Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

[Tom Mazanec]

This might make an interesting game background.
Assume the Club of Rome is right. Industrial Civilization collapses in a decade or two from resource depletion and pollution.
Recoverable fissile and fossil fuels are depleted to insignificance (but other metals can be scavenged from the infrastructure). Climate is much warmer and, until the oceans catch up and can start evaporating water in equilibrium, drier. Even when the rainfall recovers (23rd Century?) it will be in different areas.
What technology would we have, in particular? The internet I suppose is gone, but could shortwave radio be maintained, probably using crystal radios and hydroelectric powered broadcasting, for example?
Any thoughts?

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

This might make an interesting game background.
Assume the Club of Rome is right. Industrial Civilization collapses in a decade or two from resource depletion and pollution.
Recoverable fissile and fossil fuels are depleted to insignificance (but other metals can be scavenged from the infrastructure). Climate is much warmer and, until the oceans catch up and can start evaporating water in equilibrium, drier. Even when the rainfall recovers (23rd Century?) it will be in different areas.
What technology would we have, in particular? The internet I suppose is gone, but could shortwave radio be maintained, probably using crystal radios and hydroelectric powered broadcasting, for example?
Any thoughts?

The problem is that so much is dependent on fossil fuels that things will start falling in TL regarding energy production. Hydroelectric has the issues that dams need TL 6 or better maintainance after a while. Also while people think warmer = dryer that is not necessarily true. The Mid-Miocene has similar climate to what were are going to and it was wetter than today.

The first half of James Burke's After the Warming (actual history part) talks about Lake Agassiz and how it triggered a change in only 70 years sending the Earth back into an ice age.

The range of crystal radioes is not as extensive as modern radios and it could have issues but it might work.

[jackcelso]

NO fossil fuels no ´plastics, he would go back to wild west at best to dark ages at worse!!

[awesomenessofme1]

By fissiles you mean uranium and the like, right? How could those possibly be depleted to insignificance, especially in only a matter of a few decades?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by awesomenessofme1

By fissiles you mean uranium and the like, right? How could those possibly be depleted to insignificance, especially in only a matter of a few decades?

I agree, especially if you take the possibility of thorium reactors into account. It's much more plausible to suppose that fissiles stop being used because of a quasi-religious prohibition.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I agree, especially if you take the possibility of thorium reactors into account. It's much more plausible to suppose that fissiles stop being used because of a quasi-religious prohibition.

The thing is that the modern economy is a castle of cards; it's a complex system, disturby it too much an it all falls apart.

As we stand, dropping fossil fuels is madness, civilization would soon collapse short after. Fossil fuels arent just fuel and plastic, it's also fertilizers, and modern agriculture is an industrial activity. Current nuclear power is insuficient to replace fossil as we are right now - which has been an extreme short-sight from our divine overlords who dont care about anything except their personal power (that includes the "enlightened" ones at the Club of Rome and similar organizations such as the World Economic Forum who think they know what's best for us better than ourselves).

Without fossil, industries would halt, agriculture would halt, famines would begin, and hungry people is people desperate and people that you dont control.

Civilization collapse could be halted up to WW2 because of the empirial systems, the logistic chains were all internally contained; now pretty much only the USA has that capacity, so if globalization ends China goes into Oblivion, they'll have a famine that will kill 500 millions of people, Brazil breaks down, althought we wouldnt have a famine but we would deindustrialize and go back to the 19th century, Africa and Middle East would go back to the stone age and hundreds of millions would die and Europe would go back to the middle ages also would hundreds of millions of deaths.

Oh, but before that there would be endless wars as countries fight for scraps.

Now, as for the US, they can only survive because they now are self sufficient in oil. Take that away and there's no more industries, no more agriculture.

And the notion of a small group of army personnel under the government keeping a piece of civilization so that it can flourish back again is mostly a fantasy. Ok, lets assume the USA keeps one Nuclear Powerplant under it's thumb in hopes to rebuild after the "Fallout" setting strikes the world. Well, they'll need soldiers and guns to protect what they have from the hordes of hungry nomads. Well, it just so happens that soldiers eat but dont produce food. So you'll need farms, lands and soldiers to protect those. The electricity you'll need for making vehicles to transport the goods, machines to produce the manufacture and the food, and the guns, since all of those need replacement. But in order to make those, you need mines of raw minerals. Sometimes some essentials will be hard to come by - like rubber for the tires. And on top of that, you need skilled people - you need engineers, nuclear physicists, agronomers and more, all people with skills that need years to develop, and in order to do that you need surplus of food, clothes in order for those people to dedicate themselves to study rather than hunting or growing their food. It cannot be done.

And all that without the practicity of plastics - more so to the industry rather than daily life. Bio plastic requires even more specialized knowledge and is far harder to produce than plastic from petroleum, so it's not a viable alternative for a post-economic-apocalipse society.

Without oil, it all ends, and in just a few decades or centuries at best, we are back to the middle ages.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by awesomenessofme1

By fissiles you mean uranium and the like, right? How could those possibly be depleted to insignificance, especially in only a matter of a few decades?

Good point! And Thorium would be explored as well, and it is far more abundant than uranium.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Originally Posted by jackcelso

NO fossil fuels no ´plastics, he would go back to wild west at best to dark ages at worse!!

Work has been done to develop plastics made from biologic sources, so I assume plastics would still be possible unless other factors prevented it.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by maximara

Also while people think warmer = dryer that is not necessarily true. The Mid-Miocene has similar climate to what were are going to and it was wetter than today.

The first half of James Burke's After the Warming (actual history part) talks about Lake Agassiz and how it triggered a change in only 70 years sending the Earth back into an ice age.

The range of crystal radioes is not as extensive as modern radios and it could have issues but it might work.

I dont know why people think that, hotter means wetter, in the glacial period the amazon rainforest was a savanna. The hotter Earth is, the more clouds, it's just common sense, glacial periods are actually dryer periods overall. The hotter it gets the more jungles there would be.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by KarlKost

I dont know why people think that, hotter means wetter, in the glacial period the amazon rainforest was a savanna. The hotter Earth is, the more clouds, it's just common sense, glacial periods are actually dryer periods overall. The hotter it gets the more jungles there would be.

From the linked article: "Places as far afield as East Coast USA, the Pacific Northwest, Western China, Patagonia, Central Asia, and the Atacama in South America, all became much wetter, causing a global uptick in erosion. The result was a general expansion and densification of forests. Remarkably, there’s no sign of deserts either in North Africa or Asia, where today we have the Sahara and Gobi deserts."

More over Tropical rain forest thrived throughout last Ice Age states "These data will come as quite a shock to many paleoclimatologists,” said Paul A. Colinvaux, a research scientist at the University of Michigan Center for Great Lakes and Aquatic Sciences and senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “They contradict the widespread belief that a drier climate during the last Ice Age turned the Amazon lowlands into a savanna with isolated pockets of rain forest.”

It is like how we view fossilized animals. The "Shrink-wrapping" fossilization produces results in reconstructions whose resemblance to what the thing looked like in life next to nil.