To what level of tech would society revert? (Post-Apoc)

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I am trying to envision a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting in which civilization ends in 1982 due to battles between godlike creatures spread across the world. The damage is not contained to major population centers or strategic sites as in a nuclear war, but about 1/3 buildings (including libraries and their collections) are left intact. Eventual population decline is about 99%, mostly due to disease and famine.

What technology would be recoverable with limited access to public libraries and some surviving scientists and engineers, but with pre-industrial infrastructure? I envision a society that technologically regresses to roughly the 1600's with a few holdovers from the 1800's, but I want to make sure that is realistic.

Power: Steam engines and windmills / waterwheels should be easy to make, but would it be possible to make batteries or internal-combustion / electric motors using hand tools? Would the survivors be able to extract a useful amount of oil and coal to run these engines given that the "low-hanging fruit" would have already been mined by 1982?

Weapons: Black-powder flintlock muskets are a given, but can percussion-cap or metallic cartridges be made? Is it possible to manufacture smokeless powder (enabling breach-loaders) without post-industrial tools?

Transportation: Are lighter-than-aircraft possible? Bicycles (esp. the modern chain-driven bike)? Paved roads? If so, what level of population and organization would make them feasible? AFAIK, the Romans were the only pre-industrial power to build a significant amount of paved roads, and they had a level of organization orders of magnitude better than the survivors in this scenario.

Agriculture: Can any elements of industrial farming be utilized, or would agriculture return to a Renassaince level?

Medicine: With modern medical knowledge but little infrastructure, how far will treatment of injury and disease regress?

[Ahriman238]

Complicated enough I'm far from certain of the answer. It depends largely on how well-distributed knowledge of this things are which, honestly? Comes down largely to regionalism. In what part of the world is this story taking place? How wealthy was it, and how good was the education system?

Most people will understand how to create an electric current, and enough to figure out the most basic batteries. Producing statistically relevant amounts of either... is another story. We have be down to hand-cranked or pedal-powered homemade generators.

There are probably enough people who understand percussion caps and metal cartridges to keep that going, less for smokeless powder. Again with regionalism. It's possible in your brave new world there will be a handful of people in one town who can produce these things and the surrounding communities trade with this town or swear fealty to it for protection.

You can build an ultralight with a car motor, finding fuel for it might be rougher. Bicycles should be doable. Roads will likely require more effort and expense than post-apocalyptic communities will be willing to spend on them. But hey, after a few rough winters the roads in New England will be shit while the roads in say, South Carolina will barely have deteriorated.

With 99% dead and 66% of buildings knocked over, you're going to lose a ton of knowledge and most of the people who can fill in the gaps between what you read in a 5th grade science text and practical application. At the same time, unless everyone was an expert in something BEFORE your catacylsm, you can probably justify most any knowledge you want to survive for the sake of your story pretty easily.

[Gunhead]

What you also need to determine is how fast does the remaining population start banding together to form groups big enough to defend against bandits / other hostiles and produce food at a sufficient level so some of the people can devote their energy towards rediscovering / rebuilding technology. This is largely dependent on how big clumps of people there are left and where. Scavenging will only take you so far, even if there is tons of stuff for people to survive on. This will only last so long anyway, food items and so on will not keep forever and even canned stuff will expire eventually. Even chemicals will dilute and lose their potency over time, such as fuels. For any kind of fast start to achieving a sustainable level of technology to happen, you'd have to have it happen pretty fast. The longer you wait, more and more of non replaceable equipment / fuel / stores will be used or lost.

This is very much dependent on location and the level of preparedness for the coming cataclysm. If there was no or little warning, I think it's pretty unlikely a group that can do all this would emerge fast enough to seize all it needs to get things rolling, unless it happens by chance. If there is some warning and a group is even semi assembled before disaster strikes, the chances of them making it are increased.

-Gunhead

[Broomstick]

Power: Steam engines and windmills / waterwheels should be easy to make, but would it be possible to make batteries or internal-combustion / electric motors using hand tools? Would the survivors be able to extract a useful amount of oil and coal to run these engines given that the "low-hanging fruit" would have already been mined by 1982?

A "useful amount" of coal for 1% of the population is quite different than a useful amount for 6 billion people. There are still open seams of coal in Appalachia and other locals that can still be mined by primitive means.

Oil, in the sense of petroleum, is likely to be a greater problem, as is raw ore for many metals. On the other hand, there will be a lot of metal bits lying around that could conceivably be recycled provided there is sufficient fuel to drive a forge.

As noted, there are still accessible coal seams. Other fuel, though - well, vegetable and animal oils are possibilities, as is the generation of methane via bacterial action. Our world doesn't have infrastructure set up for that, but a world struggling to recover from apocalypse might well develop it.

Transportation: Are lighter-than-aircraft possible?

Absolutely. Actually, heavier than aircraft are possible. I will explain:

The Montgolfier brothers in France were launching hot air balloons as early as the 1790's. The main obstacle is knowledge, not material technology. The biggest problem with aviation pre-1900 was the underestimation of just how big things needed to be - how big a balloon needed to be, how big an airplane wing needed to be. By the late 1890's the world had the first steerable lighter than air vehicles. These were small scale, and small scale is likely how the post-Apoc air force will remain for some time.

Small scale aviation can be done by small groups of people utilizing minimal tech, large scale aviation can not. It could be used for communication, for transport of individuals or very small groups, or transport of small, compact, and valuable items. And sizable cargo is likely to be via lighter than air due to fuel concerns although generating lift will be interesting. Despite flammability hydrogen is likely to be the most useful lift gas as it retains lift even without need to be heated (until hot air) and is easier to obtain than helium.

The big problems with heavier than air tech was lack of knowledge of the needed wing area/structure, and lack of steering mechanism. As far back as Ancient China and Egypt the world had the material tech and the math needed to construct workable gliders, what was lacking was aviation knowledge: how big to make a wing, usefulness of camber, how to steer. That has now been solved and reference books should be findable in the average library (I recommend, among others, Wolfgang Langewiesche's Stick and Rudder which is understandable to the non-flying layman, gives the basic knowledge needed for flight, and has been in continuous print since 1944 so there are a LOT of copies around the world so it's reasonable some are going to survive. There are others, of course, but it's a start for understanding more technical information). You can construct a workable heavier than air vehicle using mostly natural materials - wood and fabric - with minimal hardware. The next big problem would be finding an engine and fuel. You don't need a LOT of horsepower to get one person off the ground - in my case, as an example, I have managed to get aloft on 22 horsepower. The Wright Brothers did it on 12 hp engine (with a really shitty airplane, too, I might add - the 1903 flights suffered more from aerodynamic design inadequacies than lack of engine power). An engine running on alcohol or vegetable oil might not be as efficient as a modern gas engine but it doesn't have to be - 50 hp would be quite adequate for an ultralight/microlight flying one, maybe two people or one person and a little cargo. Certainly it would be adequate for communications and/or reconnaissance.

There has been at least one working airplane that ran on steam power. Yep, steam engine flight. Not terribly fuel efficient but if a steam engine is all you have...

Flight isn't going to be terribly common, but it certainly could continue. And both accidents and fatalities are going to go up, both from more primitive materials/less quality controls and loss of modern weather tech which is heavily satellite and radar dependent.

You will not, however, have helicopters without at least a WWI or WWII era level of tech.

Bicycles (esp. the modern chain-driven bike)?

Yes, you should have both a lot of leftover bikes, and the ability to build new ones, although the frames might be wood rather than metal in many cases. They are also likely to become heavier and with either fewer or no gear changes.

Paved roads? If so, what level of population and organization would make them feasible? AFAIK, the Romans were the only pre-industrial power to build a significant amount of paved roads, and they had a level of organization orders of magnitude better than the survivors in this scenario.

The Incas also had paved roads. They were a pre-literate society. On the other hand, they were also highly organized. You need a substantial level of organization to pull this off, pre-1500 only empires - Roman, Incan, maybe others - managed to pull this off.

Agriculture: Can any elements of industrial farming be utilized, or would agriculture return to a Renassaince level?

Hmmm.... some mechanized things that could run on either steam or animal power could endure. The Amish might be a source of this tech, given that they've hung on to a lot of it. Mule and horse driven combines appeared in the 1830's, so it's possible. The cotton gin, invented in the 1790's, will make a comeback as well.

There will be a strong incentive to retain or rediscover agricultural labor-saving devices because it makes food production less chancy. The early years, when there is still stuff to scavenge, there will be leeway for mistakes and bad years but as time goes on production will become a vital activity.

Medicine: With modern medical knowledge but little infrastructure, how far will treatment of injury and disease regress?

A lot of medical progress is due to such simple things as germ theory, washing hands, and proper sewage. These things are retainable even with primitive tech. Anything more than simple surgery or dentistry will be lost, and without modern anesthetics invasive procedures will be more savage.

Assuming folks remember how to sterilize instruments and wash their hands there will be fewer deaths from infections in one sense, but you'll lose antibiotics, anti-virals, advanced surgery, and so forth.

[Forgothrax]

Medicine: With modern medical knowledge but little infrastructure, how far will treatment of injury and disease regress?

Well, we're a lot better at prevention in some ways than we used to be. However, without technology, a lot of treatment and diagnostic options are simply not available. Medications decay over time, so within 5-10 years of the event dosing will be difficult, and within 20 medications will be unusable. That said, we will retain knowledge of herbs commonly used to treat different illnesses, so we'll have some treatment options. With the elimination of smallpox and polio, as well as the practical elimination of several other diseases, it's likely that epidemics won't be quite as common, but as those who have been vaccinated die off or vaccinations lose efficacy without boosters, we'll start seeing more infectious diseases... without the ability to treat them.

That said, anybody with chronic conditions that require continuous management is simply SOL. Diabetics, people with renal conditions, etc. Insulin can be produced in kitchen-sink quantities to some degree, but the effort required to do so with a low-end techbase is probably not commensurate to the value of maintaining such a person. If they're the more fortunate diabetics who can manage it by diet and exercise, or can use oral medications, they may manage to last a few years but will probably die off quickly.

To the West, contraception is going to become of vital importance. While reproducing quickly is important, women without access to modern medicine do die in childbirth more frequently and without careful sexual management, we could lose people whose knowledge is important. Similarly, people are going to have to adapt to the more frequent deaths of the very young and very old.

Like Broomstick said, surgery is going to take a massive step back. It's possible to produce ether and nitrous oxide, so anesthesia is not a major problem, but without access to muscle relaxants like succinylcholine and its relatives, surgery will cause a great deal more damage. Even with succs, you also need to manage breathing (usually by respirator) and that's not going to be possible.

The greatest problem immediately will be in the field of mental health. The general collapse of civilization and associated horrors is going to do a significant number on anyone's psyche. I'd expect to see a LOT of mental health problems cropping up. Suicide would probably be rampant, at least initially, and PTSD would likely be a fact of life.

Weapons: Black-powder flintlock muskets are a given, but can percussion-cap or metallic cartridges be made? Is it possible to manufacture smokeless powder (enabling breach-loaders) without post-industrial tools?

If you can make nitric acid and sulfuric acid, you can make smokeless powder. Metallic cartridges are not necessary; paper cartridges will work with breechloaders (see the Chassepot). Fulminate of Mercury is the traditional percussion cap material, but there are IIRC safer and easier to make alternatives.

That said, black powder flintlocks will be fine as hunting weapons. The sheer amount of ammunition and weapons available in the United States, however, will ensure that nobody needs to produce new weapons for a few decades at least until existing stocks are used up. So long as you store ammunition properly, I have no doubt that a well-maintained Mosin will last until the last of the ammo in the area is gone.

[Ahriman238]

One of the first casualties will be the ease of transport the modern world takes so much for granted. With only so much fuel and un-maintained roads, a simple twenty minute drive to the next town will be first a luxury, then unfeasible. Walking and biking will be the new normal. Which means lots of supplies aren't distributed. Your diet becomes restricted to what can be grown locally.

Another major factor is these godlike beings that apparently crushed civilization underfoot, more-or-less by accident if I understand you correctly. What are they? Where do they come from? How deliberate was this? I ask because I can remember one book (Mutineer's Moon) where ancient humanity were starfarers who lost their technology and history after being stranded on Earth. Largely because there was an armed and advanced group acting for those first decades to kill any technical specialists or leaders. If these entities intended to cause the destruction, there's tons of little things they could do to make things so much worse.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

The setting involves the aftermath of the construction of a Forbidden Planet-esque "wish machine". As soon as it's turned on, subconscious wishes, fears, and nightmares come to life across the globe, and the world is torn apart within hours by deities, dragons, demons, etc. Stories would be set many generations after this event, so any original technological artifacts, buildings, fuels, etc. that weren't carefully or magically preserved ("magic" being an interaction with the damaged machine) would be dust.

If I understand correctly, it seems like both external and internal combustion engines could be built on small scales for special purposes, and small aircraft would be rare but not unheard of. Bicycles would be a common mode of transportation (what would the tires and tubes be made out of, btw?), and paved roads would exist only in very well organized places. Weapons would resemble those of the American Civil War except with 1890's propellant (this is actually a problem as I had envisioned a more "sword and musket" setting). Agricultural efficiency and medicine would be quite good, although not at a 20th century level. Overall, it seems like societies would only be knocked back to an 18th century tech level, and within a few generations would be able to recover to a 19th century level with a few early 20th century calling cards.

P.S. I forgot about communications. Would it be possible to build a telegraph network if you understood the theory but didn't have 19th century tools? Also, could a light-bulb be easily constructed and powered?

[Broomstick]

The Morse telegraph was invented in 1837. Earlier experiments in transmitting electrical signals over wires date back to the mid-18th Century.

The biggest obstacle to an electric telegraph is drawing great quantities of conductive wire which you need both for transmission and for an electrical generator.

Other forms of telegraph, such as light signals or semaphore, require clear lines-of-sight but date back thousands of years. Something like the "clacks" system in the Disc world novels would definitely be possible to very crude levels of tech.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes; the main reason "the clacks" didn't exist in real life is that it didn't occur to anybody to make the investment- semaphore signaling did get implemented, but the large scale "run clacks tower lines all across the continent" schemes require a level of investment most rulers weren't interested in making. Having good data-transfer infrastructure isn't as valuable to a normal medieval person as it is to us today.

[Also, it is entirely likely that in real life, a "pony express" system of relay riders would have been cheaper by far than the clacks system]

[madd0ct0r]

is the machine still running?

Becuase it'd be hard to starve to death if so.

[madd0ct0r]

right on schedule: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/20/1308825110

[LaCroix]

With population cut back to 1%, you will see wood burning technology coming back with a vengeance. Charcoal is a very good energy source for small communities, and in wartimes, many people built cars running on wood-gasifiers. With lot's of land unused, lot's of natural re-forrestation would occur, anyway.

So, your world would probably have trucks and tractors running on wood-gasifying, and a charcoal and water power driven industry.

Also, WG-driven cars can be refueled with an axe... (As long as the wood is remotely dry and the fire still going strong.)

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

is the machine still running?

Becuase it'd be hard to starve to death if so.

The machine still runs, but it's damaged so people need to contort their bodies and thought patterns to get it to respond ("spellcasting"). Most people have no knack for it, and the techniques are discovered gradually and closely guarded, so widespread use that would benefit the average person does not exist.

With population cut back to 1%, you will see wood burning technology coming back with a vengeance. Charcoal is a very good energy source for small communities, and in wartimes, many people built cars running on wood-gasifiers. With lot's of land unused, lot's of natural re-forrestation would occur, anyway.

So, your world would probably have trucks and tractors running on wood-gasifying, and a charcoal and water power driven industry.

Also, WG-driven cars can be refueled with an axe... (As long as the wood is remotely dry and the fire still going strong.)

The stories would be set many years after the event, so the population would have recovered somewhat and all of the car and truck frames and parts would be history. Good point about charcoal power, though.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Thanks for the input, everyone! This will help when I flesh out the setting. I had originally intended to create a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting with mostly Medieval tech, developed pockets at an 18th century level, and a few preserved holdovers from the before-time, but now I realize that even the boondocks would be at or near 18th century tech with a few 19th century calling cards.

[The Guid]

Remember to some extent that "tech" is represented by our cultural, economic and social understanding.

In vast areas of the world we generally understand that other people around the globe are, for the most part, good eggs. One thing I would be surprised to see is a total flashback to earlier levels of warfare, certainly not straight away. War is still going to be less popular and acceptable than it was; people are less willing to lay their lives down for "the cause" than they perhaps were when vast armies lead by Emperors and Kings roamed the Earth.

Equally you can' just kick back the feudal system which existed largely on the basis that other forms of government were not even considered.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Don't worry, there will be warfare aplenty

At the time of the cataclysm, there were a number of starfaring alien species living on Earth who are now trapped and cut off from their technologically advanced past. The machine also responds to widely held beliefs, causing monsters and gods to become flesh and blood. If people loved slaughtering each other over made-up angels and deities, imagine the fervor of crusading armies being led by real ones!

[Irbis]

P.S. I forgot about communications. Would it be possible to build a telegraph network if you understood the theory but didn't have 19th century tools? Also, could a light-bulb be easily constructed and powered?

To run a "telegraph" network you need a bagful of hand mirrors, some pieces of bark or cardboard as screens, done. Throw in a few hills or tree platforms, viola, easy range extension. Link.

"Light bulb" called paraffin lamp (of quite advanced for the time design) is easy, too. We don't need to replicate both of the above exactly to get working equivalent.

[Ahriman238]

You could make things regress basically as far as you'd like with that basic premise. Enough of the right people dying would do the trick. If your cataclysm had the wealthiest and best-educated portions of the world sank underwater or turned to smoking craters, indirectly by people's envy. Or have fundies recreate the sort of god who will smite heathen secular scientists. Even if the gods themselves are long gone, a decade or two of people who ask questions or act too smart getting struck by lightning would leave a huge impact, both practically and in terms of people's attitudes.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

True, I was trying to see what the regress would look like according to the natural order of things, without the wildcards inherent to the setting. Otherwise I'd be asking you guys to speculate the entire basis for a fictional universe, which is my job