Warren Okuma
First Post
Oh, too bad. But I don't live in a city.Dannyalcatraz said:I have books that teach me all kinds of things, but since I live in a major metropolitan area, I doubt any would survive the initial strike or the subsequent fires as gas lines erupt and the city basically burns down.
Ah, too bad. I live near a stream and store food. Oh, about six months, planning to increase it to a year. Just because you can't rebuild society doesn't mean I can't.Dannyalcatraz said:The key knowledge that would let you rebuild society is whatever you can retain at your mental fingertips. Surviving books are fine- if I have them- but before I could get my smithy up and running, I'd need:
1) Food
2) Water
3) Shelter
Without those, I won't live long enough to get to the higher order tasks, and I sure as heck won't have time to re-read my old Scouting manuals...assuming I could even find them. And I'd need those 3 things in amounts large enough (or easy enough to aquire) that I have time to do tasks other than look for sustinence.
Dannyalcatraz said:After that, I'd need:
4) Combustibles
5) Knowledge of the locations of raw materials or scrap that I can reforge.
6) Tools to build the tools that I'll need to build the smithy.
7) The ability to distinguish between what I can work with and what I can't. (As an amateur jeweler, I understand & recognize precious metals far better than base ones.)
Etc.
Essentially, I have to win the sprint of survival before I can even compete in the marathon of rebuilding.
I don't.
Dannyalcatraz said:If all you have is basic combustibles like wood or paper, your factory has no fuel that will run the machinery in a machine shop.
I know a shop that has solar power. And it's rural.
Dannyalcatraz said:I've been to 3 dumps in my vicinity. The books you'd find there would largely be unreadable- torn, shredded, and damaged by liquid wastes...assuming you can even find them in all the tons and tons of debris.
Could you get lucky? Sure! But the odds are stacked against you. You're more likely to find things you can use as fuel or building material in a dump than you are usable literature.
You are not looking hard enough. I found the garbage from a bookstore once. Didn't take anything though. It's amazing what companies throw away. Manuals, passwords... not that I ever dumpster dived to get passwords...
Yes, but some people actually have food on hand and the right books, and solar cells or a wind farm. For technology to utterly fail. Everybody's books will have burned. Every skilled person would have to die. That is impossible. Tech will survive and tech will recover. Just because you are not in an advantageous position, doesn't mean everyone else will suffer like you.Dannyalcatraz said:Some of us already know how to do this and other tasks. How quickly the rebuilding goes depends upon 1) how many of them survive the ELE
and 2) their ability to bridge the gap between immediate survival of the ELE and the actual business of rebuilding society- not a single task, but a multitude of smaller steps.