This episode is sponsored by Dashlane. Civilization has collapsed. The only rational way forward is to cover your dune buggy with spikes, craft some leather S&M armor, and resort to cannibalism. Mohawks are optional. A pretty common theme in science fiction,
and just in general discussion of the future, is that some sort of doomsday will occur that
will leave only shattered remnants of civilization behind. Often shattered not just physically
but spiritually too, typically that remnant left behind is portrayed as crazy cannibal
barbarians. Even the nominal heroes of such stories tend to be nihilistic and more than
a trifle villainous in portrayal. There’s some logic in that notion too, we
get the word apocalypse from the Greek word for Revelation, the last book of the New Testament
that has the various survivors on Earth being those left behind after all the good folks
got a ticket to paradise. And a lot of stories set in such scenarios will have similar notions
in play, something has made a lot of folks crazy or evil and that’s part of why civilization
isn’t rebuilding itself to rise from the ashes like a Phoenix.
This too has some plausibility, since technological civilizations are hard to trash by simple
disasters, so something generally has to be making them act weird in the first place.
Otherwise the disaster, natural or artificial, is either going to kill everyone off or be
something we recover from after a while. Of course “a while” is a pretty relative
term, we can dismiss it as irrelevant when talking about things like Galactic Colonization
and the Fermi Paradox because several centuries just doesn’t mean anything on those timelines,
but this episode is in our Rogue Civilization series and our prior two examples, Space Prison
Colonies and Techno-Primitivism were both cases where they seemed like temporary states
of civilization. Cultures are constantly changing, so it seems wrong to bypass ones that would
tend to be fairly temporary, just lasting a handful of generations, since again most
cultures don’t even last that long. We could contrive some particular doomsday
scenario that made a post-apocalyptic civilization linger in a diminished state a very long time,
but while I was considering more plausible options for that, it got me wondering about
what would survive afterwards. For instance, we tend to picture tribes of leatherclad mutants
with mohawks riding around on dunebuggies in a wasteland, something that got so cliché
in fictional post-apocalypses that a lot of shows satirize it like Rick and Morty, but
it raises the question about where they get the gasoline for those engines.
Gasoline does not actually store well. Even if water and oxygen don’t seap in, that
gas itself will separate into light volatiles and a sludge of heavier viscous compounds.
You’d have problems getting it work in an engine a year later even if it had been stored
properly, which is unlikely to be the case in most doomsday scenarios, and even very
good storage and a fuel stabilizer might only get you 2 or 3 years. Gasoline’s not terribly
hard to make but a cracking tower isn’t something you’d expect your typical tribe
of mutants to have and you can’t just go find an abandoned one and dump in some crude
oil or spoiled fuel and fire it up. Well you might be able to but ‘firing it up’ is
probably exactly what would happen. So if you’ve got folks with functioning
engines decades after Doomsday it implies they’ve got folks who are decent chemists
and engineers, or at least repairmen, and who have time to practice their trade, so
your savage tribe of mutants won’t be staying primitive much longer. Otherwise, if they
want those high-horsepower dunebuggies, they need to be pulled by actual horses. Which
kind of ruins the flavor. The Mohawks are fine at least, hair gel and
cutting technology doesn’t need to be very advanced to do that one. The leather is probably
fine too except one wouldn’t really expect lots of cows or deer to be around the typical
irradiated wasteland. Of course it’s often implied to be made from other people, though
rats seem more likely and economically plausible. Cannibalism, literal or figurative, is not
a winning pathway, especially for humans who need decades to grow up, the math just doesn’t
work out. Cannibalism will certainly happen in desperate times, but given that humans
need decades to reach full size, a food industry based on it would be impractical.
Of course they have to get clothes from somewhere and textile factories wouldn’t seem to be
common so fur and hide would make sense. But there would be a ton of clothing left over
from the end of the world. Properly stored most fabrics do hold up for generations, but
they’d be getting worn-out from being worn out in the wasteland and leftovers lying around
ruined warehouses, basements, and attics would tend to get moldy and picked apart. The most
enduring would presumably be polyester, so amusingly the mutant savages are more likely
to look like they’d escaped from a disco than a biker bar.
You’re probably thinking leather is better for absorbing strikes, as is chainmail, but
keep in mind there are millions of kevlar vests in the US alone, and while the ballistic
plates would all break, Kevlar lasts and can be patched, and you could stick a piece of
sheet metal in one as a decent replacement for the ceramic plate, which is for bullets
not knives anyway. Coming up with rubber for boot soles would be unlikely though, so they’d
probably have to go back to wood and hobnails, though maybe they could use sheets of plastic
or metal and hobnails. As to those various ruined houses, even absent
any new production, when the planet’s been reduced to scattered millions instead of billions,
you’ve got spare parts and replacements all over the place, slowly rusting down in
many cases. A prolonged scavenger-punk era wouldn’t be likely, at least where durable
consumables are concerned, since they’d know where every building was and would either
have quickly ransacked all their supplies, or, if they are few in number, have stopped
only because they had acquired more than they could use before spoilage.
People will be getting pretty systematic about it. Someone will think to grab or make maps
and document each building looted and to use things like fiber optic snake cameras for
scoping out collapsed structures. If not, it’s because there are very few people,
in which case they will have more than enough supplies by ransacking the local grocery store
and warehouses, leaving them tons of time to prepare for when their supplies go bad,
rather than get used up. The scavenger aspect of fighting over supplies only applies when
there’s high demand but limited quantities, not when there’s a huge supply with a half-life.
The more enduring stuff is going to be things like stainless steel cookware and utensils,
as well as granite countertops, so the mutants probably won’t be cooking over an oil barrel
with rusty pots, rather, they are going to have very ornate and top-notch kitchens to
prepare their rat-based cuisine in. Things like knives are going to be around
half of forever anyway and there’s no shortage of metal to work with either. Of course we
tend to assume all those electric appliances in the kitchens would be worthless but while
gas powered vehicle engines would be a pain to fuel after the first couple of years, a
stationary electric generator is actually really easy to build and maintain. Especially
if efficiency and mobility isn’t too big a deal, as you can use rather crude parts.
So you’d actually expect them only to stop having electricity when all the things that
used it eventually broke down, and that will take centuries, since a lot of appliances
are incredibly useful and rugged, especially if not used a lot, like sewing machines, LED
light bulbs, food processors, clocks and so on.
In the same vein, batteries won’t last long but battery powered things can, and batteries
are fairly simple to make and can be built out of lots of stuff that’s lying around
like copper pennies or easily made even by copper age civilizations. A good lead acid
battery takes a bit more work but not a lot. Size and weight are a different matter when
it comes to batteries and those post-apocalyptic muscle-bound freaks we see in the movies probably
got that way lugging around insanely heavy batteries for their portable equipment.
We also always assume such folks would go back to a barter culture, when not stealing
anyway, but while paper money wouldn’t last long all those trillions of coins lying around
the planet would make a handy medium of exchange, being rather durable and hard to forge, so
I’d not be surprised if they just kept on using the local coinage, albeit massively
deflated in value so a penny or nickel was valuable enough again to make it worth carrying;
not for its intrinsic metal value, but just because it’s already viewed as money, and
again, is tricky to make forgeries of without the right equipment.
Gunpowder is easy enough to make, as are bullets. Guns themselves are pretty durable and most
of the less durable parts can be jury-rigged, even a lot of the more fragile bits like the
springs in your typical magazine or magazine catch button. Those do regularly appear in
post-apocalyptic settings. What’s missing is that most would probably have working flashlights
and scopes attached to them too, and their wielders are liking to have perfectly modern
body armor to go with them, not just dirty leather or rusty knives.
They probably wouldn’t be terribly dirty either. They’re unlikely to just magically
forget that many ailments are attached to not keeping clean. Soap is easy to make, and
contrary to popular belief, our pre-industrial ancestors never had an aversion to bathing.
When they didn’t do it a lot, it was because they just lacked the facilities and fuel to
make it convenient, and our post-apocalyptic civilizations will remember hygiene’s importance
to disease control and be even more likely to emphasize it.
A collapsed civilization isn’t one that just goes back in time like someone flipped
the calendar back. A ton of technologies are really easy to do once you think them up and
often folks incorrectly assume that if something was invented in, say, the late 19th century,
that it must require all the technology and industrial resources of that period to make
or maintain them. The standard Gem Paperclip is from that era,
but anybody with a length of wire can obviously make them. You don’t picture the mutant
tribes brushing their teeth either, but a toothbrush is an easy enough device and they
won’t have forgotten the value of that or what causes wounds to get infected or a host
of other things it took us a long time to learn but are easy enough to know. They might
run out of canned foods in a decade or so, as all get scavenged or go bad, but they won’t
forget how and why we can food. Similarly, there’s many other ways to make
a refrigerator, freezer, or air conditioner than our typical modern models, like the Einstein
fridge that has no moving parts and just needs piping, fire, and some refrigerant to work,
even ammonia or alcohol does the trick. But even the normal designs could be maintained,
repaired, and cannibalized for a very long time and anyone working on them is going to
develop an understanding of them quickly enough. So the mutant tribes would have freezers for
storing their food too, and we would doubt that only because we think of them as hunter-gatherer
equivalents and such folks walked everywhere they went and so would need to carry stuff
too. But they wouldn’t be, because they wouldn’t be hunter gatherers. They might
have to walk, or use bicycles or horses, as again gasoline doesn’t store well so they’d
have to produce it, though they could and there’s lots of alternate fuels to use including
alcohol. But they don’t need to move where they live. Our ancestors did because their
food did, the herds migrated so they migrated with them, until they domesticated them and
got good at pasture management, those critters are still domesticated and won’t just revert
because the end of the world happened. They’d have tons of building materials lying
around to pick from–many stone, brick, or concrete ones that would work well, and if
their village looks like a junkyard it’s probably just because those would be so valuable
for spare parts they might live there to maintain possession of it.
But they don’t have to move, because they can still grow food. There’s the notion
that they live in a barren wasteland so they have to hunt or gather, but if animals and
plants can live there to supply food that means they can grow food there too. They’d
have an effectively infinite supply of glass to make greenhouses out of too if water or
contaminated soil was problematic. Fundamentally, though, agriculture is more efficient than
hunting and gathering, no matter how wrecked the local environment is, unless it’s so
wrecked you couldn’t hunt or gather anyway because everything was dead, in which case
you’d follow soon thereafter. This though highlights why we’d tend to
regard such civilizations as rather temporary. Over and over again we see why they’d still
prize knowledge and how even in the most brutal and savage setups they’d still benefit by
preserving and utilizing it. And those were just examples off the top of my head, I’m
sure you can think of many more and I’d encourage you to put down your thoughts on
the matter down in the comments below or our facebook or reddit groups.
Just from what we’ve seen today though, they’re likely to have a lot more luxuries
and modern conveniences and advantages than we normally assume and likely to have a lot
of highly skilled technicians hanging around, even if they are sporting Mohawks and dressed
up in rat-leather, or polyester and Kevlar, and such skills are likely to be valued and
lead inevitably to restoring technology and infrastructure. That is much easier if you
still remember that basic science and still have books and diagrams and broken down examples
of such devices to build off of. Personally, I don’t think we’ll ever have
a post-apocalyptic civilization. Either a catastrophe would make us extinct or we’d
recover fairly quickly, but if we do end up with one, I suspect it wouldn’t be nearly
as grim as we tend to think and would restore itself after only a few generations at most.
I was mentioning how we’d expect electricity and appliances to remain in use even after
a total collapse of civilization, and I suspect we’d see the internet, or local equivalents,
pop back up pretty quick. Of course that’s assuming it wasn’t the internet that brought
on the Apocalypse. The internet is like most technologies, it offers many benefits but
with new risks and challenges, both to civilization and to us individually.
Whether or not the internet might end the world, if you do get your identity stolen
or your accounts hacked, it can feel like the End of the World for you. Internet security
and encryption is only as good as your password, and it is important to use different ones
everywhere and not ones that are easy to remember, and thus easy to hack. You could make a minor
account at some small website, use your favorite User ID and password, and they get hacked
and someone sells all those user IDs and passwords on the Dark Web.
Dashlane lets you not only store all your passwords for easy but secure access across
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So next week we’ll be finishing April out with a look at Matrioshka Shellworlds, truly
immense artificial planets that allow vastly more living area than Earth does, and which
Earth might one day become. Next Sunday, we will also have our Monthly Livestream Q&A,
at 4pm Eastern Time. For alerts when those and other episodes come
out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if enjoyed this episode, hit the like
button and share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
we’ll see you Thursday!
I would think that getting back up to a 1950s level of civilization wouldn't take that long, considering the amount of tools and plans which would inevitably survive. Lathes and books would likely survive relatively well. We would probably see the rise of a mediocre advanced civilization with independently manufactured vehicles and weapons, even if they aren't the best (think South Africa level) which would conquer 1980s-stereotype "post-apocalyptic raiders" in a few days.
Isaac's comments about post apocalyptic greenhouses were really interesting.
After an all-out nuclear war, I think glass would be in short supply. It's uniquely vulnerable to shockwave overpressures of 0.04 to 1 psi. After an urban nuclear detonation, there would be large swathes of territory where everything was intact except all the glass was broken. Glass is also highly vulnerable to conflagration.
I wonder if the comment about large quantities of glass being available was implying the manufacture of new glass? That would seem doable, but would require a lot of fuel (or other reliable heat source), a lot of transportation (of fuel and/or sand), and a lot of people. People require a lot of food, and the food (at least in a radioactive nuclear winter scenario) would seem to require greenhouses.
About 15 years ago I was in a fairly depressing peak oil depletionist movement so focussed on the 'inevitable' end of civilisation as the fossil fuels ran out (Olduvai theory) that a young 19 year old I knew (online only) actually rode out to his favourite national park and hung himself. So awful, and such a waste when there is so much hope as we're close to mass producing old fashioned breeder reactors that could fission all the energy we need with uranium from seawater for 5 billion years, let alone what could do if we just get into space and harness baseload solar PV. (I love Isaac's PowerSats video.) And that's just with today's tech, let alone if we conquer fusion!
But some of my 'depletionist' concerns are reignited by a huge catastrophe like an all-out nuclear war. Not only would we be struggling to survive the nuclear winter, but assuming this war happens in a few decades, we'd have another struggle to deal with. All the easy fossil fuels would be gone! All the light sweet crude, surface coal, and easy gas. Remember, peak oil describes not when we run out of oil, but when we've used up the best stuff, the low hanging fruit. The rest post-peak stuff is much harder to get to and requires things like deep-sea rigs that are an incredibly expensive gig to run now, let alone in a post-apocalypse world.
On the other hand, as Isaac has pointed out, wind turbines are not that hard to MacGyver into place and then our (much more local) village or town would at least have some power, some of the time. Which is vastly more than the early industrial revolution. I imagine a successful farming community attracting more and more people allowing more specialisation and salvaging crews to send out more requests for more specialised tools and resources until basically you had a decent sized town working local food systems and riding bicycles everywhere and eventually building up the local economy to point where some future Mayor / Governor would task force the next nuclear reactor — even retrieving some of that wonderful nuclear 'waste' to reprocess and put in a reactor as fuel!
The reason I keep emphasising local is that so much energy is wasted in our current suburban car-dependent lifestyle, and that's only enabled because we have such an energy abundant planet. EG: Half of global shipping moves fossil fuels. In a world running low on that, we won't need it. How much trucking just moves oil around? In a world low on oil, we won't be trucking oil. How much trucking moves stuff from where we build it cheaply to be cheaply trucked to where it is cheaply deployed in stores to be cheaply purchased? In a world low on consumers and consumables, we won't be bothering to change out the lounge because it looks a bit old. We'll go to the local warehouse of salvaged goods only when that lounge well and truly falls apart, and then we'll just be grateful to pick a lounge that works. In the end, you still have somewhere comfortable to sit! And if you hate the colour, old curtains might make a nice throw rug to go over it. Remember, salvagers can be quite mix-and-match when it comes to meeting one's needs. The main point is, there's plenty of stuff to salvage and a lot of today's energy use only really occurs because it's there to use! If not, we'd find other ways to do it. One could rig up a bicycle and trailer to lug some fairly heavy gear a thousand miles if one wanted to.
In a post-apocalyptic civilisation low on fossil fuels, walking and cycling will be a big thing. And you can move a lot of stuff just with human-powered bicycles, even moving house if you get some friends along! I even suspect that if the apocalypse hits in a few decades there will be much larger Electric Vehicle companies and battery warehouses in more states than not. Someone would go raid the closest EV factory warehouses and get some decent electric trucks working to help the salvage crews. Once they do that, their salvaging teams will work faster. They might even take portable solar power panels with them. Drive one day, charge the next, and have a nice break while they charge! (Play games, read books, read up on the next technical thing they're salvaging this trip, whatever.) Eventually they'll make trading allies in other villages and they'll probably be well within the range of the vehicle. That neighbouring village might have good overnight wind that charges the truck for the next day's trip — or even some sort of local hydropower. (If the Hoover Dam survived the catastrophe, Las Vegas might change from a gambling town to an industrial town! Go figure!) Or if the trading village doesn't have night time power, oh well. Maybe they have good solar farms to recharge the next day. Economies will operate a little slower, things may not be as tightly wound and frantic as they are now, but that's hardly the end of civilisation is it? Some might argue that it's more civilised to live that way, and have a bit more time to read or watch archives of youtube like this great channel. And once you have trucks moving stuff around, you're not that far off being able to build a nuclear power plant.
Ultimately, I'm with SFIA. A few generations at least and they'll be back. We've simply discovered too much, and have too many clever ticks up our sleeves, to allow a little thing like a nuclear war and fossil fuel depletion to stop us!
I'm not buying that people would keep using coins or even money after the bombs have dropped. As fiat currency those coins would have close zero use value because there wouldn't be large economies or governments to guarantee their artificial value and in the end currency is a contract between everyone in a society that everybody agrees to believe that money has some value so it can be used as a mediator of trade. People wouldn't just spontaneously decide to keep using basically worthless pieces of metal that only have their value as scrap and that wouldn't be hard to come by anyway. Not saying that some commodities like alcohol wouldn't take the place of currency in that situation, but that is only because everybody or almost everybody finds it useful and not just for drinking.
Also a functional currency run economy needs a lot of people to run efficiently and more efficient way is just to run basically self sufficient communes or medieval style villages with the few people that there are. It would be foolish to think that markets and money are the best way to go in that situation or even practical. This is just copy-pasting our current economical situation to a vastly different environment. In a such small community of survivors everybody can know each other and everybody relies on each other for survival. Not giving to the community would get one shunned and ostracized from the community and that would mean death. So motivating people to work without money isn't really an issue in that sense. Markets wouldn't really help to moderate the production and prices of things in the wasteland because producers are few and markets would be local and inefficient.
Another question: do you think government would survive an all-out nuclear war? It seems that we need some sort of command and control presence from government to stop things degenerating down into possibly generations long blood feuds between warring tribes. If Walking Dead has taught us anything, it's that you want some kind of law and order, but not "The Governor", running things.