Re: Surviving something major like an EMP?
No nation stands forever, but I'd say it's a fair bet that humanity will at this point. Not only do we not want to kill the world, you can't without multinational collaboration. If you were building enough nukes to do it, every country in the world would know: it's going to take you at least 5 years, and you can't let them off in parts (because I'll just stop you with my single nuke, and there goes your whole manufacturing base). The only thing that would have a chance is some sort of dirty bomb, but even then pockets survive on places like isolated islands. Anyone who has taken basic physics will understand the difficulty of the EMP strategy: it's just as bad as the nuke one, in that you need hundreds and hundreds. But it's also worse because such things take a hell of a lot of energy, and the energy required goes up nonlinearly with the size of area to be covered.
Right now, we still have many, many peopl
e alive who lived without computers. This includes most of the scientists who invented them in the first place. America has farmers, you know, but it is true that it also has one of the heaviest reliance on tech. We would probably see the most population drop there. But no, we wouldn't need the knowledge to come back in from third world countries who, after such an event, couldn't give it to us anyway.
No, people aren't just going to go on a book-burning rampage. There is enough duplication that even if some do, nothing of major importance is lost. Even if most people did, there are places which presumably have government--and government is designed not to panic in this kind of situation, so I bet they'd know that we shouldn't burn the books even if everyone else went raving mad. Your library can give you all the information you need to live off the land, build radios and candles, build simple crank generators t
o charge them. You can find recipes for batteries in science books aimed at 5-year-olds. You can find info on how to make better ones from any chemistry or electrical engineering major.
We'd have radio in 5 years, and it would be able to reach across the ocean. Why? Those satellites I mentioned or,if nothing else, the moon. The so-called moonbounce is a pretty well-known Ham radio hobby these days: aim your radio at the moon just so, an it'll arrive places it normally can't because the earth is curved. We know where the satellites are, we still have mechanical telescopes, and therefore we can plan communication windows with different locations. This requires zero computers, and can be done with really basic hand-fabricatable hardware and crank generators. You can make a hydroelectric plant the size of your laptop and capable of providing continuous power by diverting a little bit of a waterfall with a shovel or some low-g
rade explosives and connecting it to your hand generator. I know almost zero about engineering this kind of stuff and only have some basic physics but, if I were sighted, I could have a radio inside a week after a trip to my local library. A radio powerful enough to do a moonbounce is harder, and the major delaying factor is waiting for more than one station to be online and/or finding the other station. Basic electronic components can be made in your kitchen.
Basic computers would take longer, but the techniques for solid-state devices are also old enough to certainly be found in written form. This would require more organization. We may not have raw resources handy, but all those computers that don't work anymore are sure made of a lot of metal and rare elements, now aren't they? And again, the techniques for recycling them are known. This needs organization, and it would take time for computers to be widespread again, but t
hey would come back and, again with the satellites, a good chunk of the internet infrastructure is still in tact. In fact, all the miles and miles of internet cabling is probably also fine--EMP doesn't typically hit that kind of stuff to my understanding. If you're lucky, one of the old wires that runs under the ocean is still working, though there's a lot that can go wrong there, and I'm not sure if we maintain any of them anymore.
And finally, the chances of it hitting everything? Small. If someone saw this coming, I'd power off my devices which gives them a much higher chance of surviving. There is hardware in emergency bunkers. There are survival cults who aren't taken very seriously at the moment, but who have put together all sorts of plans for this kind eventuality. Fiction gets this pretty wrong for the most part-we are not suddenly in the dark ages again. This doesn't hit modern social ideals
like slavery is bad. This does not revert all of Christianity back to the days of the witch trials. This would suck for me as a person given my visual impairment, and it would suck for many others. But we could be back to the point of the space program and considering visiting mars within a hundred years.
And finally, vehicles. There are still lots of vehicles in use that don't have electronics. They're rare, but exist. They'd obviously be valuable, but you can make more with a forge in your backyard, some basic manual metalworking tools that are still in use, and some patience. How do you think they came about in the first place? And if you own a car, you've got a giant metal deposit on wheels in your front yard.
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