[throwaway892238]

Weird take. Sure, you could try to re-build what you had before the apocalypse. Or you could build a new world that isn't the one that just plunged everything into chaos. If our technology wasn't so good, the world wouldn't be as populated, we wouldn't need so many resources, there wouldn't be so many ways to poison the earth, and the earth would be habitable and sustainable for millennia.

After the apocalypse, I want the people who can dig wells, practice permaculture, organize a farm, keep sheep, spin yarn, blacksmith, prep lumber, fire pottery and glass, tan leather, hunt, fish, manage woodlands. Doctors and scientists would be handy too, but now that we know so much about how biology works it wouldn't be so difficult to keep people living longer. Assuming antibiotics still work in 20 years and we retain some basic surgical skills, we're basically set.

The most challenging thing after an apocalypse is obviously going to be government. If there's no law and order you can't really organize anything. Whoever has the most power, best strategizing, and most flexible morals will collect the most resources and gather the largest forces. It'll be "join or die", and slavery will come back. Just read your history to see what happens when societies crumble.

[akersten]

> Assuming antibiotics still work in 20 years and we retain some basic surgical skills

And what happens when the antibiotics and sterile surgical implements run out, due to the incredible industrial machinery needed to produce them having disappeared? "1600's Welsh countryside but with modern medicine" doesn't quite play out without the corresponding modern supply chain, at least for long.

[throwaway892238]

You don't need industrial machinery to produce penicillin. You can sterilize equipment a variety of ways, such as with horseshoe crab blood, fire, alcohol. Now, would it work well for 7 billion people? Hell no. I'm hoping the apocalypse knocks out a significant chunk of the population, and that at that point we can focus on sustainable, simple living, rather than industrialization.

[imchillyb]

> You don't need industrial machinery to produce penicillin.

Sooo. How are you going to grow enough of that, while /not growing/ any other type of fungus, mold, bacteria, etc...

There's a reason modern medicine utilizes things like cleanrooms and laboratories, instead of y'know a farm and a barn.

[throwaway892238]

I can build you a sanitized laboratory with 16th century equipment. That's the great thing about how much knowledge we have now: we can do more with fewer things.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

This viewpoint is appealing, but the thing is: natural selection says it isn't possible in the long term.

For every person like you, who thinks s/he knows how things would be better for the environment and others, and how to get there (at least approximately), there is another person who doesn't give a shit and who will do long-term damage in exchange for short-term gains all day long. That person will out-compete you and other people like you.

We do, however, seem to be getting better and better at solving these sorts of cooperation puzzles. I just don't see a way out of the Malthusian problem (there will be more and more of the sorts of people who breed more, by definition). We might just have to live with a boom-and-bust cycle on this planet, much like other species, but on longer timescales. It's also possible we avoid the evolutionarily stable state and manage to successfully trap ourselves in some sort of metastable state.

It's all going to be fine and your life will be really good, though :-)

[hutzlibu]

" I just don't see a way out of the Malthusian problem (there will be more and more of the sorts of people who breed more, by definition)"

Why is that by definition? Even animals have more or less offspring, depending on the food offering/suitable habitat.

It balances itself out. In nature by starvation. But humans could find other ways. But btw. there are many many people starving and allways have been.

It is not like we are heading to a starvation crisis. We are already in it and always have been. The question is rather, of whether we can stop it one day and have all humans fed and cared for in a sustainable way.

[xaedes]

> We might just have to live with a boom-and-bust cycle on this planet

Reminds me of:

"The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer sun does not prevent, the human race is always increasing at times, and at other times diminishing in numbers." - from Plato's History on Atlantis

[avgcorrection]

Boom and bust cycle? There’s been one boom and now there will be one bust. Unless you have some fancypants geoengineering idea which will stabilize the climate and put fossils back in the ground.

[nostrademons]

There've been plenty of booms and busts before, eg. the late Bronze Age collapse, the fall of the Roman Empire, most Chinese dynastic transitions, the destruction of North American civilizations by colonialism. This boom just happens to be bigger than the ones that came before.

[avgcorrection]

I meant that there has only been one boom-and-bust cycle to end organized human existence on Earth. That’s what I meant…

[ars]

> can dig wells, practice permaculture, organize a farm, keep sheep, spin yarn, blacksmith, prep lumber, fire pottery and glass, hunt, fish, manage woodlands

I'm very confused by why you think this is sustainable - this type of life uses FAR FAR FAR more resources than modern living. It only works with a low population.

England for example basically cut down every tree it has in order to sustain this type of (old) life. They found coal because they had no choice, they were about to run out of energy.

If you just want to kill lots of people and have a low population, I suppose you can advocate for that, but it's completely orthogonal to the type of technology we have.

[gen220]

FWIW, 17th Century Europe didn't have access to the technology and knowledge that we have today, that do not require any fancy devices or technology to improve our efficiency of resource usage in the hypothetical scenario discussed in this thread.

At the time, there were many incentives to deforestation, but the main ones were to procure wood as fuel, and to clear arable land for agriculture and animal husbandry. I can at least speak to these two.

It was true in the past, that wood was an unsustainable source of heat. However, with modern wood-burning stoves, even in the nordic latitudes, this is no longer true.

Sweden and Norway have done a lot of innovation in this department in the last 80 years, because it's a matter of national security for them. They've found that it's actually more sustainable, affordable, and environmentally-friendly, to use wood as the main heating source for homes, rather than oil or coal. Again, this is only true if you're using wood stoves whose construction is informed by modern (post-WWII) knowledge. But the stoves are cast-iron, their manufacture doesn't require nanotechnology, pure silicon, etc.

On the agricultural front, it's difficult to overstate how far we've come in the last 400 years. Our caloric yield per acre on the same acreage of arable land would be much higher, today, even if you were to take away the products of modern industry (fertilizers, etc) that would presumably be inaccessible in an apocalypse.

Especially given access to new world domesticated produce, like potatoes, maize, various nuts, squashes, legumes, yams, tomato, maple, rubber.

[ClumsyPilot]

A man with a tractor and a combine harvesters can cultivate over 100 acres. With manual labour you can't cultivate 1 acre

[cheese_goddess]

> I'm very confused by why you think this is sustainable - this type of life uses FAR FAR FAR more resources than modern living.

Living in a society without heavy industry, without, electronics and without internal combusion engines uses up "FAR FAR FAR" more resources than living in a society with them? How so?

[ars]

Because the internal combustion engine is surprisingly efficient.

Did you know you release more CO2 walking a mile than driving a mile? It's surprising, but it takes a lot of energy to grow food, and then a lot of energy is lost by the time that food powers you.

Yes the CO2 from food is from the air, so not the same, but it's just an example of efficiency. Ignoring the source of CO2, a tractor emits less CO2 than a horse, for the same farm work.

You still need to heat your home, you still need to find fertilizer somewhere, you need fuel for cooking. You need to make clothing.

All those things take energy, and modern living uses less energy. The main difference from the past is there are more people now. And in the past a lot of that energy came from the sun, rather than being mined.

But back to resources (rather than just CO2): To live like a farmer you need wood, and you need more wood than can re-grow in the area available to you. Look at peat moss mines in Ireland - they mined so much, just for basic living, there's not much left.

[cheese_goddess]

No, the main difference from the past is that we have been taking fossil fuels out of the earth and burning it for the last 200 years, and releasing in that very short time the CO₂ that has been stored in them for many millions of years. This is much more than the amount of CO₂ that the environment's carbon sinks can bind and so we are warming the environment, and at a very fast pace.

Like you say, the CO₂ we breathe "comes from the air". Specifically, that CO₂, like the carbon gasses released by farming and agriculture, is part of the atmospheric carbon cycle that circulates carbon gasses between the biosphere and the atmosphere. This cycle is stable, it has been stable for millions of years and it has never caused a greenhouse effect, neither is there any risk that it will cause a greenhouse effect, now or in the future. There is certainly no chance that the CO₂ we exhale will cause the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere to shift, because that's where we get our carbon in the first place.

The internal combustion engine on the other hand, efficient or not, is burning fossil fuels and is a primary driver of release of the CO₂ bound in fossil fuels, to the environment. This is a major mechanism of climate change.

That having been cleared up, you're making a weird argument that is very difficult to support. If I understand correctly your earlier comment that I quoted, you're saying that living, in summary, without burning fossil fuels, is not less sustainable than living while burning fossil fuels. You 're saying that this is because the internal combustion engine is efficient. You mean that it makes good use of the fuel it burns, but its fuel cannot be easily replaced (because it takes billions of years for it to be created by natural processes that we can't replicate at scale) and burning it is causing a greenhouse effect and climate change.

So, no, it doesn't make any sense that living without burning fossil fuels, without combustion engines, without all the trappings of modern life, is not more sustainable than living with them. We can discuss the benefits and risks of either way of life (I'm not keen to return at a pre-industrial time myself) but it is abundantly clear which way of life is sustainable, and which isn't. And that's not "more sustainable". Burning fossil fuels is just not sustainable anyway you cut it.

[notriddle]

> It only works with a low population.

That’s the point. Killing lots of people lowers the population, but it doesn’t stay low. Over time, the population will always approach the carrying capacity, so the only way to permanently lower the population is to make the carrying capacity lower.

[oldsecondhand]

Going back 300 years in tech won't reduce the carrying capacity permanently. We'll either rebuild modern technology or will cut out enough trees to cause an environmental catastrophe.

[ars]

> is to make the carrying capacity lower.

What's the point in that? You end up using the identical amount of resources, but having fewer people. What goal exactly did you accomplish?

[throwaway892238]

I mentioned woodland management, which would have prevented deforestation. There's actually many practices we can implement to make more use of the land than we've done in the past. Just picking different crops would enable us to feed the entire existing planet with a fraction of the land area we use today. And we certainly know a lot more about sustainable climate regulation than we did in the past, requiring fewer fuels and enabling more sustainable ones.

Producing more technology to keep swelling the population obviously isn't working either (hello, climate change). Human civilization needs downsizing, or at least more rational and sustainable resource use/management.

[imchillyb]

SO... you think that the country of England had no woodland management?

The leaders of the day decided, that the protected lands would no longer receive protection, there was no populace vote.

You think post-apocalypse would be different from a monarchy /how/ exactly?

The strong rule, and without rule of the masses and enforcers of law, we're back to warlords and kings. Good luck with your processes...

[wrycoder]

It's certainly sustainable, but a three-generation nuclear family will need two or three farmable ("arable") acres to prosper. Expect the population to diminish substantially.

What is not sustainable is high technology, which likely can't be quickly restored, once it crashes. It might take a couple of centuries to put all the systems back in place, if the crash is deep enough.

[rm_-rf_slash]

I think parent meant that absent the high tech and energy dense supply chains that underly modern society, people would have to do a lot of things to sustain a society that for us these days can be solved by going to Walmart.

[wrycoder]

This may be the right place to mention that the comment in the article, "But the photovoltaic cells we use today need pure silicon, and nanoscale manufacturing — essentially the same technology as microchips used in a computer — so actually making solar panels would be incredibly difficult." is incorrect.

One needs only modestly pure silicon and no nanoscale tech at all. You can make photovoltaic cells with a small furnace and a couple of rather basic inorganic chemicals. Patterning for diffusion masking can be done with wax applied by hand.

You do need some electricity, so steam power or biodiesel would be necessary at first. You will need to run scavenged vacuum pumps and induction heaters to create the silicon ingots and zone refine them. You will need to conduct some basic inorganic chemistry and be able to produce the key industrial acids and bases.

Edit: you will need to recreate Pyrex glass and be able to form it into tubes and chemical glassware.

[jeffreyrogers]

> Assuming antibiotics still work in 20 years

The Soviet Union tried to create antibiotic resistant bacteria as part of its bioweapons program. They were able to increase antibiotic resistance but not make anything totally resistant, so I expect antibiotics to still work 20 years from now.

[notahacker]

Widespread resistance to particular antibiotics is also the product of an advanced industrial society where new variants of pathogens spread easily amongst billions of internationally-travelling city dwellers and widespread prophylactic use of the antibiotic creates strong selection pressures.

Its a bit different after an apocalypse. In theory, an isolated post-apocalyptic community could roll a 1 and get bacteria that is resistant to locally available natural and stockpiled antibiotics in their community, but that's quite low down their list of concerns.

[avgcorrection]

What a weird gymnastic split this comment is.

Yeah, let’s go back to pre-industrial technology. But let’s do it with “government”. You really think that you’re gonna have some kind of cross between a hippy commune and modern centralization of force/taxation? A world were all of us now-middle class folks can just go to work on the permaculture farm 8–6 and relax with our organic root beers afterwards? Welcome back to Medieval serfdom for most of us, I say.

Can’t really have it both ways.

[wrycoder]

Look back to High Farming in England. Read William Cobbett's book, Cottage Economy (1833). No need to go back to the dark ages.

> Besides, skim-milk and bread (the milk being boiled) is quite strong food enough for any children’s breakfast, even when they begin to go to work; a fact which I state upon the most ample and satisfactory experience, very seldom having ever had any other sort of breakfast myself till I was more than ten years old, and I was in the fields at work full four years before that. I will here mention that it gave me singular pleasure to see a boy, just turned of six, helping his father to reap, in Sussex, this last summer. He did little, to be sure; but it was something. His father set him into the ridge at a great distance before him; and when he came up to the place, he found a sheaf cut; and, those who know what it is to reap, know how pleasant it is to find now and then a sheaf cut ready to their hand. It was no small thing to see a boy fit to be trusted with so dangerous a thing as a reap-hook in his hands, at an age when “young masters” have nursery-maids to cut their victuals for them, and to see that they do not fall out of the window, tumble down stairs, or run under carriage-wheels or horses’ bellies.

Cobbett, William. Cottage Economy To Which Is Added The Poor Man's Friend (pp. 55-56). . Kindle Edition.

The first duty of government is the security of its citizens and their property. That is what war lords provide, and later more sophisticated forms of government should do the same.

[imtringued]

Yeah people will happily vote in feudalism by voting for lower land value taxes and gold as a currency to make sure social mobility is zero.

[all2]

The problem isn't technology. The problem is immoral people. Immoral people make immoral and greedy governments. Immoral and greedy governments wield power to acquire more and survive as a parasitic organism. All governments move towards totalitarianism. No nation-state in the world has ever escaped this eventuality.

Limiting technology won't limit the harm even one evil person can do. Take a look at Gengis Khan, for example.

What limits immoral people is the moral people around them.

The reason Western culture has fared so well over the last 500 years is because it was largely Christian in nature. There are fundamental values embedded in the Bible that have echoed into what we consider to be "human rights" today. These ideas are uniquely Christian in nature, and rely on a Christian morality in order to function.

"Do to others as you would have them do to you", "love your neighbor as yourself", "you need to work in order to eat", the ten commandments (which are pretty common sense if you're looking for a stable society), a true/faithful set of weights and measures -- including a sound currency, lending for interest gained is illegal, and so on.

All of these require a basis of people who are willing to adhere to them. The Western world lacks people who are willing to adhere to them. In fact, we've been taught to hate the West and its contributions to the world. We hate white people, we hate Christianity, we hate absolute truth, we hate moral law, we hate being accountable to the Almighty, and we scoff at anyone who loves those things.

[andrekandre]

  > The problem isn't technology. The problem is immoral people.

i think you are underestimating the power of your tools (technology) to shape you instead of the other way around... might be a good idea to read up on Marshal McLuhan and Neil Postman to get an idea what technologies and systems can do to us (as humans)

  > The reason Western culture has fared so well over the last 500 years is because it was largely Christian in nature. There are fundamental values embedded in the Bible that have echoed into what we consider to be "human rights" today. These ideas are uniquely Christian in nature, and rely on a Christian morality in order to function.

human rights came from the bible? got any proof for that claim?

[all2]

> human rights came from the bible? got any proof for that claim?

I apologize for the delay. Let me see what I can do.

By my reckoning the core of "all men are created equal" finds its roots in Paul's letter to the Galatians where he says

    3:27 For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
    3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
    3:29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.

The statement "All men are created equal", from the Declaration of Independence is an appeal to the idea of the perfected church. That is, in a perfect world, the christian church conducts itself in such a way that none of the above "identities" matters any more. (See Romans 12 for how the church ought to act towards itself and others.) You aren't valued more or less than because of your race/ethnicity/people, or because of your financial status, or even because of your gender. If the ideal is realized, there is true equality.

In the Lord's Prayer, there's a request to God to bring His kingdom into this world

   ...Your kingdom come, Your will be done...

The founders of the US understood this and it is reflected in the Preamble of the Constitution

    We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

They recognize they can't achieve perfection, and still seek it out "in order to form a more perfect union".

I argue that the fundamental human ~right~ truth is equality. From that all other rights stem. Without equality, none of the other rights enshrined in the constitution (what you say, who you associate with, your right to self defense, your right to your person -- habius corpus, your right to swift justice, and so on) all have their roots in the sovereignty of the individual. And the sovereignty of the individual among peers is only guaranteed if one has equality with all the rest.

Here's a short essay that covers this more in depth: https://www.gotquestions.org/human-rights.html

[edit] wording [/edit]

[amanaplanacanal]

This seems a bit overstated. Civilization is way older than Christianity, and there is no evidence I can see that civilization under Christianity is any more moral than any other kind.

[slibhb]

> Or you could build a new world that isn't the one that just plunged everything into chaos.

How are you going to get people to agree to "live sustainably" over thousands of years?

[cheese_goddess]

I think the answer is that if you don't, then there won't be people after "over thousands of years", or even after a few generations, anyway.

I mean because this is after the apocalypse we're talking about, yes? Either people figure out how to restart civilisation in a sustainable manner or they die out after a short while.

[willcipriano]

Better question, if you can do that, why haven't you already?

[cheese_goddess]

Because we're before the apocalypse?