A post nuclear conworld - decades and centuries afterwards

[Torco]

what'd it take for communities of survivors to revive the lost art of gunmaking? I don't think a lot. at least in the places where the bombs didn't directly fall... there's still lathes and mills and all the rest of it, and even if your survivor colony doesn't have any machinists... they're not that hard to figure out, power tools. i'd expect some level of low-lever warfare in post-state societies, guns or no guns: neither the mad max everyone shoots everyone all the time condition, nor the peaceful vibes of solarpunk. people in feudal societies, as well as hunter gatherers and other "primitives" by all accounts lived in a world where you just had a war sometimes, it was kinda part of everyday life for most people. not a total world war 2 scorched earth war necessarily but, you know, some kind of war. the sorts of raiders and looters situation we're imagining are just wars between people who grow barley and people who don't for, you know, the barley. it's likely those raiders over there beyond the highway also plant barley, they just had a bit of a shitty crop twice in a row, and your wife has family there. and yeah, it's totally plausible that they'd be using muskets for a good while. also no gas, forget computers, and most people go "back" to subsistence farming.

but i wonder how does that transformation come to pass, socially? agriculture isn't a spurr-of-the-moment thing, people aren't gonna panick for the hills to start their own microagriculture parcelas. though. capitalism isn't good, as we all know, at planning: and are people going to buy plots of land? how? money probably collapsed, and most people are poor anyway. family might come to the rescue. anecdotally, here: even in highly urbanized chile, most everyone, poor or rich, knows someone who has land. an uncle, aunt edith's husband. maybe people will decide, as food starts becoming more and more expensive, let's ask uncle bob if he'd like some help with the veggies. plus, uncle bob's sure to need a lot of extra hands on deck, especially without gas, without electricity, without tractors and all the rest of it.

Warlordism would be rampant

okay likely, but what does that mean, precisely? people would still be trying to stay alive and well fed and relatively warm, as they always do, not playing doom. even if a warlord invades and annexes uncle bob's farm into his empire...bob's gonna keep growing them taters, even if half end up going to the warlord. plus, as the warlords kill each other, they'll have to replenish their forces with boys from *somewhere*, the neo peasantry is the logical choice. warlords aren't psychos... okay, not all of them, and not even most. warlords would probably be just regular people, maybe ex military or gun nuts or drug dealers, or cops... all violent people prone to abuse, but not to the extermination of their entire support base.

what *would* make *war* ubiquitous is the inviability of agriculture. that's where the degree of the winter part in nuclear winter comes into play. areas where nothing can grow the first, say, 10 years would... oh, wait. those people would migrate towards the equator, wouldn't they? as they find it's harder and harder to get food, plus the cold... okay, depending on just how much of the world becomes not-somewhere-you-can-farm, the mortality of those movements of people alone might be staggering.

[hwhatting]

The question would be how much of the modern technology and machinery would survive that allows less than 5% of the people to work on farms and to feed the other 95% who do other jobs in a modern post-agrarian, post-industrial society. If we go back to traditional, low-productivity agriculture, billions of people would starve even if they survived the catastrophe, and social structures would go back to 80% peasants and 20% non-peasants (which include specialized craftsmen, merchants, artists, scholars, priests, soldiers and bureaucrats), ruled by extractive elites wherever agriculture is grain-based and the terrain doesn't help the farmers to resist central rule by people with guns.
If all that is possible is hunting and gathering, even more people won't survive.

[Otto Kretschmer]

The question would be how much of the modern technology and machinery would survive that allows less than 5% of the people to work on farms and to feed the other 95% who do other jobs in a modern post-agrarian, post-industrial society. If we go back to traditional, low-productivity agriculture, billions of people would starve even if they survived the catastrophe, and social structures would go back to 80% peasants and 20% non-peasants (which include specialized craftsmen, merchants, artists, scholars, priests, soldiers and bureaucrats), ruled by extractive elites wherever agriculture is grain-based and the terrain doesn't help the farmers to resist central rule by people with guns.
If all that is possible is hunting and gathering, even more people won't survive.

My guess is not much.

Agricultural machinery requires both fuel and spare parts to operate and a lot of farms in 1980s used artificial fertilizers. In a nuclear holocuast, supply chains would break down completely. A decade long nuclear winter and fallout wouldn't make things any easier.

Now, things might be somewhat better in the Global South but I suppose even those countries would lose 50-80% of their population due to nuclear winter (less water evaporation from the oceans = droughts), cessation of food, fuel and fertilizer supplies etc.

[Torco]

global supply chains would certainly collapse, but that doesn't mean returning to medieval tech. people know how to operate lathes, how to build rudimentary forges, how to make basic steam machines. not everyone does, of course, but there's a fair amount of people who can get started with a vast headstart vis a vis a pesant from 13th century bohemia or something.

[Otto Kretschmer]

global supply chains would certainly collapse, but that doesn't mean returning to medieval tech. people know how to operate lathes, how to build rudimentary forges, how to make basic steam machines. not everyone does, of course, but there's a fair amount of people who can get started with a vast headstart vis a vis a pesant from 13th century bohemia or something.

How much of that knowledge will survive though?

I agree about forges - but building even the simplest useful steam engine requires knowledge of physics and engineering far beyond the reach of an average person.

The first 40-50 years after the war will be about bare survival. A lot of books that survive will end up eaten by mold or burned as fuel.

The Industrial Revolution didn't spring into existence out of thin air - it was a result of centuries long process of accumulation of knowledge (enabled by the combination of paper and the printing press) and - crucially - wealth/capital accumulation.

[Torco]

technologies will vary as to their degree of preservation for sure. knowledge of chipmaking? it'll all go the way of the dodo, for sure. welding? probably lost, since you need advanced factories to make the little rods with the coating that makes the inert gas and protects the metal from quickly oxidizing, let alone the energy. but riveting? that's just a forge, a well made die or two and some fellas with hammers. and riveting enables boilers. and boilers enable, even with very basic tools, a piston. even if a community forgot the way steam pistons work, there's bound to be some book or other they can consult in the non-bombed areas. a steam tractor is a very advanced thing, but you can use a basic piston to power a bellows, or a grain grinder, or a basic lumber mill, or perhaps even a boat, using fairly basic techniques.

internal combustion, on the other hand... yeah, goodbye. but windmills and watermills are much easier to revive. electricity? if you can procure magnets and copper wire you can make a little bit of it [and copper wire is relatively plentiful] sanitation? almost certainly not lost: almost everyone knows about boiling water to clear it of pathogens, and that in itself will be a great help to survivors.

like, this may be a latin american or third world thing, but the other day i had to fix my car and we (me and the mechanic) needed a part. the guy literally made the part we needed (just a die to turn a bolt that had a weird shaped head) right there in his backyard with a lathe, some calipers and a file, in something like 30 minutes.

[Ares Land]

I don't know about agricultures. The crops themselves have been selected to be more productive (there's the issue of terminator seeds, but I don't know if these are that widespread), and we have a much better grasp of what works as fertilizers. Agriculture would go back to being labor intensive, I expect, but the yields would still be better than pre-industrial ones.

Torco maks a good point that processed materials would still be lying around -- copper wires, certainly.
Resourceful people could get a great deal out of a car.

[Torco]

the more i think of it, the more i think survivors might just skip steam and go right to electricity. there's a lot of people who understand the rudiments of it, and there are just *so many electric engines and thingamajigs to boot*. batteries, little cables, diodes, resistors... i myself, if i were to scavange my own stuff, have at least seven electric engines in my apartment: the fridge has one, i have a space heater, a hair dryer, a bunch of power tools...

[Raphael]

the more i think of it, the more i think survivors might just skip steam and go right to electricity. there's a lot of people who understand the rudiments of it, and there are just *so many electric engines and thingamajigs to boot*. batteries, little cables, diodes, resistors... i myself, if i were to scavange my own stuff, have at least seven electric engines in my apartment: the fridge has one, i have a space heater, a hair dryer, a bunch of power tools...

Great point.

[hwhatting]

You'd need to have something to generate electricity, though - for generators, you need a fuel supply; existing solar cells would work for a while, but you'd need to re-start complicated supply chains and fiddly production pocesses to replace or expand solar power generation; for small amounts of electricity, wind mills or dynamos operated by hand or animals may be useful and even produceable by smaller communities (but you still need the materials for the batteries). For bigger amounts, you would need to preserve or restore coal, gas or nuclear power stations or hydropower, which implies preserving or rebounding to a certain degree of industrialisation.

[Raphael]

for small amounts of electricity, wind mills or dynamos operated by hand or animals may be useful and even produceable by smaller communities (but you still need the materials for the batteries).

That's exactly what I wanted to post in response when I had only read the very first part of your post.

[Torco]

oh, yeah, no, forget about photovoltaics: doping silicon might as well be negotiating with mephistopheles that he may send your uncle's soul to the fifth hell instead of the seventh, but you can do local generation out of renewables with wood and gargabe technology. probably it'd be mostly for powering radios, lightbulbs and telephones at first, but then again those are exceptionally useful little inventions.

serious energy production is harder, i totally agree, not least cause steam turbines require really advanced metallurgy.... then again, small scale generation can be enough to run a water boiler... or power tools, which are no small thing: if you want to build a chair it'll take you six times as much to do it with just hand tools than it'll take you with, say, one jigsaw.

[Glass Half Baked]

I agree that settings like The Road or Mad Max are pretty unlikely, and Zompist is probably correct about the tendency to create something like social cohesion even after a major collapse. But I think it's easy to forget that a resilient agrarian semi-egalitarian community can still be what a modern person would identify as extremely distopian. Violence could be casual and frequent. Life might be cheap in that world. Creating a workable lifestyle and sustainable community in difficult circumstances is a trademark of pre-neolithic human society, but it might look indistinguishable from Fallout to someone who's used to a world where spanking your children is considered a criminal act.

One detail to keep in mind: while economic systems are incredibly fragile, and political institutions are only a little stronger, cultural institutions are almost impossible to kill. The North Korean education system carried on intact while most of the workforce became foragers. The Roman Empire became a church. Mayan religion survived the loss of most Mayan urban centers. Archaeologically, some of the last buildings built in the Norse settlements in Greenland were churches. In sci fi depictions of a major collapse, the writer usually replaces existing religion with something based on people's new challenges and priorities. But the reality is that in a world with no functioning governments, no electricity, and no antibiotics, there will still be Pentecostals. Writers don't want to put that in their stories, presumably because it would take the reader out of their immersion; but it's far more likely than not that most major religions would survive with barely a hiccup.

[Ares Land]

oh, yeah, no, forget about photovoltaics: doping silicon might as well be negotiating with mephistopheles that he may send your uncle's soul to the fifth hell instead of the seventh, but you can do local generation out of renewables with wood and gargabe technology. probably it'd be mostly for powering radios, lightbulbs and telephones at first, but then again those are exceptionally useful little inventions.

serious energy production is harder, i totally agree, not least cause steam turbines require really advanced metallurgy.... then again, small scale generation can be enough to run a water boiler... or power tools, which are no small thing: if you want to build a chair it'll take you six times as much to do it with just hand tools than it'll take you with, say, one jigsaw.

Agreed on the small scale generation. Photovoltaics are out, I agree... Solar thermal power generation might be feasible though!

[hwhatting]

then again, small scale generation can be enough to run a water boiler... or power tools, which are no small thing: if you want to build a chair it'll take you six times as much to do it with just hand tools than it'll take you with, say, one jigsaw.

I agree on the power tools; for boiling water, directly using fuel instead going via electricity would probably be more efficient in a scenario without industrial-scale electricity generation.

One detail to keep in mind: while economic systems are incredibly fragile, and political institutions are only a little stronger, cultural institutions are almost impossible to kill. The North Korean education system carried on intact while most of the workforce became foragers. The Roman Empire became a church. Mayan religion survived the loss of most Mayan urban centers. Archaeologically, some of the last buildings built in the Norse settlements in Greenland were churches. In sci fi depictions of a major collapse, the writer usually replaces existing religion with something based on people's new challenges and priorities. But the reality is that in a world with no functioning governments, no electricity, and no antibiotics, there will still be Pentecostals. Writers don't want to put that in their stories, presumably because it would take the reader out of their immersion; but it's far more likely than not that most major religions would survive with barely a hiccup.

Good point. Using existing religions or religious tendencies as a basis is something I liked about the old "Medieval America" project.

[Travis B.]

The key thing to remember is that people will not simply forget about the advances of the last three centuries, which will give people a head start in redeveloping what they would have lost in such an apocalyptic scenario.

[zompist]

I agree that settings like The Road or Mad Max are pretty unlikely, and Zompist is probably correct about the tendency to create something like social cohesion even after a major collapse. But I think it's easy to forget that a resilient agrarian semi-egalitarian community can still be what a modern person would identify as extremely distopian. Violence could be casual and frequent. Life might be cheap in that world. Creating a workable lifestyle and sustainable community in difficult circumstances is a trademark of pre-neolithic human society, but it might look indistinguishable from Fallout to someone who's used to a world where spanking your children is considered a criminal act.

The problem with such predictions is that our models are mostly premodern and pre-apocalyptic. They're stable because that's what everybody knows and what's been done for centuries, for better or for worse. We don't know how to live like that any more.

A nuclear war does not reset the world to a balmy version of the 1840s— or the 1340s. A better model is probably what's happening in Gaza right now: utter destruction of the urban environment, destruction of all physical infrastructure from schools to hospitals to stores. Gazans are not, in fact, attacking each other savagely and grabbing each other's food... one reason being that there's really nothing to grab.

It's probably right that an abandoned car would be a valuable source of metal, wires, etc. But you're not going to get nice salvageable wrecks in a blast zone, only a layer of melted glass and metal in a larger ruin. Similarly, the local stores are not just looted, they're flattened.

The US population is about 80% urban; China, 65%. It's harder to say how much of the population lives in areas likely to be bombed, but don't forget firestorms and radiation, to say nothing of the entire collapse of the urban economy.

Anyone who's done a home improvement project— which is far less difficult than building a generator or a machine shop— knows how many trips to the local hardware store are required. It gets a lot harder if there is no hardware store and everything has to be found and looted. (It'd be realistic if a scene in a post-apocalyptic movie had the survivors die because they just can't find a Torx screwdriver.)

That's why I expected the survivors would be in 'primitive' areas as far as possible from the combatants– remote parts of Brazil, Congo, New Guinea, etc. Maybe Montana or Tibet are unbombed, but, well, they only have a few million people.

Writers don't want to put that in their stories, presumably because it would take the reader out of their immersion; but it's far more likely than not that most major religions would survive with barely a hiccup.

Agreed. Though I'd expect major doctrinal changes.

[Torco]

sure, catholicism would collapse but people would still identify as catholic: you'd just get catholic sect, until some bishop or other phagocites some or most of them.

the horrible nature of the collapse is well described by zompist: in the directly blasted cities, for example, i'd expect as bad as only single digit survivorship. but that's still a vast, vast amount of people. plus all the others in the only moderately affected areas, plus all the others where the bombs don't fall at all. sure, the rate of deeply rural papuans surviving will be higher than, say, newyorkers: but there'll still be more survivors with a facebook account than without. and remember: the more people die today, the more resources for people alive tomorrow, so the curve flattens out.

[WeepingElf]

I have to think of Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin here. It is set in a far future, long after our industrial civilization is gone, among people who are not urbanized and industrialized, yet have access to early 20th century level technology such as electric light and railways. (The novel also features a conlang named Kesh.)

[hwhatting]

The survival of Catholicism after a nuclear catastrophe is one of the central topics of the classic SF novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz". Although the Church has to relocate from a destroyed Rome, organisation and doctrine remain mostly unchanged. It's an interesting book, although I dopn't agree with all of its assumptions, e.g. I doubt that we would get a re-run Middle Ages -> Renaissance -> Modernity with a new threat of nuclear war.