What we really need is for the federal government to step up buy the land put its foot down and say protest all you want we are building this fucker one way or the other. Anyone caught on the construction site will be shot for for trespassing in a secure location.
Cut the population from ~7 billion to ~3 billion. Start with ebola and work up a good one. That eliminates the problem of selection. Random chance will take care of it.
you first.
blacksmiths need fairly significant infrastructure behind to be of any kind of use.
yeas because there would be no scrap metal form our millions of cars left for a blacksmith to reuse. It would all need to be freshly mined oar.
if the clothing isn't stored properly, it won't last as long. Before air conditioning and modern insulation, cedar chests were the bees knees in providing protection for clothing and papers. so all is not lost and it won't be all that bad.
that may be true, thank god then that much of our clothes are synthetic those not eaten by creepy crawlies.
The post-apocalyptic world would also need blacksmiths, potters, carpenters, farmers and so on. Not to mention someone capable of swinging a sword and lopping the heads off marauders intent on dragging off the young women and torching the village. The challenge is that scientists and engineers do not necessarily have the skills most critically.
Says the man that has never seen a trebuchet cannon or a ballista.
Whos gonna do it if not Slasdotters?
Competent people?
no they would of been killed by the mad maxian rednecks, we will only come out of our basements after we have run out of d&d campaigns and eaten the last of out twinkies which will take a while.
In either a sudden collapse, or gradual decay, much will be lost. Let me remind you that when the Roman civilization decayed, technologies as simple as the making of cement were lost.
Cement.
Not exactly what we'd consider "high tech." It demonstrates just how fragile our scientific advancements are. They can be wiped out by a few generations of relative illiteracy for the great mass of survivors. In three generations, electric lights are a distant legend and those ubiquitous round copper disks find their most frequent use as quick, easily made arrowheads.
Yeah they were knocked back a couple hundred years you knock us back a to 1800 and we would still be able to make electricity Ben franklin was playing with it a decent part of his life. Beyond that the average person in the roman era was illiterate and there has very little written down as apposed to today where every town has at least one public library, the elementary and middle school libraries have a set of one set of encyclopedias each at least, then there is you high schools with chemistry, biology, physics labs and a often a auto shop each with all of the information and much of the equipment need to to bootstrap your way into the early 1900s. Then there are the community colleges which would bring you up to say the 1950 level of tech. Anywhere with a state college or descent sized privet college could probably push you back up to the 1970s if not mid 80s. We despite all of our educations systems failing have at least enough literate people and redundant copies of most enough knowledge to boot strap our tech fairly quickly. Hell anyone with a couple of TB hdd and a few solar cells could mirror more then info information to preserve at elast our access to knowledge.
I don't think that would even stop them form collecting debt.
Well lights after dark would be one great reason for electricity as would radio so as to communicate with others. Motors would be another great use. security camera or alarm systems. Using preexisting power tools would be another great one. And as for transmitting power over a distance I would far rather use electricity it is much easier to splice a cable than repair a couple hundred yards of mechanical linkages.
I agree a surgeon would be way more useful than an md l, as for me a comp-sci IT person like most of slashdot we could still make electronics with our trusty soddaring iron so not completely useless
With your bare hands?!?
