Spinning off from another thread.


We tend to assume that survivors of our civilization's collapse will be more primitive than ourselves. We assume that they will devolve into marauding, tribalistic cargo-cultists sustained only by what they can salvage from our ruins. We assume that as a given.

What if we are wrong?

What if the tribal peoples of the post-apocalyptic future are smarter than us? What if the survival pressures of their environment drive innovation and creativity such that their own scientific and technological progress surpasses us?

Quote from: Cave Bear;1010192(Not replying to anybody, just continuing along a train of thought.)

Look at the following images. What do these look like to you?

Spoiler

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1987[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1986[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1985[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1984[/ATTACH]

These are images from a Victorian fashion magazine. These are predictions of what 20th century people might wear, based on extrapolations of current trends and advancements in textile technology. Look at the poofy, ornate designs. That seemed to be where the wind was blowing.

Then World War I happened.

Sudden scarcity bottle-necked fashion, and forced it to move in a different direction. Imagine how backwards we might look to those Victorian fashion futurists.

Our whole idea of post-apocalyptic cargo cults is based on seemingly logical extrapolations of our own history. But unexpected events occur constantly, and any black swan event big enough to destroy our global civilization is likely to change us deeply in ways we cannot anticipate.

What if we have post-apocalyptic people all wrong? They look like tribalistic cargo-cultists to us only because our perception is colored by our own biases, but perhaps they understand us just fine. If they have a different perspective on our culture, maybe it isn't because they see us through the veil of ignorance but because they see us through the lens of hindsight.

Let's imagine post-apocalyptic civilizations that put our own civilization to shame.

Quote from: Cave Bear;1010630We tend to assume that survivors of our civilization's collapse will be more primitive than ourselves. We assume that they will devolve into marauding, tribalistic cargo-cultists sustained only by what they can salvage from our ruins. We assume that as a given.

Just for fun, and because 1970s post-apocalyptica reflected that era's upsurge in crime, which was due mostly to a decline in law enforcement (in particular, much weaker sentencing & end of the death penalty). In reality you wouldn't see those post-apacalyptic marauding gangs spring out of cultures that had no history of marauding gangs (marauders could come from elsewhere, eg Saxons then Vikings invading post-Roman Britain, Arabs raiding & invading the post-Roman Mediterranean). The people would stay the same people, and societal mores would be a lot stricter, not relaxed, in stressed populations.

In the typical post-nuclear-holocaust scenario with say 25% survivors, the post-apocalypse wouldn't stay that way for long, civilisation in eg Europe Russia Japan China would rebuild within decades. Probably India too, though it might go back to decentralised military-feudal states rather than one big democracy, at least for awhile. At most you might see the feudal military cantonments of Twilight: 2000, but I'd expect countries with strong democratic traditions to return to representative democracy within decades.

Looking at your idea, well apocalypses like the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Black Death do tend to shake things up and spur innovation in the longer term, so you could emphasise that. Settings which use that sort of idea somewhat include Traveller 2300, and arguably the Star Trek mythos.

I dunno ... my buying into the standard post-apoc meltdown comes as much as anything else because in the First World (at least), people just don't know how to do things any more without a tech base.  Let's just start with the basic question: where do you get more food from when what's in your cupboard runs out?  Even in the 19th century, with the advantage of readily-available high quality equipment (know any blacksmiths, and where's your nearest source of quality coking coal?), medium scale farming was a hit or miss deal with frequent droughts and infestations.

Honestly, the areas that have a chance post-apoc aren't Europe or Japan.  It's Africa.

Quote from: Ravenswing;1010666I dunno ... my buying into the standard post-apoc meltdown comes as much as anything else because in the First World (at least), people just don't know how to do things any more without a tech base.  

Mass die offs due to starvation are certainly possible, and have been quite common in history. That does not mean 'marauding cannibal gangs' in the Mad Max style, though.

Looking at people here in England, what most survivors would do in a post-apocalypse situation is seek some Authorities to put themselves under the command of. Since not 100% of Authorities (police, military etc) will have perished, the remainder will swiftly establish zones of control. Those Authorities in most cases will seek out more senior authorities to place themselves under, in turn. If no central government has survived it might be a few years until a new one can be sorted out, but that is what would happen.

Meanwhile it's quite likely that starvation & possibly disease kill far more people than the original apocalypse, yet that still does not mean anything like a Mad Max situation.

Does a post-apocalyptic meltdown necessarily strip us of our tech-base?

My apartment complex has solar panels on the roof. It's nothing fancy; these are the same stop-gap portable units they stick on every building here in China. Even if the national power grid goes out, we'll still have some power in my building.
The great thing about renewable sources of energy is that they can be decentralized.
And as long as we have electricity, we can supplement our remaining man-power with more efficient mechanical power.

Sonsidering that some survivalist groups were claiming they planned to do exactly what you claim wouldnt happen rather throws the wheels off your rickety wagon. Sorry.

Assuming some sort of collapse thats going to happen is that some people are going to flip out. And all it takes is for someone to gather the nuts. Others are going to realize that they have ZERO ability to fend for themselves and set out to take from others by force. Or they dont want to actually work the land and go to raiding. Others may be remnants of organized crime or gangs. Or even military remnants.

History has brutally shown us just how far people will go to survive one more day.

The main thing that gets overlooked when some self appointed smahtie starts one of these threads is that these bands of marauders are just about allways one step from being wiped out. Sometimes they are close to depleted of fuel or supplies before the story even starts and its part of why they are raiding town X.

As for falling back to more primitive states. This also depends alot on the depiction. One big factor will be if a group has anyone who knows agriculture or metalworking. Or if they have access to books that tell how. And theres the problem of seeds and a viable spot to settle. Maintaining tech will get harder and harder.
Or worse. Maintaining some tech will be just short of impossible as some modern good have built life spans so the buyer has to buy another of the item later. That could take as little as 5 years in some cases.

Then theres the fact that farming is a full time job for a family.

So its not as implausible as some morons keep trying to make it out to be.

Any sort of post apoc world is likely going to be a patchwork of groups at varying levels of tech. Something Gamma World used way back even.

Farming is a full time job for a family.  But hunting and gathering is a pleasant part time job.  

Ifbthere is a major population crash there will be plenty of food for the survivors.  You know assuming green plants still grow.  And if they don't, its not future generation's looking through our books its future life forms digging through the Anthropsien a couple million years from now.

Traditional farming is a full-time job.



It's fun to imagine Billy Badass down the street filling his backpack with bullets and cans of baked beans and riding forth on his Harley Davidson to save humanity from the apocalypse, but he's more likely to fall victim to his own short-sightedness and end up on a pyramid of skulls somewhere.

"Adventure is just bad planning." -Roald Amundsen

Survival in an uncertain and resource-scarce environment environment requires a capacity for long-term planning. "Stock up on bullets and spam" can only get you so far. Hunting and gathering isn't an answer either. The most likely cause of global societal dissolution at this rate will be ecological collapse. Even if we do manage to kill ourselves some other way, our survivors will still have to contend with damaged and derelict factories and power plants leaking heavy metals into the water supply. Contaminated aquifers will kill off flora and fauna, making both foraging and traditional agriculture impossible. There will be sudden spike in Mad Max wannabes, followed shortly by another round of mass-deaths as the raiders and survivalists blow through their remaining resources.

Humanity can't survive the fall of our civilization by following our rules. Humanity may survive by exploring novel solutions.

If humanity is to survive an apocalyptic event, I imagine they will do so by:
1. Making use of automation to compensate for a lack of man-power
2. Utilizing some currently unexploited source of nutrition, such as entomoculture

BTW while a Mad Max situation would not occur, I do think apocalyptic fears & fantasies would have an impact. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that; the US media and the suburbs around New Orleans were expecting the flooded city to turn into Mad Max land. This didn't happen, the people in the flooded city did not engage in an orgy of violence. But fear of them did mean that the police in the mostly white suburbs in places actually sealed egress from mostly black New Orleans and didn't let survivors out, exacerbating the disaster. Stuff like that would certainly happen in divided societies. OTOH Louisiana is an extreme case of racial polarisation even in the USA.

Quote from: Cave Bear;1010630Spinning off from another thread.


We tend to assume that survivors of our civilization's collapse will be more primitive than ourselves. We assume that they will devolve into marauding, tribalistic cargo-cultists sustained only by what they can salvage from our ruins. We assume that as a given.

What if we are wrong?

What if the tribal peoples of the post-apocalyptic future are smarter than us? What if the survival pressures of their environment drive innovation and creativity such that their own scientific and technological progress surpasses us?




Let's imagine post-apocalyptic civilizations that put our own civilization to shame.

We have stupid people living in current day now. See Democrats. Not sure how atomics would make them wise in any way.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1011073Not sure how atomics would make them wise in any way.

Survival of the fittest. If civilization collapses, it will probably be because of our short-sightedness. When civilization collapses, it will prune out the short-sighted.

Quote from: Omega;1010964This also depends alot on the depiction. One big factor will be if a group has anyone who knows agriculture or metalworking. Or if they have access to books that tell how.

Well ... there's a staple of post-apoc narrative that's a heap of wishful thinking.  It's that there's Some Wise Fella (or cluster of the same) who knows how/where to farm/forge/do old timey crafts, and a plurality of the good folk listen and learn.

Really?  C'mon.  Let's take contemporary politics.  People don't give a damn for facts, truth, morals or common sense: they listen to the ones who tell them what they want to hear, when that dovetails with their prejudices, preconceptions and innate tribalism.

Quote from: Cave Bear;1011075Survival of the fittest. If civilization collapses, it will probably be because of our short-sightedness. When civilization collapses, it will prune out the short-sighted.

Not particularly.  It'll prune out the less violent and less heavily armed.

And then shortly after that the second most violent.

Quote from: Ravenswing;1011110Really?  C'mon.  Let's take contemporary politics.  People don't give a damn for facts, truth, morals or common sense: they listen to the ones who tell them what they want to hear, when that dovetails with their prejudices, preconceptions and innate tribalism.[/COLOR]

Yeah, and those people will starve to death when somebody moves their cheese.

Violent tribalistic dumbasses like ISIS might take over in the short term, but they will burn themselves out and get outcompeted in the long term by those who know how to think in the long term.

Okay, so evidently we cannot imagine a future past blood crazed bikers in BDSM gear...