This episode is sponsored by Raycon We often picture post-apocalyptic civilizations
as rather crazy and murderous, and I often wondered how realistic that was. Then I asked myself how crazy a lot of folks
might be without a few days of internet access. Suddenly savage techno-barbarians made a lot
more sense. So today we’ll be looking at a popular notion
in science fiction, the post-apocalyptic civilization with a mix of high technology as relics but
otherwise pretty primitive. As usual, we’ll be asking how plausible
that really is and how it might come about. We have plenty of examples in fiction but
probably my favorite and the one that was on my mind when I put this topic up as one
of the five options on a Youtube episode topics poll – which it won handily - is Warhammer
40k. In that universe we have a grand galactic
empire emerge over many millennia between now and around the year 25,000 AD, or 25k,
but it ends up falling apart for various reasons leading to the Age of Strife, which goes on
for about 5000 more years, then sees the rise of new empire that endures to the present
time of the setting, the year 40,000. And in this era, what high technology from
the old empire remains is preserved and jealously guarded by the techno-priests of the Cult
of the Machine, the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars. But Warhammer 40k, and most of the other examples
in science fiction of an empire collapsing into a dark age, draws influence from Isaac
Asimov’s Foundation series, which draws its influence from the fall of the Roman Empire. In the Foundation Series, as the original
Empire begins to fall, the Foundation is started as a secluded world with a core of knowledge
and science designed to serve as a foundation for a Second Empire, so that it might rise
more quickly than the predicted 30,000 year dark age. Their early interactions are essentially with
Techno-Barbarians, folks who still have a lot of old high tech devices that are barely
functioning, often maintained through ritual more than true understanding, and plenty of
lower technology. Spacefaring civilizations are powering their
industry on coal and oil because they can’t keep their fission or fusion plants running. In both the Foundation and in Warhammer 40k
we see entire religions or cults built around preserving that technology. Other settings, like Gene Wolfe’s Book of
the New Sun, have more of a fantasy flavor even though there is technology and ruins
of technology everywhere, because the societies of those universes don’t seem to make much
distinction between magic and technology. That is maybe appropriate too because much
of our own early science and technology was heavily intertwined with mysticism. Of course any sufficiently advanced technology
might be indistinguishable from magic anyway, what we call Clarketech, and many science
fiction stories utilize that to blend the science fiction and fantasy genres together. Another point I often make on the show is
that while empires do fall, civilization or at least technology generally does not fall
backward much, and the Dark Age is something that folks in later times dreamed up to place
themselves as the spiritual successors to Greco-Roman civilization of antiquity, a second
Empire as it were. The Dark Age was not dark, even in Europe,
it was not ignorant, and indeed it produced a very great deal of science and technology,
but the image of the mighty Empire falling and its degenerate descendants living in its
ruins if and until a second empire arises is rather stuck in folks minds even if its
historical veracity is a bit sketchy or at least rather exaggerated in many regards. Still, such a fall could happen, regardless
that the classic example is nearly as fictional as the stories inspired by it, and that is
what we will focus on today. As usual for the Rogue Civilizations series
here on SFIA, we’re not concerned if such a civilization is stable in the long term
or not. Same as when we looked at Space Prison Colonies
and said that would probably only be a temporary period of a few generations, or the same for
various derelict or post-apocalyptic civilizations we looked at in other episodes. Most historical periods and civilizations
really only last a few generations anyway before undergoing a major metamorphosis so
it doesn’t matter if a techno-barbarian civilization might be temporary one until
some new scientists and inventors arise, it would still be a unique and memorable period,
ignoring that they probably didn’t keep many records. Though we will also ask today what might make
such a period endure for centuries or millennia too. What are techno-barbarians? Well, barbarian is a word the Ancient Romans
adopted from the Ancient Greeks. Barbaros basically means babbler, because
foreign languages sounded to the Greeks like ineloquent unintelligible sounds, bar-bar-bar,
the ancient equivalent of blah-blah-blah. These days we’d say that’s a bit of an
arrogant superior attitude, but I’m willing to give people some slack when they invent
philosophy and democracy. And to be fair, once the Roman Empire conquered
the nearby civilizations, they were surrounded by cultures who weren’t quite as organized,
literate, developed, or well-bathed as themselves. The northern barbarians who would later bring
down the empire were very good at making swords and river boats, low-manpower technologies
that a small tribe can support. But anything like an aqueduct or a university,
things that only a large stable affluent civilization would even want to produce, let alone try
to, well, not so much. And that’s basically what we mean techno-barbarian,
a culture that is overall not highly organized or developed or technically literate but has
some technology around, along with some folks who can maintain or copy the technology but
no scientists who could have created it, or can further build on it. We could assume a case of total ignorance,
some illiterate culture where the folks really have forgotten everything, but it’s not
terribly plausible as we’ve discussed in episodes like “Post-apocalyptic civilizations”
and “Cyclic Apocalypses”. In science fiction, it tends to summon to
mind folks running around dressed in leather and fur and carrying crude knives… and laser
guns. Often in some post-nuclear-war wasteland,
which begs the question where they’re getting all those animal hides from in a desolate
environment, though more dark settings will just suggest the leather and hides aren’t
from animals, or at least not from the four-legged kind. For others it is many centuries after the
bomb or the fall and forests have regrown, as we see in settings like Terry Brooks’
Shannara series. For those in settings right after a cataclysm,
when all the technology would mostly be still working, and you can still find hair gel for
spiking your mohawk, there’s a lot of logic to the mixed tech levels. You can’t manufacture many things but many
will still be working with some effort and plenty of folks are still around with some
direct knowledge of the devices. How to use them, how to maintain them, and
maybe even how to build them. How long would various things last? Well, while many electronics of modern times
would not hold up well, though some would, other things last much better. Guns are very durable even when not stored
terribly well, and can often be fairly easily fixed from cannibalized or improvised parts. This isn’t true of all of them, some are
very touchy and need precision-machined pieces, while others like the M2 .50 cal Browning
Machine Gun, affectionately known as the “Ma Deuce”, first developed in 1918, is still
used to this day, and often the individual guns are considerably older than the folks
firing them. A few years back the Army found one that was
still in service and working fine at the age of 90, one of the first few hundred ever produced. They are durable and rugged, and you can roll
one down a hill into a muddy ditch, dump some motor oil on it, and be shooting it a minute
later. Of course, it weighs about half as much as
a person so it’s not something your typical techno-barbarian would be lugging around and
shooting, unless they were a musclebound mutant. And that is another example of how a technology
might linger too. It wouldn’t be too improbable that we’d
develop some sort of genetic engineering retro-virus that made steroids look like a placebo, such
a virus might linger in a population or even be hereditary. On the other hand you could get a protracted
period of low-tech if much of the population suffered nutritional deficiencies, like a
lack of iodine, and such deficiencies might be far more a concern on a space habitat or
terraformed planet. For that matter, we have previously discussed
using specialized minerals or chemicals as a control for genetic engineering, like creating
a plant or animal that had to have some rarer element to grow so it could only do so where
we wanted it to, to avoid issues of invasive species, and we might use similar approaches
to human engineering so an engineered trait that was hereditary could only be activated
if desired. So too, a civilization might have a population
that was heavily saturated with internal nanotechnology that grew itself. An advanced civilization that partook in a
lot of genetic engineering might see a lot of those sorts of alterations or upgrades
remain available. This is also likely to be true of a lot of
drugs and medicine, both the chemicals and treatment options. Discovering them is hard, but not so much
keeping them. A civilization isn’t likely to forget what
germs are and what disinfects, especially given that most post-apocalyptic scenarios
tend to give the survivors ample reason to remember how to deal with sanitation and hygiene. Just as an example, the X-Ray machine was
first used for surgery way back in 1896, and the technology involved is something you could
whip up in a garage from even a cursory explanation in a book. As to books, those can often be quite durable
and since they are data, they can be copied. And if they’re critical to your civilization
you will find time to make copies and compare them to others for accuracy. Hand writing a book is no short process but
if you’re using that process every day and need to make a new copy every century, you’ll
find the time, or dump most of the task on an apprentice for you to check and to help
them learn. Now you might be thinking, sure you can preserve
the blueprints and basic ritual of manufacture, but the science is gone. But let us be realistic about this, for something
like X-rays, those are a type of light, you see light all the time, you literally can’t
see without it, folks aren’t going to lose interest in what it is or find the explanation
that it’s made of individual tiny particles called photons that come in many different
colors, some invisible, all that crazy or hard to remember and explain. Or maybe not, after all the wave-particle
dualistic nature of photons is certainly a confusing one to folks when first explained
and is probably very ripe to transmute into some sort of mysticism, after all quantum
tends to have that happen to it a lot as is. As I mentioned earlier though, a lot of initial
scientific thinkers – Kepler in particular comes to mind – were pretty heavy on the
mysticism and still got science and innovation done so it might not be that big a barrier
to recovering technology if that did develop. That’s probably important to consider since
while an awful lot of technology and science is very simple once you figure it out, an
awful lot of our technology is very intricate. Those are also likely to be very hard to recreate
the supply chains to maintain and build new ones for too. With a lack of understanding besides maintenance
and primary purpose, they also might be very bad at obvious innovations, like realizing
they could hook up their still functional fusion reactor to run water purification or
desalination, or grow food inside LED-lit, climate controlled greenhouses. I’m always surprised by the absence of those
in post-apocalyptic barren wastelands too, it’s not like there’d be a shortage of
glass to work with. Anyway, our techno-barbarians might have guns
but probably not smartphones, except in that first generation or two. Especially since cell phones are not really
devices by themselves, just access points to a network and fairly useless without that
network. So they’ll just run out and break. It really doesn’t matter how much you want
to preserve a computer processor, especially a modern one, when it breaks you need to replace
it, not get in and replace one micron-thick wire among millions or scrub some corrosion
of it. Cutting edge technology things are generally
not very durable, nor are tiny components. And while duct tape is said to be able to
fix anything, it generally doesn’t apply to nanoscopic technologies… though maybe
they’ll invent nano-duct-tape in the future. Again though, that’s modern stuff and stuff
a few generations back is easier to perpetually repair, whereas stuff a few generations forward
might be self-repairing or even organic or quasi-organic in nature. Someone might create a plant hybrid that grew
silicon wafers for instance. Stuff also doesn’t decay for no reason,
and a civilization re-emerging a decade or two after some calamity might have access
to tons of mostly functional devices and opt to store many of the extras and still retain
knowledge of how best to do that. Removing oxygen from a room and replacing
it with Nitrogen-only is one common preservative method, and separating oxygen and nitrogen
out of air is a simple enough process, probably most easily done through fractional distillation,
parallel to how you make gasoline from crude oil, another thing they’d need to retain
if they wanted to keep engines around, and distillation in general is handy for many
things including making ethanol from plant matter as an alternative to crude oil. If nothing else they’d presumably want to
retain that technology for making alcohol. For me it conjures to mind some big silo-style
cracking tower decked out in mystic symbols attended by robed monks. Any techno-barbarian civilization is going
to need its tinkerers to keep going and while it's overly simplifying in some ways, it wouldn’t
be inaccurate to say one of the default human tribe setups is the leadership being shared
by the chief and the shaman. Your most successful tribes or smaller nations
popping up in such an environment would presumably be the ones that kept the most technology
around, so any culture type that permitted that more easily would tend to be dominant. By default I tend to assume techno-barbarian
is a very short phase, some calamity hits, folks survive and things are pretty brutal
for a bit, but stability returns and there’s so much old tech and knowledge lying around
that all those folks practiced at maintaining the old junk have ample examples for recreation
or as guides to rediscovery for anything they actually did lose. You would also expect lots of folks to be
making caches of knowledge and examples for later down the road when they could start
manufacturing them again. Now folks might burn that knowledge, if the
calamity was something tech-based like a Machine Rebellion, but since those with tech will
survive better, you’d expect a certain pro-tech or pro-knowledge element to remain who weren’t
wholesale torching every science book and device schematic, to the point of rooting
out any possible troves of lore. One of the more interesting things about the
Warhammer 40k’s settings Age of Strife or “The Long Night”, the 5000-ish years of
collapse, is that as the setting got built up more they take the attitude that it wasn’t
one Big Fall but an initial collapse as Earth and the Solar System got cut off from its
daughter systems and had lots of partial revivals and follow up collapses, with each one just
being a bit weaker of a revival each time, because the system is cut off from external
resources and was already running at its maximum, like if we walled off a major metropolis. This scenario is a bit easier to imagine as
realistic. Everything gets more patchwork and more militant,
and weapons are prioritized for maintenance and of course get used a lot. Some priceless relic of technology that keeps
some planet terraformed gets blown up because the faction with it has a big advantage and
that is the only way you could even the odds and not get wiped out. It just slowly accumulates and corrodes over
centuries of frenetic but insufficient patching and occasional sabotage or attack on something
irreplaceable by someone who doesn’t care about the long term or who does but just thinks
the long term will be a much worse place if the folks controlling that item remain a dominant
player. Which is plausible enough, obviously if the
folks on top were seen as likable and efficient, your Dark Age would tend to stabilize and
come to an end, most folks would rally to them instead of trying to topple them. At the same time, whole wars might be fought
over control of one of the few remaining irreplaceable relics, like the last remaining functional
semiconductor factory, where it’s needed so badly and valued so much that the attacker
is willing to send folks in with clubs and fists to die in droves just to ensure no gunshots
or explosives damaged the priceless relic. The Battletech and Mechwarrior franchise is
set in the future with that attitude towards superluminal spacecraft and communication
devices for instance, they are not to be attacked. Now it’s worth noting that we always tend
to assume such civilizations are fairly violent, though also to keep in mind that we are by
most metrics much more peaceful nowadays than we used to be and probably in large part because
full-blown modern warfare tends to wreck infrastructure and land far more severely than more technologically
primitive styles. It’s debatable how much of our tendency
to avoid full-scale scorched Earth warfare derives from how much more fragile and complex
our economies are nowadays, but it probably is a decent chunk of the reason, because you
can’t really conquer folks that way and benefit by seizing their stuff, you ruined
it all in the process of taking it. Techno-barbarians nominally have that even
worse because they can’t even rebuild the destroyed stuff, so ironically might be more
prone to peace. Now that would imply they’d get peaceful,
thus get stable, and thus be able to rebuild their civilization and technology but that
would depend on a lot of the specifics, such as if their initial or ongoing calamity was
resource-scarcity based too. Ongoing calamities – like a resource scarcity
- also better justify staying in a dark age. It is virtually impossible to deplete the
resources of a planet, especially with a modern population. I’ve had folks ask me if we might run out
of aluminum or iron or water without realizing that those two elements, aluminum and iron,
are the third and fourth most abundant things on Earth’s surface, right after Oxygen and
Silicon. Or it’s upper crust anyway, water obviously
covers most of the planet’s surface and while you can run out of fresh water, as long
as your planet has oceans then it will rain freshwater and the amount overall is basically
related to your temperature. That’s another interesting one from that
Techno-Barbarian phase on Earth in Warhammer 40k, they are missing all their oceans and
the culprit is said to be it evaporating in all the perpetual nuclear wars. That wouldn’t work but I personally just
rewrite that as something they think is true and more likely they just exported the water
out to various orbital colonies like O’Neill Cylinders to give them water while lowering
their own coastlines to make more land. As we saw in the Earth 2.0 series, if you’ve
got enough energy abundance you’re not really dependent on natural evaporation cycles to
supply all your water needs, you just need some big cisterns and a good collection and
treatment system. If you have a ton of colonies that are space
habitats with their water all trucked in from Earth or the Kuiper Belt Objects like comets
and icy asteroids, then if those get damaged or leak over dozens of centuries, then yeah
that water is basically now gone. Any that vented in a fashion that made it
moving faster than solar escape velocity would head out to deep space and the rest would
eventually clump together or get pulled into a gravity well but it’s way more likely
to be Jupiter or the Sun’s gravity well and effectively out of play without major
effort. The notion of some partial Dyson Swarm, even
if it was only very partial, like a K1.8 civilization with 1% utilization of the Sun’s light,
is a lot more plausible as a way in which a solar system might get depleted of resources,
compared to a handful of mere planets with population of billions managing to drain an
entire system. It is decently plausible that we might build
up the solar system quite a lot in millennia to come, potentially having a population of
a billion-trillion within just a few millennia. The Sun can maintain power for that, as could
potential artificial power sources like controlled fusion or black hole power generation, but
you probably used up all your resources building that Dyson Swarm up, making all the land and
living space and infrastructure you need. You can potentially raise that resource cap
quite a lot more locally by engaging in Starlifting, but either way you eventually hit a local
ceiling. At that point you’re capped out and any
resources needed for maintenance either need to be recycled or trucked in from out-system. Recycling is never going to be 100%, and so
one can imagine the Solar System being cutoff by its colonies, either by embargo, war, or
simply them having similarly maxed themselves out, and forced to slowly eat itself… and
that is a scenario where scavenger civilizations and wars for raw materials could occur and
could cause a series of perpetual partial collapses with ever more and more patchwork
fixes and total losses involved, essentially a long-term techno-barbarian setup. One could also imagine it with colonies too. They would have tons of raw materials when
they arrive and probably lots of manufacturing capacity, you wouldn’t try colonizing without
that, but they probably rely on a lot of automation and a lot of standard templates. If they have to shut off their AI who handles
that for some reason, things could fall apart fast. Same, I wouldn’t be surprised if 3D printing
templates or other forms of Intellectual Property in the future came with some sort of subscription
rather than purchase option. You rent the colonial gear printing templates
maybe, and you get cut off from being able to get updates or maintain that access, and
have to fall back on repairing that gear or rebuilding from what templates you managed
to keep. I’ve also suggested before that we might
tend to get pretty organic in our colonial technology, engineering a lot of lifeforms
or synthetic parallels that basically grew themselves, and that might be the sort of
thing where you kept a lot of your technology, like your own personal genetic enhancements
or your various gene-hacked plants that grew electronic components, but other tech you
lost or those began to mutate over time. You also might have limited trade with other
places who could sell you higher technology but only took payment in raw materials or
very place and culture unique items, and who were not interested in selling you the actual
knowledge because it would ruin their trade if you could make your own. Nasty approach but reasonably plausible. It’s hard to control an interplanetary or
interstellar empire and if you got some critical stuff that a place needs it’s a lot easier
to keep them in the fold by maintaining that need rather than letting them fulfill it locally. If our solar system developed heavily and
we did interstellar colonization too, I could see whoever was running the show intentionally
building in such scarcities to force unity. They might even do it openly. Nobody appreciates being forced to rely on
others but we also all recognize the necessity for it as a byproduct of having a specialized
civilization. We also know trade interdependence, keeping
the pipes flowing, tends to help keep relations reasonably cordial as your neighbors can’t
just slam their doors shut or they’d fall behind. Since this encourages cooperation, I could
see future civilizations intentionally and openly and maybe with full public approval
forcing some interdependence of that type, as it prevents some cylinder habitat going
dark and manufacturing doomsday devices inside it. Maybe you build your space habitats to be
self-sufficient for most food and energy needs, and able to stockpile decently fusion fuel
or raw materials, but other stuff is more limited and you’ve got 100 or so such key
items that each place gets to make 1 or 2 of only, and with tons of encryption and security
built-in to prevent local replication of that supply chain by those who didn’t have it,
or expansion of it by those who did, seeking a monopoly. In such a case you could see some calamity
disrupt that and create a downward spiral where folks can’t really recreate things
or maintain them. Indeed some folks might seek a monopoly anyway
by attacking any other place that made the same items they did. You could also have some core technologies
that got banned as dangerous, that weren’t just limited to the truly dangerous product. You might ban nanometer scale computer chip
production to avoid recreation of artificial intelligence if that had been a problem, and
lacking that have lot of other devices that wouldn’t function anymore, or other devices
that could only be manufactured profitably by employing artificial intelligence, and
such devices would become relics and artifacts you might be able to maintain at great cost
or even occasionally make at very great cost but fell out of common use, and that would
be parallel to techno-barbarianism. Someone’s got themselves a suit of power
armor that used to be a dime a dozen to manufacture with all sorts of awesome features built in,
complete with a weak AI running it, so the wearer is basically like Iron Man, but it
needed a very advanced AI to mass produce them that cheap and now only a few trusted
master craftsmen have the knowledge to maintain them, or the suit mostly maintains itself,
and nobody makes them anymore. Centuries later you haven’t got any new
ones. The same could happen to a colony that had
a lot of self-maintaining technology but lacked the ability to make more, like some colony
ship had intentionally traveled long and fast to a very remote area of the galaxy with the
intent of cutting themselves off and succeeded more than they planned, but couldn’t build
themselves up enough to maintain and recreate the infrastructure to make more of some things. Complex supply chains are exactly that, and
very vulnerable to any number of things breaking down or becoming unavailable, even things
you didn’t realize were critical to the system, and you need a big infrastructure
and true expertise to improvise alternative sources or pieces too, so colonies could conceivably
have that happen and indeed might have during their flight out there, a notion we considered
in more detail in our episode the Million Year Ark. So while I’d tend to imagine most techno-barbarian
cultures would be very short lasting, a generation or two at most, and even that probably not
nearly as extreme as we see in fiction, we do have a handful of decent scenarios where
you could get a protracted epoch of that. We’ll get to the schedule of upcoming episodes
and announcements in a moment, but first I wanted to welcome on board our newest sponsor
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I Love me some techno barbarians.. let the Warhammer gushing commence !
Its hard building a proper civilization when raiders with there warships can pop out of the sky without warning at any time and disappear back into the vastness of the galaxy. Th problem with faster than light pirates is that they arrive before you see them. Turns out warp drives can be built as cottage industry but no one has managed to create a microchip factory for millennia. I'm not even sure the mentats and scribes have the necessary information on how to make microchips anymore. We keep the location of our planets secret and meet only give our most trusted trade partners the location of our trading posts on overwise abandoned planets. But as the galactic population increases there is always the risk that some random explorer will stumble upon one of our settlements. Recently some of our trade partners have disappeared there must be a new pirate base nearby, we recently found the planet we think they are coming from so we are preparing a raid. It will be good to get back at the pirates, should score some good booty and slaves.
Love the topic.
The tricky thing with a lot of modern technologies are the "expendable" components. You can try to keep a car functional as long as possible, but the gas you need is going to go bad a lot sooner than the car.
That's even more of an issue with modern guns. The guns themselves can be maintained for a very long time, but you'll run out of ammo. Modern ammunition uses smokeless powder (nitrocellulose) and chemical primers that are kind of dangerous to handle, meaning it's not going to be something you'll be making at home unless you're already a pretty decent chemist with all the tools and materials for it. I could easily see a post-collapse crisis civilization having to revert to black powder weapons for a time.