[stolenmerch]

Genuine question: if we're in a collapse scenario that is so devastating to the global supply chain that we're scavenging microcontrollers, how do we generate electricity to power them? Solar panels and batteries don't last forever and would presumably require the same or similar supply chain as the microcontrollers. This is a cool project regardless, but in such a catastrophic scenario it seems easier to just give up on computing and go back to more primitive technology. If I can't get a single thing delivered, I see myself collecting rainwater and gardening, not compiling Forth to an old Z80.

[Anarch157a]

You can scavenge car's alternators and use a water wheel or windmill to turn it. Alternators can work for a decade with minimum maintenance. Just have five or six stashed, just in case. They can supply 40A at 12V, or using a transformer to up the voltage, 4A at 120V.

[throwaway316943]

Have you successfully run any modern hardware off of the irregular current coming out of something like that? You could charge batteries off of an alternator with a voltage regulator but I doubt any modern electronics are going to work well on current supplied by a jerry rigged water wheel and step up transformer. You’d be reliant on a lot of ICs to do it properly at a small scale.

[cturner]

Would it be viable to use a rig of leyden jars to smooth out power coming from a scrappy alternator/commutator, and to implement cut-outs?

[emteycz]

Alternators are also trivial to build by hand.

[mauvehaus]

Sure. If you have the input materials. If you're at the point of having to build an alternator by hand rather than just taking one off a car, I'd like to know where you're getting magnet wire, the machined shaft, the various rotor and stator parts, the end-bells, and the ball bearings.

[emteycz]

Consider that you're not necessarily building from raw materials, you will be repurposing things you find around. Finding an alternator probably won't be a problem in the populated areas of USA but might be elsewhere - thankfully building it is still sufficiently simple.

[crocodiletears]

In most reasonable collapse scenarios I could imagine, energy isn't so much a technological concern as it might be a political concern. Slightly scarcer perhaps, but there's a ubiquity of old alternators, plenty of shit to burn, and I guarantee the extractive industries will be among the first to come online, if they ever went out in the first place, and can be coaxed to function in a degraded state without globalized supply chains or too much esoteric knowledge.

Computers are much more difficult to bring back: much of their manufacture and distribution is highly dependent on a globalized supply chain, which in turn is dependent on the security guarantees of an international order backed by military force. Many of their parts are proprietary by nature, and individual components can at their simplest require rare expertise in multiple niche fields of science before their production can even be considered.

[pjc50]

> energy isn't so much a technological concern as it might be a political concern

This is what irks me about these kinds of "collapse fantasy". Somebody described the apocalypse novels of John Wyndham (Day of the Triffids etc) as "cosy catastrophe", and that very much applies here. The laser focus on technological detail-hoarding while having blinders on to any consideration of the politics of the situation, or what might be called "material conditions".

Historically few societies collapsed without external pressure. Societies do not collapse, they are collapsed. And the force that's doing the collapsing is the thing you need to worry about.

It also can take a very long time to wane; while Rome may have split from the Roman Empire in 395, the eastern successor Holy Roman Empire lasted until 1806. And the microstates provide even weirder examples, like the Maltese feudal knights with a WW2 air force!

[Guthur]

Yeah, the brief thinking I've ever done about the collapse in these scenarios is to potentially band together with some like minded friends and try to setup some subsistence group with hunting, light farming and security.

Firearms are highly regulated where I am from which makes the first and last a little more difficult than they potentially could be.

I really never gave it that much thought to be perfectly frank. Though the point is I feel semi conductors are pretty far down the order of priorities.

[throwaway316943]

Light farming and hunting won’t work unless something like >50% of the population dies off quickly. Even then you’d still need to have everyone spread out pretty evenly across the countryside, be able to learn how to plant and do it on time. You’d be going back to subsistence farming which is extremely hard work. Fertilizer and fuel for tractors would not be replenished. You’d have to learn how to save seeds, irrigate without power and pumps, eventually how to plow with draft animals. If you aren’t already doing this now chances are you wouldn’t make it. That’s the problem I have with collapse fantasies, you’re either all in now or you’re dead. The safer bet is on working to prevent a collapse since that’s something you can do now that probably has immediate payoff unlike going all in on prepping.

[pjc50]

In the UK we only just survived the WW2 blockade, with a highly centrally planned push to expand local agriculture to cover missing imports. Loss of imports forever will kill over 50% of the population, slowly.

The problem with transitioning to draft animals is preventing them getting eaten in the collapse. We'd probably also run out of trees in a few years.

(Collapsists should make more study of WW2, such as Beevor's magnificent, horrifying Stalingrad. Or the siege of Leningrad. Surrounded Soviet civilians died by the millions. And that wasn't a collapse in the collapsist sense, the social, legal and technological order remained somewhat intact)

[Meph504]

Firearms are highly regulated where I am from which makes the first and last a little more difficult than they potentially could be.

In a collapse they won't be, and those willing to seize them, will be at a great advantage, police dept. military bases, even countries whose population don't have access to an abundance of guns doesn't mean there isn't an abundance in the country.

In almost any scenario where government collapse can occur, people will become the largest threat to survival.

The problem with security against other humans in the long term, is that we are damn clever, and determined. Even with an overwhelming firepower, if you are in a fixed location, people will find a way.

As for Hunting, it can be done without firearms, Crossbows and Traps can be highly effective, and simply constructed. What you have to think about is how much and what sort of wildlife their is around you, and how rapidly they will be depleted by others.

As they say, Hell is other people, best bet since the time of the plague, you want to survive go where others aren't.

[Guthur]

Crossbows require a permit as well :) Can't have the population undermining that monoploy on force ;)

But I get your point.

Like I said I hadn't given it much thought, though if one could get a sustainably large commune group with reasonable access to weaponry it would hopefully be a deterrent for most small groups.

I'm in Australia which rather large. Clean water is the likely the most valuable commodity. It would be interesting to see how much of the population would actually survive such a collapse.

[pjc50]

The "sustainable" "collapse" (again, what does this mean? end of imports including oil? large scale political turmoil with no clear winner?) level of Australian population would probably be larger than Aboriginal pre-invasion times (estimated 700k?) but not much more than that if you lose access to mechanically pumped water. It's not a very habitable place but the introduction of European crops and animals has irrevocably improved this. You're still looking at the likely death of nineteen out of every twenty Australians in this scenario.

(actually, having thought about this, the "collapse" scenario I'd be most worried about in Australia is average temperatures above human survivable levels plus wildfires. Not so much a collapse as a thorough incineration)

[Meph504]

If you have a collapse, I don't think permits on weapons are going to be a large concern. And after the collapse, they are one of the more simple to craft, and easy to operate weapons.

MadMax should be your go to guide right? (just kidding)

Large targets, can be whittled away over time, you basically become under siege, your attackers can leave anytime in small groups to gather supplies, you would be stuck at your parameter.

Think castles, after a while, they all fall through starvation, contamination, sabotage, etc..

[mastazi]

> Hell is other people, best bet since the time of the plague, you want to survive go where others aren't.

I have played for a while on a Minecraft "anarchy server"[1]. You could consider it a very, very rough approximation of how anarchy would play out in real life. Your statement (if you are in a fixed location, people will find a way) closely mirrors my experience.

Even though, in the Minecraft natural environment, there are things that are dangerous (e.g. wild animals, "monsters", ravines, etc.), nothing comes close to the danger of meeting another player, possibly armed.

If you are a new player, the most challenging part is escaping spawn (the area where new players start from, which is also the only crowded area in the game). This is pretty hard because spawn is a wasteland with no natural resources left (in Minecraft you have a hunger meter so if you can't find food you will eventually die), and in addition spawn is populated by armed players who kill new players as a pastime.

Once you get to about 20 kilometres from spawn (20k blocks in Minecraft) you start finding food (trees from which you can get fruit, wood for building fishing poles, seeds that you can plant to start a small farm). However, you can't stay in the same place for long, because in a few weeks at most, some other player will find your base and steal your stuff and/or destroy the base.

Once you get to about a hundred kilometres from spawn (100k blocks in Minecraft), you can build a temporary base and hope that it will last a few months (mine lasted about 3 months).

Currently I have a base that is over one million blocks from spawn (i.e. more than 1000 kms) and I expect this may last for a longer period, maybe even years, so I'm building larger structures.

Obviously this is just a Minecraft server and doesn't accurately reflect real life.

Some elements are realistic, for example travelling speed[2], or the way natural resources are either renewable (plants, animals) or non renewable (minerals).

Some other elements are not that realistic, for example the number of players on the server is way smaller than the population of a typical city. This means that the "safe distance" from spawn might not reflect the safe distance from a major city in real life.

Also, spawn is the only area with a high population. There are some larger bases across the map, but even the largest ones have a population of a few dozens players at most.

Another element that is not realistic is obviously construction. In real life, building a home or a farm means a lot of hard work, whereas in Minecraft you can do it in a few hours.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2b2t

[2] walking speed is about 5 km/h, travelling through a "nether highway" you can go at about 45km/h so this could be compared to motorised transport in real life

[webmaven]

> If you are a new player, the most challenging part is escaping spawn (the area where new players start from, which is also the only crowded area in the game). This is pretty hard because spawn is a wasteland with no natural resources left (in Minecraft you have a hunger meter so if you can't find food you will eventually die), and in addition spawn is populated by armed players who kill new players as a pastime.

Hmm. Is cannibalism an option?

[fractallyte]

It was Brian Aldiss who coined that description, and I despise it. It's as though he never actually read any of Wyndham's books...

[vermilingua]

That’s the western HRE. The ERE only survived until the 1400’s.

[flohofwoe]

Nitpicking: If the Holy Roman Empire is seen as a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, then the Russian Empire can be seen as the continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire (e.g. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow,_third_Rome), and this lasted until 1917. Both claims are dubious at best though (IMHO).

[londons_explore]

> Computers are much more difficult to bring back

In all post apocalyptic scenarios I can imagine, there will still be billions of already existing computers.

Rebuilding humanity will fulfill its computing needs by mining for a MacBook. Some will survive whatever natural disasters hit. As the supply of working ones dwindles, repairers will thrive. The skills and equipment necessary to repair waterlogged or crushed computers is still orders of magnitude less than that required to build a new one.

"Mining and repairing macbooks" as a strategy could last for 1000 years or so if necessary. Of the billions out there, at least a few will be working in 1000 years, if there are humans around with the desire to repair them.

As the repairs get harder and the supply dwindles, there will be more and more incentive to reinvent processes to make new ones. It wont be anywhere near as hard 2nd time round, because I'm sure across all of those billions of buried macbooks there are designs of all the machines necessary.

[herogreen]

Unless the apocalypse is due to a solar flare similar to the Carrington event, which could destroy a lot of computers.

[JamesLeonis]

Rather than a total and permanent collapse, instead imagine a large-scale supply shock. Governments and institutions can access parts but consumers are rationed out of the supply chain for a while. Thailand's tsunami knocked out hard drive manufacturing back in 2011 [0], and crypto-tokens have persistently strained graphics card supplies for several years recently [1].

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/25/thailand-...

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2021/01/06/bad-news-gr...

[smaddox]

Building/refurbishing lead acid batteries wouldn't be all that difficult immediately post collapse.

Solar panels can also be refurbished. For poly silicon cells, it's mostly the contacts that degrade, and you can improve that with a soldering iron. A bit more work, but still doable, would be a forming gas anneal, which can additionally passivate defects.

[NegativeLatency]

I suspect you could scrounge materials for a nickel iron battery without too much trouble.

[analyte123]

There are lots of ways to generate electricity. You can build a bicycle dynamo or a wood burning steam turbine pretty easily. People had wind turbines charging batteries a hundred years ago.

[hyperion2010]

Singer foot pedal sewing machine style power for electronics would be one possibility. Of course those would have to be scavenged too given the lack of skilled blacksmiths these days.

[layoutIfNeeded]

A top male athlete can sustain 500W power for an hour. I wouldn't have high hopes for your sewing machine generator.

[pratik661]

This doesn't really need to be hypothetical. There are plenty of contemporary and recent examples of countries experiencing collapse: Syria + Libya in the 2010s, Yemen now, etc.

[JoeyBananas]

microcontrollers are very low power because they are designed to run on batteries