How would a modern city manage after the Great Disruption?

[MarkB]

If you're playing with all of prehistoric times, how do you handle continental drift? Depending upon location, your 300 mile landlocked bubble could become an island surrounded by deep ocean, or your nice coastal city could wind up in the middle of Pangaea with its adjoining ocean now just a big salt water lake.

 

[jian]

If you're playing with all of prehistoric times, how do you handle continental drift? Depending upon location, your 300 mile landlocked bubble could become an island surrounded by deep ocean, or your nice coastal city could wind up in the middle of Pangaea with its adjoining ocean now just a big salt water lake.

Let’s handwave it and say locations move with the continents but are somehow recognised by the system as the same place, with the map of the world being what it is in 2026, so Rome is where you expect it to be in Italy and not several hundred metres away somewhere inconvenient, or whatever. God knows what the dinosaurs think of it.

 

[Tonguez]

1. Hadrian's Rome, AD 120 is approaching a million inhabitants and cannot feed itself under its existing arrangements.
Rome's depends on imported grain from North Africa and it isnt coming, leading to starvation.

But Hadrian is an administrator and builder - so he builds roads into the prehistoric lands. Roman engineers are experts at claiming wild barbarian territories and its bureacracy can handle large labour forced to convert those terrotories into agricultural surplus. Its armies also now have more incentive, even if they do end up facing a Draco terribilis or two

2 A meeting between Kublai Khan, 1270 CE and Wu Zetian, 690 CE would be interesting. Kulai Khan has the chinese bureaucracy to maintain granaries and irrigation, but he still needs fertile lands. Luckily he has horses and mongol calvary, so exploring the zone becomes much easier. This also means Kublai might soon discover Luoyang and its many farmers speaking an archaic form of Chinese. They are able to communicate and both have records of their era. More importantly Kublai has access to history books which cover the whole of the Tang dynasty - including Wu Zetians own biography. He has incredible leverage now

 

[jian]

2 A meeting between Kublai Khan, 1270 CE and Wu Zetian, 690 CE would be interesting. Kulai Khan has the chinese bureaucracy to maintain granaries and irrigation, but he still needs fertile lands. Luckily he has horses and mongol calvary, so exploring the zone becomes much easier. This also means Kublai might soon discover Luoyang and its many farmers speaking an archaic form of Chinese. They are able to communicate and both have records of their era. More importantly Kublai has access to history books which cover the whole of the Tang dynasty - including Wu Zetians own biography. He has incredible leverage now

“Just tell me who I need to execute next, you Mongol son of a bitch.”

 

[Umbran]

Yes, that’s fair. I think you’d do electronic initially for convenience but then switch to cash once you’d got everyone used to the new scrip.

I think you underestimate the difficulty in establishing a new monetary system in software across an entire city.

Modern transactions are managed by payment processing systems which aren't going to be present. You'd need to rebuild that infrastructure.

Plus, see the food issue - in the immediate aftermath of transition, money is no longer relevant - people will be starving, and if people try to use money to manage that, food prices will inflate to levels so absurd as to be meaningless.

 

[jian]

I think you underestimate the difficulty in establishing a new monetary system in software across an entire city.

Modern transactions are managed by payment processing systems which aren't going to be present. You'd need to rebuild that infrastructure.

Plus, see the food issue - in the immediate aftermath of transition, money is no longer relevant - people will be starving, and if people try to use money to manage that, food prices will inflate to levels so absurd as to be meaningless.

Oh yeah, it’s very easy to get it wrong. You’d basically have to completely control the economy to make sure everyone gets food and housing, not to mention directing your collective resources to short and long term survival. It’s the work of decades or even generations, all the while gearing down all your technology to be manufacturable and replicable with sustainable processes and planning to gradually gear up your science so one day you might be able to make antibiotics again. There’ll be a chance to screw it up every day and every year and make the decision that unknowingly dooms you to decline, disaster, and dispersal.

The best possible outcome is looking out over a city in 20 years time and watching the smog rise as the kids burn coal for heat and act out Friends episodes half-remembered from stories their parents told them in street theatre. But for now they’re alive, and fed, and housed. The ships from the Tang-Yuan armada will arrive in False Creek next year, but thankfully it won’t be your problem, because you will die of pneumonia from a bacterial infection that would have been trivially treatable twenty years ago.

 

[trappedslider]

because you will die of pneumonia from a bacterial infection that would have been trivially treatable twenty years ago.

Eh, depending on what you have and the knowledge you have access to, you may be able to make basic penicillin.

 

[Kaodi]

I realized that unfortunately for Vancouver because of the era shifting smallpox actually does exist in the topsy turvy world - the only question is where.

 

[Koloth]

Baring the traveling city being dropped into a desert, the locals will have a food, water and materials infrastructure in place. Diplomacy of some sort will be essential for the travelers to work out trade agreements with the locals.

 

[Umbran]

Baring the traveling city being dropped into a desert, the locals will have a food, water and materials infrastructure in place. Diplomacy of some sort will be essential for the travelers to work out trade agreements with the locals.

Well, after people starve the first year, yes.

Modern city populations are supported with modern farming techniques and machinery. And whenever this transition takes place, the local farmers would have planted for their normal expectations, will won't include the city people - you can't instantly add a couple of million new people into an area and expect there to be food available for them until at least the end of the next growing season.

In this scenario, in North America, you also have the issue that the areas currently planted with grain, and that are used for graxing livestock, are
1) Out of transport range of most city folks who don't have fuel infrastructure.
2) Are apt to be from a historical period in which that land was not being used for farming yet at all. Humans can't eat prairie grass.