- Energy scarcity, agriculture, and cycling
- But Eclipse – the modern world was built with oil!
- Great waves of salvaging
- Emergency Technical guilds for the first decade or so
- Middle-High School replaced by Technical training?
- Back to paper
- Primitive electronics and computers
- Growth
- Famous youtubers on rebuilding
- My 4 Rebuilding pages
As a refresher from the first super-virus page (See Order) – I’m actually optimistic that many national governments would survive. Most larger nations have weird think tanks that game-play various doomsday scenarios and prepare bunkers for the government to hide out in. I would be amazed if they didn’t have mRNA kits and labs buried down there. These are not just survival bunkers but are Civilisation Starter Kits with all the tools and manuals and seeds and plans to start again. And if all that fails – even warlords like their comforts. They would want their own tyrannical orders followed to maintain the technology and toys of their self-interest. My point? Chances are, some sort of Order emerges, from whatever motivation and source.
Energy scarcity, agriculture, and cycling
Different to a nuclear war – most of our infrastructure could have survived a super-virus. There are always risks of bushfires racing through our cities burning invaluable resources. But the main resource that was destroyed was people, and technical know how, and the cultural knowledge of who to contact about what needs and emergencies?
The population is traumatised by the unimaginable horror of so many dead, and many of the crimes of desperation that may have occurred before Order arrived. So what happens next?
But Eclipse – the modern world was built with oil!
True – except for the bits that were not. It depends what you mean by modern. Look at the industrial revolution. Diesel and petroleum dependent industries and construction methods are a product of the 20th Century. But the 19th Century certainly built the world mainly with horses, steam engines and brute muscle labour! We’ve forgotten how much can be run on steam power – from tractors to large digging shovels. Check the 7 Wonders of the Industrial World for examples of some of the fantastic wonders built with older techniques.
Oil rationing: These include the tried and true methods used in various countries in rationing in WW2, and also famously in Cuba after the Soviet Union collapsed and they lost their only oil supplier. The obvious first rules the new Order will implement is oil rationing. (See Sudden oil crisis) They would prioritise fuel for agriculture, encourage cycling, rickshaws for moving stuff around, sailing to trade around the coasts, and all that. Petroleum has a one or two year shelf life at most. Fuel would be the new gold, enabling some initial agricultural output – and it would be gone within the first year.
Dirty energy: But what can they do after the fuel runs out? A post apocalyptic world is forced to use all these strategies even more ruthlessly and efficiently. Indeed – with the population down to 5% – I wonder if the governments would figure that vast areas of former grazing lands are regrowing trees, soaking up carbon. Who knows if many countries would revert to coal fired power or coal to liquids in such a catastrophe? 30% of the land on earth is grazed for just 1% of the protein we get. With this proportion – 5% of the population would only use 1.5% of the land on earth for grazing. That’s over 27% of the land on earth left fallow – to regrow whatever trees it wants. I’ve done the math. On average, that could be 3 TRILLION trees – that’s enough to soak up all historical emissions and solve climate change!
Great waves of salvaging
Surprisingly, once the government picked a few good industrial towns to rebuild (See Rebuilding viable towns and cities), and the salvaging crews had their wood-gas trucks ready to go – life in a post-apocalyptic town could have more than you think. As in, a decade or so of clothes that you don’t have to sew! Lots of furniture to store in warehouses for a growing population. Indeed, the great challenge might be how to pack and wrap and store salvaged goods and protect them from rats and bushfires. It’s mathematics. If only 10% or 5% of your population survived the disaster – the surviving shops and homes across the nation catered to 10 to 20 times your current population. Granted, the modern world does not warehouse as much as it used to. “Just in time delivery” has reduced the excess stored in warehouses. Even so, the excess out there should be significant and keep the population clothed and warm and supplied with excess furniture and other resources for a decade or so!
Salvage crews would also move steel sheeting for water towers, plumbing supplies, electrical gear, solar panels, power tools, shovels for digging outhouses – all manner of kit. They would be sent to retrieve solar panels and batteries. Even rural towns would have heaps of useless cars scattered around that could be scrapped for various metals for years to come – let alone the metallic bounty waiting for them in the nuked out abandoned cities.
Emergency Technical guilds for the first decade or so
This is where the book World War Z has some insights. The book is quite different to the movie and follows the decade after the initial Zombie outbreak. A travelling war correspondent interviews survivors and a disturbing global picture develops from these different global snapshots. The survivors fortified the Rocky Mountains. They got organised, and radically simplified the economy in a series of sweeping emergency laws. The whole economy rested on 5 layers of either command or professionalism. It valued real world, useful trades like plumbing, carpentry, building, manufacturing, and machine tools. A good plumber was valued far higher and had more power than a Hollywood talent spotter. They were lucky to get on the cleaning roster to earn food and a warm bed!
In a similar way I imagine we would see governments form local technical guilds as fast as possible. The old formal hiring and firing and industrial negotiations would be stripped back to ruthless efficiency. The soldier’s version of this is the battlefield promotion because someone else died. Well, in this situation – most of humanity died! Depending on which town you were in, a carpenter suddenly becomes chief architect – and is busy cramming technical manuals each night as they try to meet expectations of their new role.
I said on my “Rebuilding Law and Order” page that many governments already have their own civilisation starter kits stored away in bunkers in multiple redundancies of formats. I’ve seen documentaries on all kinds of storage systems – from manuals to microfiche viewed with a candle behind the film and big magnifying glass.
Yet if some state lost connection with their nation’s archive due to some political dispute, there are plenty of public libraries and private citizens that store such stuff. Salvagers would be sent out, searching for technical manuals that teach future generations how to make stuff work. Many workshops have old shelves stacked with manuals. Indeed, some workshop owners might have already downloaded sites like Otherpower.com or the Open Source hardware movement. Just as there’s free open source software, there is now a free open source hardware movement. They design machines that are so simple and easy to build and maintain, a local village workshops could build most of them. They are developing free plans for a tractor, bread oven, drill press, torch table, laser cutter, earth brick maker, harvester, string trimmer, soil pulveriser; indeed, up to 50 of the most important industrial tools that operate as a ‘civilisation starter kit’. If most fridges and batteries got fried in the EMP’s from nuclear bombs, there are primitive and fairly easy local workshop solutions for batteries and even refrigeration. (See Isaac Arthur video below).
Open Source hardware is designed to be modular. That means the most important top 50 machines that enable the modern world are constructed from about 13 basic modular parts. This mix and match approach to design means the whole system is more adaptable and parts can be scavenged for another purpose quickly and easily. Everything is built for longevity. Any rural workshop that had downloaded these manuals prior to the collapse would be a super star. (See the 4 minute TED talk, Video site and blog and other resources.)
Middle-High School replaced by Technical training?
I love the modern world and the opportunities we all have to be educated so richly and broadly across so many subjects, and for so long. But let’s face it – in a civilizational crisis there’s an awful lot of ‘fat’ in modern education that could be cut. How many of us use trigonometry or other advanced maths on a daily basis in our work? Do we really have to know that for most jobs?
If workers were short, as long as we were kind and patient about it, teenagers entering Technical Guilds could both learn trades and help produce stuff as they did so. I imagine a post-collapse society that got organised would do basic primary education for children, up into middle-high, and probably then send them to technical schools to increase the workforce.
I’m imagining Germany’s Mittlestand economy only 3 or 4 years earlier. Only about 40% of Germans go to university – the rest join family owned Mittlestand businesses. These family-owned enterprises do not have to report to shareholders. They’re family owned, not public. That means the business is investing in you for the long term – and not going to suddenly restructure and fire 1000 employees just for short term shareholder profits! Mittlestand companies enjoy high employee engagement and loyalty. But instead of skipping University for technical training and a few day’s work – maybe it’s 2, 3, or even 4 years earlier – depending on the local needs. Then they can do simple tasks a few days a week and be trained the other days. This would probably be an emergency measure for the first decade only. (Maybe this generation would have access to extra schooling after the crisis period?)
Back to paper
While some survivalist bunkers and more isolated rural computers might survive, generally speaking most computers across the bigger cities would have been fried by the EMP. Technical schools might have computers – but most of the workforce will not. Not for some decades, anyway. Things would be simpler for quite some time – as one of the greatest technological hurdles is the computer chip. It could be a few generations before populations built to have the industrial might to invest in the first ‘clean room’ for building brand new computer chips. Yet – within a few decades I imagine society might feel like a more walkable version of the 1940’s. With so few people around and less agriculture required, trees would be regrowing everywhere. The world would return to paper and the printing press. (And of course salvaged shelves and filing cabinets etc to put it all in.)
Primitive electronics and computers
One option for essential government computing only might be an over simplified operating system called Collapse os. The technical people I’ve spoken to say it is brilliant. It can run a primitive operating system on really old electrical components – even stuff from the 1970’s. This might help technical guilds recycle old electronics and establish some sort of very basic computer operations again. I said above that society might be like the 1940’s – except with one big difference. All the higher tech had already been invented – and they would have heaps of technical manuals to guide them as they raced up the tech ladder a second time. Eventually one nation would start building computer chips and probably trading for food with others.
Growth
The population would grow. Farmer economies tend to view their children as their superannuation. The more children, the safer you’ll be in old age. The population could double every generation or so. Primitive wind power and hydro-dams and pumped-hydro are not too hard – they would grow much earlier than solar, which involves intense silicon processing and like computers – is higher up the technical tree. But gradually we would rebuild.
Famous youtubers on rebuilding
My 4 Rebuilding pages
Rebuilding after a full-scale nuclear war.
Rebuilding law and order after a super-virus: and why I think in some nations, order might emerge within a few months
Rebuilding a technical society after a super-virus: scavenging priorities and strategies after the apocalypse.
Rebuilding viable towns and cities after a super-virus: why a population concentrated into a few larger towns is better than scattered villages, and how suburbia is too vast to protect from climate change mega-fires when you have a tiny population.
Eclipse Now 
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