Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

[dcarson]

Salvaged I beams for the keel and major structural supports and timber for the rest would give you a ship better than they could build pre mid 1800s I expect.

[exalted]

Originally Posted by malloyd

A point I often make in post-apocalypse discussions is that flintlock rifles are actually easier to make than good quality swords, and indeed enough better and easy enough to maintain and copy that local copies historically replaced [bows] in some places.
The radio stuff definitely survives - people still hand build radio parts, they aren't as good, but there's a segment of the hobby that considers it part of the fun.
The mechanization of the textile industry was built on local water power, so cheaper, if not modern levels of cheap, clothing is at least doable, though a lot of the infrastructure would need to be rebuilt.
Up until the launch of real time weather satellite imagery (ca. 1970) weather forecasts involved nothing but good organization and the ability to move data faster than the weather, so that piggybacks on the radio (or telegraph, or telephone, which also don't need a lot, early telegraph systems after all ran on [batteries].
Clipper ships are arguably TL5, and modern sailboats do have advantages over their TL4- ancestors.
Most of the field of medicine at TL5 and 6 doesn't involve anything energy or capital intensive, though long distance trade in drugs would be really helpful - drug trade volumes aren't big though, those sailing yachts might well be able to manage it even without building new ones.
Lots of small machine shops don't use a lot of power, particularly rural ones before heavy electrification around TL7, are fully capable of making replacements for their own machines and any small engines or water wheels needed to supply their small power needs assuming there are any streams or burnable stuff left.

The really big hit for a lower energy economy are in bulk transportation. That's pretty important since most cities couldn't possibly feed themselves without long distance food shipments. Yeah agriculture production is down too, though it isn't as bad in the long term as some people want you to think since a lot of industrial agriculture production boosts go into stuff that isn't survival level food production (for example about 15% of US agricultural energy use goes into wet milling corn - you don't [need] to turn it into corn syrup, the food calories are still there in the raw corn) and fully 3/4 of production goes into livestock, for about 1/6 the calories) or into producing food on less area (the developed world has seen food production shoot up even as land under cultivation falls...) n standards.

Just wanted to say good post with a lot of stuff post apoc scenario writers rarely think about.

Also most areas of the world that aren't like the west coast/east coast of the US or the most heavily industrialized parts of Germany or China. Quite a few places would face hardship but are easily able to be completly self sufficient even with worse farming methods, a very few even had larger populations when those methods where used (see Ireland or Småland in Sweden).

About craft skills, I think most people would be surprised by how easy they are to pick up and how many people know enough to do some work. At least around here in Sweden I could point you to people who keep pretty much every viking and onwards craft alive. You won't become a master armorer in a day but building a musket from modern piping isn't particularly hard, I'd be worried about the powder grinding but mostly because I don't have to do something that stupid on a regular basis, neither is concrete construction with wooden frames, neither is most aggricultural tasks. They are a lot of work but not particularly hard.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Yeah agriculture production is down too, though it isn't as bad in the long term as some people want you to think since a lot of industrial agriculture production boosts go into stuff that isn't survival level food production (for example about 15% of US agricultural energy use goes into wet milling corn - you don't [need] to turn it into corn syrup, the food calories are still there in the raw corn) and fully 3/4 of production goes into livestock, for about 1/6 the calories) or into producing food on less area (the developed world has seen food production shoot up even as land under cultivation falls...)

Yes, we produce a lot of excess... but my understanding of population history is that food surpluses are directly tied to the massive population increases of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

I went hunting for how many people are currently fed by fertilizer, and came across at least one source that looks like it was seriously researched. Here is the pretty graph at the core of it all.

So this scenario sees a population crash for sure... but there can still be billions of people around the world, as long as people can get crops to plant.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by exalted

About craft skills, I think most people would be surprised by how easy they are to pick up and how many people know enough to do some work. At least around here in Sweden I could point you to people who keep pretty much every viking and onwards craft alive.

Another thing about modern craftsmen is that often they aren't keeping the craft alive, they've actively improved it. Pretty much any modern sword maker knows about furnaces able to cast steel (something that [existed] at TL3ish, but only in a few places), and they know a lot more about when and why temperature matters (and the chemistry it matters for) than anybody before the 19th century. There are lot of similar cases where product quality and reproducability benefit tremendously just from knowing [why] different materials perform differently. Just the idea that drugs have specific chemical ingredients that have specific effects was a pretty revolutionary idea during late TL4.

Likewise the guys who make wood hulled sailboats by hand maybe don't quite match the fiberglass, but they still get better performance than TL4 because they know about design optimizations nobody did before the mid 20th century. Hobby railroad steam engines are about half again as efficient as the last production railroad steam locomotives. All modern potter know about pyrometric cones (a temperature measuring technique invented by Josiah Wedgewood in 1782) and consequently have way fewer failed firings. Modern woodstoves are better than the Franklin stove by a substantial margin - and it's better than a fireplace by a bigger one, and an innovation over TL3 or 4. Modern wood *cookstoves* using wood gasification, are better yet...
There's a huge range of stuff that we think of as "primitive" or "obsolete" that have nevertheless continued to improve while remaining at the hobby or handicraft level of resource investment.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Another thing about modern craftsmen is that often they aren't keeping the craft alive, they've actively improved it.

SNIP

This is a point S.M. Stirling makes in an afterword he wrote in one of the books in his series, Island in the Sea of Time, the companion series to the Emberverse books.

Stirling wrote that he actually had to "dumb down" the capabilities of the small machine shop owners and local craftsmen, on Nantucket, because nobody would believe how fast they could actually re-create a small industrial economy.

Now, in that scenario, they had available abundant raw resources, and they needed the labor to extract them. That differs, substantially from the OP's (highly unlikely) premise that both fossil fuels and fissile materials both vanish, somehow, before we have fusion.

But still, knowledge of all sorts exists for all sorts of reasons, and that fact that hobbyists in wealthy, developed nations don't have to blow glass for a living, or smelt and forge metals, or make soap, or weave cloth from hemp fiber, or grow sustainable crops in permaculture fields, doesn't mean they're not good at it, or will necessarily all get overrun.

The New York City blackout of 1977 demonstrated that, while some looting will take place quickly, the vast majority of people will remain in place and wait for relief, until such time they grow so hungry or thirsty that desperation forces them to action. The thing is, thirsty, hungry, desperate people can only go so far.

[Inky]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

Recoverable fissile and fossil fuels are depleted to insignificance (but other metals can be scavenged from the infrastructure).

It isn't clear what this means. (I haven't read The Limits to Growth). Is that meant to imply that extractable metal ores are also depleted to insignificance at about the same time for some reason?

[Inky]

Before I read TGLS's posting, I'd assumed that "World3" was a typo! :-D
Looked it up on Wikipedia - it's actually the name of the computer simulation that The Limits to Growth was based on. That may account for why this premise has metal ores and uranium running out at the same time as fossil fuels - apparently, the World3 model lumps all non-renewable resources together as a single variable. This seems potty, but there you are. If this premise is supposed to follow the World3 model, then it also isn't an overnight disappearance of resources (and Tom Mazanec's original posting doesn't seem to say it is).

[benz72]

Originally Posted by malloyd

You can probably forget about aluminum though.

I wouldn't put aluminum out of reach because of resources. The tough part of aluminum is the smelting out of ore. Once it is refined it can be worked more easily than iron in many ways.
Aluminum hulls are generally bad for service life because aluminum has no fatigue limit. All the flexing involved in being supported by a liquid will lead to cracking much more quickly than for steel.

[Willy]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

This is a point S.M. Stirling makes in an afterword he wrote in one of the books in his series, Island in the Sea of Time, the companion series to the Emberverse books.

Stirling wrote that he actually had to "dumb down" the capabilities of the small machine shop owners and local craftsmen, on Nantucket, because nobody would believe how fast they could actually re-create a small industrial economy.

That is a fact, I worked in some relative small local metal, electronics and building companies, all less than say 50 workers. If you transport the whole buildings including machines through time and place, they could have been the core of a new modern nation. maybe reduced to TL 7 thanks to lack of microprocessors. But the building companies could still build sky scrapers, the electronic shop could still put out 70ties stile electronic hardware ( instead of modern up to date custom circiut boards ), and the metal company would have been able to reproduce any metal working machine aka the tools they need the tools rapidly. Not to mention mortars, machineguns and the like. Any doctor / pharmacist, chemist can make medical or other drugs, heck even a high school nerd with some glasware can do this.

All of course you must feed the workers and have access to raw materials. Smelting and refining ore is with old techniques and nowadays knowledge a easy task.

I onced were considering a Banestorm campaign and asked myself what would really happen, if your small town would be banestormed to another place. An which folks would have important knowledge and skills.

In the end I came to the conclusion if not dropped in the midst of a BIG emeny TL 4 + nation, we could survive intact after some hardships and thrive building up a society with aliving standard close to US pre 1950.

By the way I really have to read this book series, I always wanted but forgot the title. In which edition was the comment from the author, or had he wrote a book how and why I wrote this series like Eddings did.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by Willy

That is a fact, I worked in some relative small local metal, electronics and building companies, all less than say 50 workers. If you transport the whole buildings including machines through time and place, they could have been the core of a new modern nation. maybe reduced to TL 7 thanks to lack of microprocessors. But the building companies could still build sky scrapers, the electronic shop could still put out 70ties stile electronic hardware ( instead of modern up to date custom circiut boards ), and the metal company would have been able to reproduce any metal working machine aka the tools they need the tools rapidly. Not to mention mortars, machineguns and the like. Any doctor / pharmacist, chemist can make medical or other drugs, heck even a high school nerd with some glasware can do this.

All of course you must feed the workers and have access to raw materials. Smelting and refining ore is with old techniques and nowadays knowledge a easy task.

I onced were considering a Banestorm campaign and asked myself what would really happen, if your small town would be banestormed to another place. An which folks would have important knowledge and skills.

In the end I came to the conclusion if not dropped in the midst of a BIG emeny TL 4 + nation, we could survive intact after some hardships and thrive building up a society with aliving standard close to US pre 1950.

By the way I really have to read this book series, I always wanted but forgot the title. In which edition was the comment from the author, or had he wrote a book how and why I wrote this series like Eddings did.

There's a reason why the last banestormed folks to Yrth are TL4 AND gunpowder is actively supressed by the powers to be. Anything more than that would invariably increase the TL of the setting, thus losing the "typical fantasy" air of it.