling back gracefully to older and older ways. My kids farm with us and they understand these things and the need.
Civilizations rise and fall. There will be another fall. Another dark age. Maybe this decade, this century, this millennia. *shrug* I enjoy technology but I don't let myself be dependent on it. If there is a fall, my pastured pigs will be worth more than gold and bitcoins will be useless.
Zontar The Mindless has no accusation, just facts.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
You don't even need diodes because there is a rectifier
IIRC a rectifier is made from four diodes arranged in a square.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The problem would be that their loved ones DO depend on it. You have to get food, water, etc...all very quickly...all without injuring yourself.
99% of people would die if asked to be self-sufficient. Sure, you think you can make a part, but you are lacking the parts and tooling. If you did have those things, you would cut yourself badly doing manual labor for the first time in years.
After a day, you would be hungry, thirsty, tired, and stressed. The quality of your work would go down. This is a downward spiral that would not end well.
Uh... a large number of problems can be diagnosed with a microscope and a fluid sample. They can still remove appendices. They can treat battle wounds. A lot of stuff can be done with some herbal knowledge, but a docotor's knowledge of the human body is very valuable.
If nothing else, they can tell you where to stab someone for the best effect. :D
Yeeaaaah..... no. I assure you, if the apocolypse comes and some idiot starts taking apart my stash of alternators saying "I can hand wind these better than the factory did!" I will bash in his skull and eat him. But not the brain. I don't want to get whatever Brain Disease he had. :D
It was a joke, since I'm an electrical engineer and 90% of electronics that randomly stop working do so because a cheap electrolytic cap has failed. Besides, in my post-apocalyptic society, wandering monks will be welcomed everywhere, as they are the Bringers of Knowledge who can dispense technical advice to the unwashed masses.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
90% of electronics that randomly stop working do so because the user failed.
FTFY. :)
You're apocalypse sounds better, and possibly more likely, than some others on here. It's much more likely than the evaporating magnets and technology. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Particle Physicists would probably be SOL.
Hedge fund managers and investment bankers too (bless their hearts).
Lawyers will probably survive longer than anyone really wants.
As for most useful: it's pretty clear that anyone who already lives off the grid is going to be way better off than the rest of us. The Amish, subsistence fishermen/hunters, and pretty much anyone who lives in Small-Town Alaska or Northern Canada will probably be fine.
Let's be honest: if there ever is a nightmare scenario, what's really going to matter is your ability to stay protected during the adjustment period:
People who have no skills and no protection will starve. (Culls)
People with no skills and sufficient ammunition will attempt to take whatever they can. (Bandits)
People with skills and no protection will be exploited or killed (Golden goose syndrome).
People with skills and sufficient protection will be a the seeds of the next civilization.
Keep that in mind. Your skill set is necessary, but not sufficient for surviving long enough to rebuild a civilization. The community you belong to is absolutely critical.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
Sorry you heard it from someone who got it wrong. The Roman punishment was to kill nine in ten in a regiment leaving one- the tenth man alive. (It was described as being one of the severest punishments and leaving 9 out of 10 alive wouldn't be that severe.)
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
I'm all set, then. Not only do I know how to brew beer, but I also used to work as a refrigeration technician.
(I've also worked building houses, but I can get someone else to do that for me if I've got cold beer and ice. :).
I grew up in a rural environment. The basic thing you need for farming in a non-mechanised environment is lots and lots of muscle power. Especially for ploughing the fields. If we also didn't have burden animals like heavy horses or oxen (big cows) - things would get incredibly difficult incredibly quickly, and every farm would need hundreds of people just to do the basic work. Even then it would be pretty marginal if they could make enough food just to support themselves to survive. In the time before mechanisation those beasts of heavy burden were often worth more than the lives of people - simply because they were so important for making enough food for society to survive.
Hunting gathering works but only with incredibly low population levels, go above that level and you rapidly start to run out of animals. A better solution might be the coast and fishing - but you can bet that a lot of others will be thinking of that too.
The real solution for farming is to fix the mechanised equipment and use that. That takes a little more than blacksmithing, say to convert a modern machine to run without its complex electronics would be pretty difficult. - the kind of thing that needs a good engineer and tinkerer. Making replacement parts is more difficult, especially if you don't have a local machine shop with lathes and milling machines and so on. And a bigger problem than the machines themselves is getting or making - or trading enough fuel for them to run. A lot of modern machines would need conversion to run on primitive fuels, and might have reduced lifespan..
Oops shatter another common delusion - on food, there are no 'unlimited' stockpiles of cans out there. For most foods and goods there's no more than a months margin in the current food supply, probably less than that. (Thanks to 'Just In Time' stock-holding.) Back in the cold war days I'm pretty sure some governments used to keep big emergency food supplies, but such things are very expensive to maintain and I don't think they really exist any more. FEMA has some but they're pretty limited, and there are stock-piles of emergency army rations - but they could not feed large numbers of people for more than a few days or weeks. Food is priority number one.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Tell it to the sources Wikipedia used: "decimate. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000". Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 2014-03-22. ^ Jump up to: a b Polybius, History of the World. Quoted in Shelton, Jo-Ann, As the Romans Did, p. 248 ISBN 978-0-19-508974-5 Jump up ^ G. R. Watson, The Roman Soldier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 119 Jump up ^ Ab urbe condita, ii.59 Jump up ^ Livy: History of Rome 2.59.9-11, quoted in Sage, M M: The Republican Roman Army; a Sourcebook (2013) p147 Jump up ^ Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus, 407 Jump up ^ Plutarch: Antony, c. 39 Jump up ^ Suetonius, Augustus, 24 Jump up ^ Suetonius, Galba, 12 Jump up ^ Tacitus, Annals, 3 Jump up ^ Watson, Roman Solder, p. 120 Jump up ^ Codex Parisiensis, Bibliothèque National, 9550, reproduced in Louis Dupraz, Les passions de st Maurice d'Agaune: Essai sur l'historicité de la tradition et contribution à l'étude de l'armée pré-Dioclétienne (260-286) et des canonisations tardives de la fin du IVe siècle (Fribourg 1961), Appdx I. on the historicity of the Theban Legion. Jump up ^ Huw Strachan (2003) The First World War Jump up ^ Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 117. Jump up ^ http://web.varkaus.fi/Varkaus_... Jump up ^ http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.pls...
Looks to me like more of your spamming. (And don't bother speaking of yourself in the 3rd person when it's obviously you, Sparky.)
It's pretty obvious that this is what it is when you post a 300+ word 'response' to a 1-line comment less than 15 minutes later, and this 'response' is about 90% the same as a bunch of your other posts.
Basically, you have this long, drawn-out screed that you've already written and keep handy, looking for opportunities to spam discussions with. And you do, repeatedly.
Anybody who's ever administered an online forum can recognise this pattern quite easily.
If you pulled this crap on the forums that *I* help administer? Well, I have a very special button on my admin page just for such occasions. One click, and you, your account (we don't allow anonymous posting there, gee I wonder why), and all your posts would be gone. *poof* Not going to tell you which one because I don't want you showing up there.
(BTW, I know even more about you and your activities at Ars Technica, Wikipedia, and a couple of other places than remains available on the Web, because... Guess what? *I know people who work at these places and I've asked them*. But to keep things fair I'm citing *only* stuff that anybody can find online for themselves.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
This presumes you have access to magnets. That's...not a given, since you need iron working. Iron working is actually hard to bootstrap - it's why the bronze age preceded it.
Umm... why would we need to bootstrap "iron working" again? There are hundreds of billions of tons of high quality refined steel (compared to the iron of ages past) laying around to be remelted and reworked. Do you believe it will all evaporate?
It's a massive interruption of society with the deaths of millions to billions of people. Why do you presume there'll be useful scrap metal or functional parts to salvage? It's not a civilization on/off switch. After the dust settles, after people somehow survive, how much do you think will be left over from the fall, however it might happen? Stores would be looted, anyone who maintained order is going to vigorously defend it. It's very unlikely you're just going to scrounging up usable metals, fuels and tools to smelt them with, etc.
If something would make your life easier, then the first assumption is that almost everyone else already figured that out and was looting it during whatever calamity was in the midst of happening. Can you even go near the cities? Ground zero for people who will be resource deprived well beyond their local ability to support themselves?
Ok, sorry I got it wrong. (I bow to the greater knowledge of WP (again). )
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Well, chances actually are, that some people that know gymel also have a wider understanding of the middle ages, and thus acquired skills, or at least know how, on how the middle ages work. So they might be able to build a fire with flint and steel, or produce pottery, and so on...
reenactors and experimental archeologists might be able to cope rather well without modern technology, because they already tried it.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Arid area farmers would have difficulty but 3000 acres is no problem. It would just take 80 men instead of 4. It would take a few years to build the populations of draft horses needed to do it well.
> feeding everyone
Most slashdotters are Apocalypse-Useful -- they've been storing up body fat for emergencies for decades.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Any remote/island community is already living in this sort of situation.
They're generally self-sufficient for food. They're able to make most spare parts as it takes weeks/months to get something from "civilisation". But probably most important is everyone knows who has which skills and more than one person in the community has those skills.
Most of what MDs do is not useful without the entire medical economic structure behind them. "You've got these symptoms, which means I think you've developed this condition, and now I'll prescribe you this drug. Oh, wait, there are no drug makers making that drug, so take two Aspirin and call me in the morning. Oh, wait, Aspirin isn't available and there are no phones available." And most forms of surgery, beyond the most crude... well, let's see how well you heal without antibiotics and the other plethora of devices. Most scientists and engineers: Same category. They can't practice their professions without computers anymore. (And more essentially, electricity.) Give me an expert in medieval gymel who has primitive camping as a hobby over the most polished expert in medicine who's never eaten with an unsterilized spoon, any day of the week.
WTF? I posted in that thread roughly 14 hours before you did, APK.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I dare say careysub's got a better idea of what "libel" means than you do.
You don't need to be an optometrist to be able to tell that someone is near-sighted. And you don't need to be an expert in the social or behavioural sciences to be able to tell when someone's behaviour is sociopathic.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
unless a nuclear winter hides the sun for hundreds of years.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
I have a big ass file that has all the essentials of how to rebuild society should worse come to worse. I guess I should print it since more than likely there won't be electricity.
The story is rather dumb. The more educated you are, and the more used to learning you are, the better you can lean new things or adapt to new situations. And anybody who wrote enough code, or deployed enough network equipment, or just was just very technical overall is probably better suited than most for problem solving. I'm not saying they'd replace the other ones, but that they are certainly not useless.
The problem is that most of this sort of knowledge is considered "lost" to much of modern society. Big industry likes it that way, and since big industry keeps buying up laws that make it harder for people to actually know anything we're sliding in the wrong direction.
Yes, there are people like pharmacists who know this stuff but Joe coach potato is hopeless. He may serve a purpose as a blunt instrument though.
I refuse to sign
I guess there is more but the above listed general conditions are basics and no amount of skill can help if you run out of luck, cannot see lucky condition because lost hope, or being stubborn enough to die. There are also some other issues with that - I guess the agent of apocalypse must be strong but mild enough to let big enough part of society to survive or else the discussion is rather pointless. Plaugue for instance killed somewhere around 1/3 of Europe population - it did not destroy civilization but made quite an impact. Is this enough to call it apocalypse? Large enough flying rock impact can be devastating but depending on how big it maybe devastating more for some than for others leading to war etc. In such situation being an intelligent psychopath can be very helpful. Still if some groups of humans survive the most important factors are the above with skills like hunting, fighting and knowledge about simple health helping techniques being just a bonus.
I suppose post apocalypse cancer is not such a big worry as a open broken bone which if treated well has a chance to heal at least to the point that owner of the bone can live without people supporting him/her constantly which post apocalypse is probably not really an option. So yes - if they can treat injuries this is good enough because there will be plenty of that to deal with - not only because of inconvenient env. but also because of neighbouring groups trying to win the only female around etc. I wonder only why is this question asked on geek site - after all if a fat blob of a geek ever leaves the cellar after agent of apocalypse stroke they have approximately null chances of surviving first day. This however is not that different from survival chances of the rest of humanity. If agent was strong enough to kill say 75% of society equally all over (plague did 1/3 in Europe and 1/2 in China) the chances of post apocalypse world are thin for all. I'd say prepare to survive tsunami or some other likely accident that can affect your neighbourhood. Other than that you will not survive anyway.If you do then your healthy and fit body and clear mind and adapting are the most important tools of survival. The rest is just a minor thing that may or not have an impact on your so to say post survival survival.
You can all bow to me, as I can grow hop and brew BEER! This is probably the only sure thing about a post-apocalyptic world: people will still want to get wasted to forget
Without constant supply chains from Farm to Walmart, the groceries would be gone in a week. Maybe two weeks max. Having a supply of fruit/veg seeds, a rifle, a fishing pole/net, and a little bit of survival knowledge would be very useful by week 3.
The only way that you'd have years of groceries left to loot is if something like The Walking Dead happened where 99% of humanity was killed quickly.
When I was researching how to build a windmill for electricity generation, alternators were universally booed by hobbyists. They need to turn very fast to generate much electricity.
You are better off using motors that perform slow work, like washing machines.
In a world with no central power to establish order, limited supplies, people knowing both those facts and guns aplenty, 99% of humanity dead in a week doesn't sound so outlandish, does it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is not a popular idea because it requires people to get over their personal drama and work together toward a goal, instead of finding reasons to justify doing whatever they personally want to do.
However, it's true. Strong leadership gets results. This country was much more "fascist" back in the days when we actually invented real stuff, instead of just moving bits around like a big game of "Puzzle."
Futurist Traditionalism
This is a very good post. It shows great intelligence, but not great experience. Bums do have many of the attributes listed by the authorâ"great ability to size people up and know when to get out of Dodge.
But society allows Bums in very low ratios to exist within it, then society takes action. It creates laws against âoevagrancyâ, and it enforces those laws by transporting Bums to the County Farm where the Bum is actually at an advantage, getting room and board for free for 30 days, or transported to the county line where the Bum has the opportunity to catch a lift from a passing car or to catch a freight train. (The county line is actually a pretty poor habitat in which a Bum can thrive. They do much better in modern cities where food can be had from charities or out of the dumpsters of places that distribute or serve food. In the modern world less than a dozen people might use one of these sources. In a post apocalyptic world there may be scores.) The modern city offers more building materials to build shelters and shorter distances between resources than the county line.
In a post-apocalyptic society Bums will be considered a threat to people with houses, esp. since the number of visible people living on the street will rise from less than 1% to well over 20%. Shooting people on the street will be so common that coronerâ(TM)s inquests will report people âoekilled by gunshot by persons unknown.â The police will not have time to investigate them all. In fact, the police will be overwhelmed with crime reports.
The America of today is far different from the America of the 1920â(TM)s. People still often had privies in their back yard. In towns a man came by once a week to clean them out. Out on the farm, they dug another hole every once in a while and moved the privy. People often had wells, and water-borne diseases were common. In a post apocalyptic world these features will rise again to being common.
I expect a post apocalypse to have a time line:
In the first week:
Electrical power fails permanently. Community water supplies fail.
Food disappears off of store shelves and price of food doubles.
Gasoline disappears from gas station and the price of gas doubles.
In the second week:
Looting, destruction of property, rioting.
In the third week:
Men with guns sell food and gasoline from the back of semi trucks.
Diseases from bad water and bad food begin to appear.
Redneck farmers form militias to discourage or kill trespassers.
Most phone service dies. Without electrical power to that cell tower and a charged battery in that cell phone, the system is dead.
In the fourth week:
Community leaders form emergency committees to handle various problems. The system that develops will look a lot like Russian communism.
Starvation and allied problems will begin to whittle away at the population.
More riots, raids, and other civil disturbances.