Semi-apocalypse

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

First of all, a visual orgasm for y'all:

The breathtaking new images that reveal the violence of a solar flare - and the beautiful aurora it created on earth

* Radiation from the eruption set to hit earth within hours, creating a 'moderate geomagnetic storm'
* Incredible phenomenon could give new insight into how solar eruptions affect electricity supplied on earth

The images are amazing...

All right, first of all this is hardly the Earth-shattering event that would wipe out civilization as we know it, and other blabla bla... And the bulk of it is not even headed exactly our way anyway; so it's more of a scientific/layman's interest rather than a matter of grave concern, etc. Whatever. My point is different:

Let's imagine for a minute a hypothetical situation where we have an Earth that's just been struck by a massive hyper-mega-ultra-super-duper solar storm, that has rendered all existing technology ultimately dead. Let's imagine we've woken one morning in a world where electricity no longer reaches our homes and streets, the Internet doesn't exist, there are no mobile communications...

Hell, why not extend that to cars, other types of transportation, television, microwaves, subway, clocks, weather forecasts, anything. ANYthing technological beyond the mere coal oven.

Question. Would that truly cause a collapse of civilization? No, not "civilization as we know it", because that'll certainly be the case. I'm talking the dissolution of society. Now, I'm aware mankind has fared pretty decently in the conditions of past non-technological eras, but here we're talking of the sudden disappearance of modern technologies. That's an abrupt change by any measure.

So what's your subsequent scenario? How would things develop from there? Would we finally get the ultimate libertarian anarchistic utopia? What about the banking/finance system? They'd stop working, right? What about industry, trade, and the political process? I mean elections, democracy, represenative bodies, legislation, crime and justice, international relations, national security and terrorism?

Wouldn't the shepherds living high in the mountain and the hippies living in the dusty wilderness, and the Amish living in their modest self-sufficient communities, be the fittest to survive? Would agriculture become #1 occupation again? Would there be millions of deaths, wars for resources? Or reverting to a more close-to-earth approach to life? How would social mores change, how would religions fare, etc etc?

Yeah, try to imagine a world where you'd be unable to even access Livejournal! OMG, THE HORRORS!!!

Now imagine this has already happened earlier today. What would be the first thing you'd do?

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Shoot myself as the thought of living in an S.M. Stirling series would be too depressing to handle. This is the plot of his http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emberverse_series, albeit there it was more "Technology shuts down because story needs it to". If modern technology ceases to work, just the first stage of this will involve the grandest famine in terms of scale and death toll ever seen in the history of humankind, with 1 billion people dying in the first year alone, and the aftereffects of that many corpses and the disaster dominoes that follows means this is equivalent to a nuclear war without the nuclear exchange. Humanity might rebuild an urban civilization but the absolute most it could aspire to would be a Victorian model, not that of our own time. But this would be centuries or millennia down the line, in an Earth far less inhabited, where continents have diverged from each other again, and where in all probability the Natives in Australia and the Americas are once again extirpated in the name of progress, leading to the chaotic conditions that recreated independent countries there, setting up a repeat of a cycle of an unstable global order that degenerates into a set of global coalition wars which lead to new technology, ensue another super-solar storm and St. Leibowitz the Magnificent establishes Catholicism Mk. III.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

+1 Emberverse

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

If the coal engine still works, then guns still work. Yeah, things will get pretty shitty for a while there.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

I'd do what I do now: drink.

But probably with more people around me than now. (I ain't exactly the drinking-at-the-PC type, but still!)

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

As Shae responded when Tyrion asked, "But what are we going to do in Pentos if we flee from King's Landing?"

"...Eat. Drink. Fuck. LIVE!"

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

It may sound blasphemous, but such an event could actually have a cleansing effect on society in some ways. The knowledge about all that technology will still be there, so it'll be restored eventually. But what processes will happen within society while it struggles to restore the wound of lost technology, is the really interesting part. People will either rediscover the meaning of cooperation, of caring for the other; or they'll ultimately spiral down to the Dark Ages, due to their greed and egocentrism, and the desire to survive at any cost at anybody else's expense. Either way, it'll be a rough ride.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Given how much of today's 7 billion strong population requires modern technology to sustain itself, my prediction is the unparallelled death toll required to *start* this process will tend to the latter option, if for no other reason than a mass famine like this will produce a set of further spiraling catastrophes that create a gigantic, utter disintegration of the system as we know it. What succeeds it may be better, or we may exchange the Hashemite King of Iraq for a Saddam Hussein.

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

"The knowledge about all that technology will still be there, so it'll be restored eventually"

I'm doubtful about that.

How long would knowledge of electronics actually last in the callapse of civilisation? Even if those surivivors of the callapse did want to take the time to teach it to their children, how do pass that information on in a world without computers?

The best hope for the knowledge surviving is in books but the majority of them will be unreadable within decades. How well do you think the average library will hold up after the callapse of civilisation?

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

It would be the single most important event in the lives of those who lived at the time, but a couple of generations later, it would be just an interesting entry in the history books.

The larger, more urbanized societies would have months of martial law, and probably widespread famine and pockets of lawlessness, before replacement parts of sturdier tech or cobbled together tech was inserted into vital production choke points. You'd probably have a flare up of dozens of petty local conflicts around the world as people take a chance to get their shots in while the rest of the world is otherwise occupied.

But, like I said, a few months and the root infrastructure collapse would be mostly over. The political map would not have changed. The distribution of power (political) would change little. Within a generation you wouldn't be able to tell a difference demographically. The only somewhat long lasting change would be some entrenched draconian laws or collectivist adaptations left over from the famine years.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Dayum, and I thought we were talking of a permanent deprivation of technology, as opposed to a glitch in the system. And I painted such an apocalyptic picture! Sheesh.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Nat Geo did a special based on the premise in the OP, with the worst case type of solar flare (they explained what that would be etc) and they suggested it would be easily years before a city like New York would have any hopes for its electrical grid restored. What would that do to an economy like the United States? And you wouldn't be able to rely on replacement parts because in a worldwide crisis, they would be in high demand (never mind some could be damaged as well). Then you have the really bad situation with 700 power plants around the world, that will run out of back-up electricity from batteries within a few days (provided they weren't damaged in the initial storms too). So how would you cool the reactor rods then once those batteries run down? Diesel fuel and generators? How would you co-ordinate organizing all that when all the satellites are more than likely fried, so no cell phones, nothing to guide you, transportation issues, etc, never mind the general chaos? It'd be a really really bad.

It's why experts are practically jumping up and down on the table our electrical grid needs to be hardened and a lot more secure, while solar flares of the type discussed in the documentary would be very rare, there are other more important reasons to make this an national priority.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

I'd say civilization would collapse, billions of people would die. But with all the archived knowledge, A decent civilization would eventually come back (maybe 100 or 200 years later). And when it did, seafood would be a lot cheaper.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

A culture like ours which has always relied on self sufficiency (hell, we keep packing up jars of pickled vegetables for winter (https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=turshija&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&biw=1366&bih=643&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=5dhdUJyYIqP_4QSGy4HACw#um=1&hl=en&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=%D1%82%D1%83%D1%80%D1%88%D0%B8%D1%8F&oq=%D1%82%D1%83%D1%80%D1%88%D0%B8%D1%8F&gs_l=img.3..0i19.3496.4795.0.5049.6.5.0.1.1.0.137.572.1j4.5.0...0.0...1c.1.0rbHUj7NLoo&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=8bf07a311a4f77b6&biw=1366&bih=643), even in this age of big malls), would eventually take over the world! Mark my words!

Technology, schmechnology! A fleeting thing. Pickled vegetables are the real thing, yo!

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

Underlankers already brought up the Emberverse series of books, which would be pretty close to the effects of what you describe, IMO.
And I say this as a voracious reader of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction.

Except, well, chemical energy will still work in your solar flare mega-EMP scenario.
All a flare can burn out is electronics.
So we still have guns, batteries, etc.
Which gives us a huge leg up over the Emberverse.

And then there are the anti-EMP people, with faraday cages in their garages full of radios and vehicles and such.
And anything lone paranoids can do, governments can do exponentially better.
So there's a distinct probability that there would be some kind of remaining electronic technological base.

And if there are governments, there's the high probability that one or more of those will use the disruption try to pound the others into submission to gain a time advantage, as in the Plague Year trio of books. http://www.amazon.com/Plague-Year-Jeff-Carlson/dp/044101514X

But yes, particularly given the current trending toward increasing polarization and tribal mentalities, toward neo-feudalism, it seems highly likely that Stirlings work would be pretty close to prophetic in that case. Mass starvation and violence, followed by consolidation under strong entities that can make something anything work in the short term. A new dark age for sure. Small bands of survivors, eventually consolidating into tribes and city states via mutual interest and/or war. Slavery, horror, cannibalism. Knights on bicycles.
http://www.amazon.com/Dies-Fire-Emberverse-S-Stirling/dp/1400156769


Another worthwhile example from fiction would be JH Kunstlers World Made By Hand/Witch of Hebron books.
In which a global financial catastrophe, coupled with peak oil and a few minor pandemics has caused the once-modern world to slide back into a degraded technological state comparable to that of the 1800s. http://www.kunstler.com/index.php Less horror, more day to day existence.


Of course, neither of these accounts for global climate change, which is a long cycle and ongoing. For an excellent SciFi example of technological regression in a GW, peak oil, and Monsanto-raped world, check out Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. http://www.amazon.com/Windup-Girl-Paolo-Bacigalupi/dp/1597801585 A mix of high and no-tech, but a brilliant piece of fiction.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

I think I should read these Emberverse books.

[musicpsych.livejournal.com]

That sounds like the premise of Revolution, Mondays this fall at 10 pm/9 pm Central on NBC. (Though it's unclear so far in the show if it's just electricity that won't work, or all technology.)

I don't think it would cause the collapse of civilization. It would be a trauma for everyone, but we would deal and move on. A lot of us would have to learn skilled trades - there would be no use for the computer skills that some of us have worked hard to earn. Newspapers would gain more prominence as a way for all to communicate. We'd have to re-establish the Pony Express. We might get cut off from family who have moved a few states away, or to different countries. Death numbers would rise, partly due to an increase in crime, partly due to loss of access to medical machines/surgery, partly due to unskilled people making mistakes while learning certain skills.

The first thing I'd do is try to join up with/solidify the community around me, just because there is safety in numbers. Get some weapons, since we can't necessarily rely on the police. And work with the community to come up with a plan for how to raise food, ensure security, medical care, etc. I suppose that reminds me of Lost. (What is J.J. Abrams trying to prepare us for?)

Though I think my personality would change, as a result of not having access to CDs and mp3s I've collected over the years. They'd all be useless, so I'd be pretty depressed for a while. We would change culturally, too, with no more TVs. Maybe we would continue some of our TV shows by having touring plays that would come around to theaters around the country. Or TV show plots would get written down, become part of a storytelling tradition. We would read more books, though not on Kindles or other e-readers.

We would no longer get up to the minute news from all over the world. Which has positives (more focus on selves/communities, fewer violent protests about movies/cartoons) and negatives (easy for leaders to misinform/manipulate - "We are at war with Eurasia/Eastasia!").

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

You're right. Technology collapsing won't. The minimum billion deaths in year 1, the further millions, if not billions, from all the unburied corpses and vermin feeding on them, the subsequent collapse globally of the economy in a way that makes the 1930s look like paradise and in fact without precedent in any modern sense other than the fall of the Romanov Empire into a Czechoslovak rampage because there was nobody left to run the damned thing, and the equivalent loss with it of so much of our ability to sustain cultural memory, not to mention that modern populations are far too sparsely distributed to rely on older, less efficient, land-intensive forms of agriculture will collapse it instead.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

A coronal discharge that hits the Van Allen belts just so would send electrons to the ground, which would then conduct into any conductive material. Just a bit (like a nail on the ground) wouldn't do much; any network of connected conductive materials would electrify like a motherfucker. Communication networks (those based on copper): toast. Same for electric grids. And best be wearing a rubber suit if you happen to be walking along the train tracks.

Capacitors would blow. Same with batteries not isolated from line power (think UPC modules). Electronics would survive only if they get unplugged. Substations would likely perish, and it would take months to replace the substations . . . if someone can figure out a way to smelt and cast replacement parts without a grid.

We've kinda had a preview of this a few years ago. It weren't pretty.

One of the power companies around here decided to save money by not trimming the trees near power lines for a few years. (The Pacific Northwest has trees.) Come November, a big 50-year blow toppled enough trees to put almost half a million people out of power for sometimes up to a week.

Many people on the East side of Lake Washington had backup generators, so they just kicked them over and watched their plasma screens for news updates. What they hadn't considered is how long the power would be out, power that drove the gas pumps. Those stations with backup power ran dry in the first day, while the rest sat idle and helpless. In two days, most of these backup systems were out of juice, as were most of the SUVs it is so fashionable to drive. Gas in cans started selling for $15/gallon, mostly to motorists who needed to revive a stuck vehicle and get it across the bridge for a fill-up.

Some of the more remote households discovered that not all infrastructure is built alike. One man in Monroe started a fire in the 1970s fireplace when the furnace went dead, and kept it going for that week to keep warm. (Oh, did I mention the horrible air pollution from everyone doing this? Yeah, bad.) Many houses, it turns out, were never built with fireplaces that can withstand constant fire (as they used to around here.) After 6 days, the heat saturated the bricks enough to catch the framing alight and torch the house. Had everyone with such a sub-standard fireplace done this, whole neighborhoods would have gone up.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

So, my motorcycles with no cell batteries would still kick over allowing the magneto to power the headlight?

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

(Disaster, continued)


Take work (also on the East side). In the last remodel, they installed auto-flush toilets ('cause, hey, toilet handles are icky). They also installed a back-up generator to keep most of the plant going . . . most, that is, except the auto-flush units. The stink was pretty darned powerful. The lesson? They debated changes, but decided that it would be too expensive to upgrade the vent fans. The other bases have flush handles and don't smell like shit (even when power is on, some of the auto-flushers fail, like the urinal one that's been half-flushing for two weeks now). Oh, and did I mention nobody saw it necessary to install windows in the restrooms? Power out, and only emergency lighting guided one to the facilities. Once those died, the base went through lots of flashlights that week, just sitting on the sinks shining to the ceiling.

That was a week to remember, but did anyone learn from the experience? Nope. In fact, many learned the wrong lessons. One co-worker was pricing back-up gen sets that could run his house on natural gas so he wouldn't have to worry about running out of fuel.

---

Nobody starved. Since everybody drove, the snarls were the biggest problem; no traffic lights. More people died in car wrecks than anything else. Had this happened to the entire region for a week, larders would have been depleted, and trucks unable to fuel would not be able to refill the stores. Go further in time, and many would have died in hospitals unable to power the life-saving equipment. Since we recently changed to digital broadcast, emergency radio broadcasts might not be picked up by all sets. Try coordinating disaster response with no communication. That's just a smattering of what to expect.

We have as a people become too reliant on technology and have scrapped the gizmos that kept our ancestors alive. Even if we could restart them, few know how they work. It's going to be interesting, to say the least. Y'know, because it's happened before (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859); there's no reason to think it won't happen again.

I guess the sky will be beautiful.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY9kQcWLvEM

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

Technology is in the mind, not the machine. Assuming that physics, chemistry and mechanics still operate on the same basic principles, we'd be able to recreate our society in the long term.

In the short term, however, there will be large scale disruption to our infrastructure and a lot of people will die.

The societies best able to cope with this kind of turmoil are what are called "high trust" societies. Places where the institutions and culture are strong enough that people will, on balance, bet on their fellow citizens following the agreed social contracts. The US is a stereotypical high trust society. In this kind of situation, while it is fun to imagine the armed forces or police collapsing, people running amok and blood running in the streets, the truth is people will generally band together and help each other whenever possible. Consider Medieval Europe during the Black Death. Terrible. A third to half of the population inexplicably wiped out in just 3 years. But looking at the material culture, looking at the development of European power and influence, looking at any number of criteria, the event registers as a blip, barely noticeable. Not that I would want to live though something like that, of course.

Banking wouldn't stop. There was banking long before their was electricity. The nature of the job change, we'd would return to the old ledger system, but accounting hasn't substantially changed in 1,000 years. You lend money, you calculate interest, you pay dividends. That is just math. Solar storms can't destroy math, they can only destroy the things that make math easy to do in volume. Big industry would go into hiatus, GM, Ford, ADM, etc, dependent as they are on electricity and oil. However, industriousness can't be stopped. By our standards, trade would certainly be reduced to a trickle without container ships or trains, or trucks to transport goods but trading is as embedded in the human psyche as almost anything. Trade and traders would continue.

The problem with the Amish and the hippies is that they wouldn't be able to defend themselves. Even in a high trust society, people are still people. There would certainly be millions of dead. Many millions. We are too dependent on far flung, interconnected trade. Many would die as their life support, dialysis, insulin and other life saving drugs or therapies disappeared. Many would die of easily treatable infections as broad spectrum antibiotics were used up. It would be pretty horrible. I think, in general, people would muddle through. Since the knowledge of these technologies are widely distributed and deeply understood, I think that eventually the world would reach equilibrium.

First thing I'd do is load my guns and get together with as many of my friends as I could in order to start pooling resources. Then we'd suss out what the local government is planning and see how we could help. We're in a disaster prone area, so most of us are fairly well supplied with the necessities and already have plans to shelter in place for a few days-week. I also enjoy as many iced beverages as I could before the ice melted.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's a big more than a blip. It kept decimating at a minimum and gutting at a maximum cultures for centuries after the fact, with the last outbreaks in the 18th Century, while it helped create the crash of prestige that made the Reformation possible. It ended serfdom in Western Europe and forced fundamental changes in Eastern Europe, and the types of losses it created arguably played a role in fostering the rise of abolitionism. This is much worse as far more people die, and economies are dependent on networks that do not exist and where even a disruption that's temporally short in duration will be disproportionately lethal. With the death toll being even larger than the initial wave, you've got an arguable loss of knowledge as plague and starvation do not discriminate, not on this scale, and loss of wallets will hit the richer countries worse than the poorer ones.

We're looking at something without any real equal bar perhaps the Spanish Influenza, and the loss of over 1, perhaps 2 or 3 billion people will so far outpace the loss in six years of 50 million people worldwide that was WWII that we will have forgotten that war as much as people have forgotten the War of the League of Augsburg or the Second Congo War. If society recovers, it will be in a more austere and cruel form, not a better one.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Amazing to think just how large that flare is

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

We often see the northern lights, especially in winter. They were particularly bright two weeks ago but one night last july they were incredible.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_%28TV_series%29

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

I don't watch anything that's beyond 3 episodes. It tends to get diluted and too soapy after that.

[vehemencet-t.livejournal.com]

Telemann mentioned this above I see but I had the exact same thought.

With the 700 or so nuclear plant rods suddenly having nothing to cool them, most of the planet
would be inundated with fall out radiation from meltdown. I am not informed
enough to calculate how catastrophic that would be but I assume really really bad with no way to escape.
Blame your governments for building the damn things.

There would be no sudden anarchist utopia because there would have been no time
for the people to actually build that kind of society and learn it and appreciate it. Just chaos. Though its possible that overtime some would band together and establish anarchy successfully.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

If by most of the planet you meant 0.02% of the surface.

Of course most modern reactors have an emergency cooling method that doesn't involve electricity, but let's pretend they don't for the sake of this hypothetical.

Now if you detonated all the nuclear weapons ever made, which have a payload of like 100x any meltdown could do, then maybe you'd have a point there... for 2% of the surface.

But anyway, back to reality.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

This would be a luminous apocalypse ;-)

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

You'll have to forgive me the model is not to scale and I didn't have time to paint it.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Standard blackout plan would be in effect.

Retriev rifle from the Safe and Med-Bag from my truck, stage them by the back door. Roll out the charcol grill and start cooking anything in the fridge that's likely to spoil, invite neighbors to impromtu cookout.

If blackout is long term, set up the still and start making moonshine so that I have something to trade for goods / buy-off the roving bands of cannibals ;)

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

I'm SHOCKED you didn't mention the zombies! Because there always are zombies!

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Well in all fairness something on the level of the 1859 Carrington Event (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859) while not a "civilization ender" would be a major national disaster.

I mean if a blackout of lasting only a few days can result in riots and looting how do you think Chicago or New York would manage one that lasts a week or a month?

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Turns out the super-developed would crumble, while those living in shacks and using candles to light their nights, wouldn't even notice the difference.

Chicago? It's in deep trouble. Nairobi? Not so much.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit more optimistic than most. My bet is that we'd be back at about the 1950's level of infrastructure in a few months or so, back to the 80's, except wiser with regards to leg warmers and hair gel, by a year, and pretty much back to where we were in a decade. Economically it'd be a bad, bad time, but more like the great depression than the apocalypse.

Here's why. We would have a huge number of resources available and a huge number of people who know how to make those resources work and what they need to do. While anything with a circuit would be toast, 1950's era technology would still work, probably with some minor fixes. The first thing I'd do is to get a generator working. I'd get one from a car and hook it to a bike or an exercise bike. The generator should work, it takes quite a bit to fry one of those things, and if people survived this event, I'd expect most generators, motors, and transistors would as well. It'd take quite a bit to fry a blender, plug one into a wall and you can see how it handles 110 (or 220) volts. Now plug a person in and see how they do. If people can survive this event, quite a few of the parts that make the world run could.

I'm also guessing the transmission lines, fiber optic cables, and other infrastructure would do just fine. It'd take a bit to get things up and running, and I'm sure the folks in rural Texas would go without power for a bit, but I'd expect cities to have enough power and transport for essential stuff within weeks. After the basics are there, it wouldn't be hard to build on that. We've got a bunch of 1980's cars still around, or at least enough to get things rolling, and a lot of people who know how to fix them. Countries which are less dependent on technology would be doing even better.

Anyhow, baring zombies showing up, I'd think we'd make it through pretty well.