# Post apocaliptic tech



## Amadeaus (Oct 24, 2011)

So a couple of weeks ago I started wondering if there was a complete global meltdown, how long would modern technology remain funtional?
I mean even with those who have solar and wind power how many of them can repare it? How many can find, extract and process the recorces to build them? Or the equipment to make it possible to make those?
This led to the thoght of how far back technology would fall.
So what do you think? 

Mods: If this is the wrong place to post this then please move it.


----------



## Tirediron (Jul 12, 2010)

there will be a huge difference in what survives, depending on the level of understanding and state of maintainance things are in. Some one who built up their solar power system a little at a time and keept the pieces, ie built in redundancy will do better than someone who just had a system designed and installed. Fuel and the transport system will crash hard and be very hard to restart, the new super size one location mind set has wrecked that.


----------



## kejmack (May 17, 2011)

Even if there was a complete global meltdown, there will still be technology. Unless you are talking about an EMP which would be bad. Greece has had a total economic meltdown and they still have technology. Even if there is an EMP or similar event, then electronic technology would be damaged, but there will still be technology and people who know how to repair it.


----------



## partdeux (Aug 3, 2011)

I've said before, if it's a complete financial meltdown, you're looking at early 1900's at best.


----------



## Sentry18 (Aug 5, 2012)

A whole lot of technology will be lost post TEOTWAWKI. Some will plan, prep and struggle to keep modern technology alive. Otherwise will plan, prep and simply learn to live like our great grandparents did. I have generators and fuel in my preps, but I really consider them either short term or transitional preps. I was working toward other renewable power sources and the like, but I am starting to wonder if I am not better off reading up on life in the 1800's.


----------



## Dakine (Sep 4, 2012)

Sentry18 said:


> A whole lot of technology will be lost post TEOTWAWKI. Some will plan, prep and struggle to keep modern technology alive. Otherwise will plan, prep and simply learn to live like our great grandparents did. I have generators and fuel in my preps, but I really consider them either short term or transitional preps. I was working toward other renewable power sources and the like, but I am starting to wonder if I am not better off reading up on life in the 1800's.


I'm not that far ahead yet and I want to be there... right now my energy plans are based solely on supporting technology to keep things like optics, comm's and the like recharged.

I store gasoline, kerosene, and propane. I need to double up on all of that. My thoughts are that I'll use what I can to go into an easy transition and hopefully ride out as peacefully as possible the collapse, after that I'll settle into some kind of a routine and grow what I can and with some luck I've still got the chickens and rabbits I am trying to get setup this winter... those could provide not only food, but barter and products like fat and leather.

Of course my problem is that where I live is a very diverse area, and it's not well off, most of these people will be looking for food and water very soon after something big happens.

It will not be a quiet week in my neighborhood when the balloon goes up


----------



## GrinnanBarrett (Aug 31, 2012)

All the planning in the world will not bring back production of spare parts like deep charge batteries to keep solar and wind production going. Loss of the power grid is the single biggest concern of most planners. Your car may run but if you can't pump gas what do you do. 

Without the grid the Internet dies a quick and painful death. Today so many of our young people are so tied to the Internet they may not be able to function. 

Also solar cells have a life expectancy of less than 25 years. Wind turbines have to be serviced regularly or they do not function. 

Learning to live without modern conveniences is going to be critical for those who survive the first six months after a collapse. You would lose up to ten percent of your population in first sixty days. That number could go higher easily. Remember all the people dependent on medical equipment to survive. Insulin dependents, older people in nursing homes, hospital patients, young people with weak immune systems. 

If the grid is really burned out you are looking at a minimum of two years to get any real help. There are no reserve components beyond five to ten percent. With manufacturing down where do the parts come from? In other words you better know how to make soap. GB


----------



## CulexPipiens (Nov 17, 2010)

GrinnanBarrett said:


> All the planning in the world will not bring back production of spare parts like deep charge batteries to keep solar and wind production going. Loss of the power grid is the single biggest concern of most planners. Your car may run but if you can't pump gas what do you do.
> 
> Without the grid the Internet dies a quick and painful death. Today so many of our young people are so tied to the Internet they may not be able to function.
> 
> ...


Most solar cells don't have a life expectancy of 25 years, they have a guarantee of a certain level of output for 25 years. They can still continue to work for years and even decades beyond that, just losing a bit of output capacity each year. If you've ever had a laptop battery go bad, you know it usually starts holding a bit less of a charge each time until eventually it works it's way down to maybe a 10 minute charge at best. Now stretch that out over, say maybe 50 years, and that's closer to what you'll experience with solar. For the first 25 years you'll barely notice the decrease, then slowly you'll start to see it more and more as they continue to age.

My concern is more of batteries as they usually age much quicker.

The reality I believe is that short of an EMP, technology will still be around. With a major collapse, but still a functioning society/economy (Argentina style) you'll just keep using the computer until it is dead instead of upgrading every few years... and even then you might try fixing it first as a single part replacement will be cheaper. Power might be spotty, or you'll need alternative power but you'll still have technology around.

Internet, that's a different story. Good chance that it will either be shutdown or so tightly controlled that we'll end up back in the dial up BBS days or ham with packet radio or something instead. My assumption... if there is some info on the internet you want to "keep" at the very least print it to a local PDF if not hard copy also.


----------



## cowboyhermit (Nov 10, 2012)

Lead acid batteries are a really simple technology and it is nearly impossible to think of a situation they would not be available for a price (time or currency). There are just too may people who can figure it out and lead is actually really easy to work with and come by. I could make a lead acid battery tomorrow even if I had never done it before, of course performance would be pretty bad.
We have so many ways of generating electricity that it will almost certainly never disappear for any length of time over a large geographical area, even if it is one of my favorite scenarios.
Way too many people know how to make a simple generator even if there weren't millions of them lying around in the form of dc motors and alternators etc. There are many simple ways of turning a generator that people would have available, wind, hydro, animal power, etc.
The world's first "modern" solar panel still works after 60 years. 
It is very likely that certain areas could be essentially with out electricity for periods of time.
As for the grid, I don't even count on it today.


----------



## carnut1100 (Oct 9, 2008)

There's no way anything is going to wind back the clock. 
A disaster be it local or global will kill some things but not others. 
As said above, electricity in some form is too easy to get if you know about it and loads do. 
Wouldn't take much to kill the Internet an anything dependent on it, even if it only went down for a year. 
Anything digital is by its inherent nature ephemeral and easy to lose.


----------



## SouthCentralUS (Nov 11, 2012)

Read the diaries women wrote of their trials during the Civil War. A Blockaded Family is really good. It tells in detail what they did to survive.


----------



## bananagoatgruff (Nov 10, 2010)

very good comments and observations and now for my 2 cents worth. unless we are nuked back to the stone ages which is a distinct possibility with our shitty foreign policy, I expect that from my understanding of progressive agenda, it will be bad and not so bad. Bad cause a lot of people necessarily will die. The useless dregs that have put them in power will be wiped out, useful preppers might be allowed to exist, alot of preppers will be eliminated due to their clinging to their guns and religion and constitution, most of the useful idiots in academia and media will be eliminated. what they really want is the hard working non thinking joe sixpacks to continue to work at whatever they deem important. Our infrastructure is the most and best developed in the world it will be useful to the multinational corp creeps and banksters and they will use it for their continued benefit. I imagine it will be an ugly two years with some resistance. Fema doesn't have millions of plastic caskets stored up around the country for nothing....keep your head down and stay out of the mainstream and you might have a chance...Appalachia or the northwest.


----------



## Padre (Oct 7, 2011)

Amadeaus said:


> So a couple of weeks ago I started wondering if there was a complete global meltdown, how long would modern technology remain funtional?
> I mean even with those who have solar and wind power how many of them can repare it? How many can find, extract and process the recorces to build them? Or the equipment to make it possible to make those?
> This led to the thoght of how far back technology would fall.
> So what do you think?


That depends on how big the die off is after the collapse, and which people survive. One of the dangerous things about society today is that so few know how to do things. Sure there are some of us who know how to put together guns, or com systems, or wire up electrical systems with solar or wind generation, but most of this is putting legos, pieces, together. Very few have enough knowledge to moved from acquisition of the raw materials (realistically there will be enough scrap metal available that you won't need to mine it) to smelting, to fabrication, to assembly following the whole trajectory of a product from raw materials to finished product. So if enough people die there may not be a critical mass to keep things working. Some estimates for certain scenarios is as high as 90%, this would be bad for the restoration of old techs. The hope would be that when things calmed down a bit people could relearn some of the skills but it might be generations before we relearn enough and get the infrastructure together to restore or replace many techs...


----------



## invision (Aug 14, 2012)

I think it all depends, right now I am reading book 3 of 299 Day series... I actually think this might be more realistic than most scenarios... In regards to technology... If there is electricity, the the grid is up, and unless government blocks access the Internet would be up... Even if it was a total financial melt down, many parts of the Internet would be up for days.... As in rebuilding... It depends on how many are left standing, and what conditions are like worldwide... If we have a way to maintain fossil fuels and electricity, then it will be easier.... If one is missing then it will be back to the old days...


----------



## oldasrocks (Jun 30, 2012)

Import some cars from South America. They run on 100 alcohol. Built by Ford Motor Company. Its funny we can't do it here. As long as you can build a still you will have power.


----------



## Tirediron (Jul 12, 2010)

Motor fuel alchy is a bit harder to make, you have to limit the water


----------



## IlliniWarrior (Nov 30, 2010)

partdeux said:


> I've said before, if it's a complete financial meltdown, you're looking at early 1900's at best.


why??? ..... when the Great Depression hit in the 1930s the world didn't regress back a 100 years .... research and technology actually advanced .... how do you think the advances between WW1 and WW2 happened? ....


----------



## seanallen (Nov 13, 2012)

Yes thats true. However, the ppl back then had a much larger agri baseline than now. The ppl now who live nonproductive lives i. e. Those who are not skilled w tools or in tradecraft will either starve or learn how to survive. My guesstimate is that america will lose a third of her population to starvation and disease, another 15-20% to violent crime. Those who are left will be the survivalist/preppers or the gvt elite. Tech will be a precious commodity. A person who can get/keep the lights and air cond running can call his own shots.


----------



## bananagoatgruff (Nov 10, 2010)

*nothing will turn back the clock?*

see history of the dark ages after the collapse of the roman empire, tons of lost technology that has never been recovered, like the engineering of the viaducts...


----------



## jsriley5 (Sep 22, 2012)

IlliniWarrior said:


> why??? ..... when the Great Depression hit in the 1930s the world didn't regress back a 100 years .... research and technology actually advanced .... how do you think the advances between WW1 and WW2 happened? ....


Yup didn't have the huge die off that most here will predict will come with the next big problem. More mouths to feed, more mouths that haven't a clue where food even comes from let alone how to grow or make their own once they can't shake a dollar at it and get it. Much more compressed living in the cities wich is going to cause issues both with food and once the trash trucks dont run and the toilets don't fluch that close proximity living is going to cause a resurgence of disease that we will no longer be prepared to handle. Therefore many of us have the impression that we will regress rather than progeress during that time.


----------



## partdeux (Aug 3, 2011)

IlliniWarrior said:


> why??? ..... when the Great Depression hit in the 1930s the world didn't regress back a 100 years .... research and technology actually advanced .... how do you think the advances between WW1 and WW2 happened? ....


Because he have lost so many critical knowledge skills, and we are so dependent on micro knowledge, there is no way to recover.

How many people here can assemble a computer - probably a few
How many people could solder a mother board to build a rudimentary computer? maybe a couple
How many people could design and build a mfg facility to build today's modern mother board? I'd bet none.

Nuclear power or any power plant for that matter
Transportation
Communications

List goes on and on and on.


----------



## GrinnanBarrett (Aug 31, 2012)

*I agree with you on this.*



CulexPipiens said:


> Most solar cells don't have a life expectancy of 25 years, they have a guarantee of a certain level of output for 25 years. They can still continue to work for years and even decades beyond that, just losing a bit of output capacity each year. If you've ever had a laptop battery go bad, you know it usually starts holding a bit less of a charge each time until eventually it works it's way down to maybe a 10 minute charge at best. Now stretch that out over, say maybe 50 years, and that's closer to what you'll experience with solar. For the first 25 years you'll barely notice the decrease, then slowly you'll start to see it more and more as they continue to age.
> 
> My concern is more of batteries as they usually age much quicker.
> 
> ...


I was not trying to mislead with the 25 years issue. My son in law is in the solar business and they do the 25 year thing for the cells because of the declining charge issues. Battery back up is going to be a huge issue if you cannot replace them. The cost of gel batteries is going out of sight right now. I priced one for my truck and it was three times the cost of the one Ifinally purchased. The gel is a special order in most cases I was told. GB


----------



## BillM (Dec 29, 2010)

If there is a collapse of sociaty causeing a shutdown of the grid, there will be a huge die off of the population of this country.

I would not be suprised to see 90 % of the current population gone in two years.

This would leave the remaining 10% in a very advantagious possition to rebuild sociaty useing existing machinery and property. 

We won't be stuck in the stone age or even the 1800's .

We might be stuck in the 1950's for a few years but the 50's weren't too bad !

I just hope I last to see the come back.


----------

