I recently saw a comment chain about nuclear bombs, and that led me to thinking about this. Say there is a nuclear explosion in the downtown of my US city. I survive relatively fine, but obviously the main part of the city has been destroyed, while major zones extending from the center were also badly damaged. What would be a good response to (a) survive and (b) help out the recovery effort?
This brings to mind something David Mitchell said once on Would I Lie To You (British panel show):
Watch it here if you want, it was annoyingly hard to find.
However I don’t think David - who is a comedian - is precisely right about how such a war would affect the state of technology. If there are survivors, I don’t think we’d really be back to the bronze age. Even if all technology was destroyed (which it wouldn’t be), give humans a few decades, we’ll have some sort of modern technology back up and running. Maybe not computers, but some certainly some analogue electronics - the knowledge isn’t lost. Communications would be one of the first points of focus, so television would follow closely behind.
The longest stretch would likely be chip fabs. You need precision electronics and hazardous chemicals and plenty of power.
But considering that some form of electronics will survive, and it wouldnt take long for people to get rudimentary electricity going, I don’t see why we couldn’t have world Internet within a decade.
Yeah, chip fabs are exactly why I think computers would need more time. I’m not super familiar with this, but I’d wager such a factory can only be built using tools and machines that come from other specialized factories, and so on maybe 3 levels down before you get to a relatively rudimentary manufacturing process that can be reasonably achieved within a few years. It would take a lot to get that back up and running.
However… Just think about how many chips are currently just sitting around… Between scrapping and searching you would likely be just fine for a few decades.
EMP would fry most of them though.
Only if they were currently running, and I’m willing to guess the vast majority of reusable/scrap chips will be unpowered in the event of an EMP.
Replacing all working electronics with new boards would definitely be a task. But unless we get an massive flare from the sun I hardly think that’ll be an issue.
By the time nuclear war happens, most chip manufacturing capability will be underground or in hidden sites and therefore not targeted.
How could you be sure of any of that? For all we know, nuclear war could start tomorrow. Or, a bit more realistically, next year. How fast can these factories be built?
Counterpoint:
When you’re functionally immortal like Lazarus Long you’ll have time to learn all that. Most people only live long enough to master one profession.
None of that’s about mastering professions
The thing is, people inherently want to live. It’s instinctual. Secondly, everybody - regardless of skill level - can learn to be handy and useful. If everything is destroyed, and society is to be rebuilt, a lot of manual labor will be needed for cleanup and rebuilding. Even the “I pick things up and put them down” guy is perfectly suited for this type of work.
Thank you for the clip! I once found the show on youtube by accident, it is such a gem. It all started with the cabbage feud. (But I have come to notice that James Acaster only tells true stories, alas.)
I absolutely don’t get the point system though but nevermind.
I never tried to keep track, but I always assumed each correctly identified lie/truth gets a point, and each mistake gives a point to the other team. Keep in mind that the show gets edited down and you don’t see everything that the audience did, while the score probably includes those things you didn’t see.
But like, absolutely no one watches this show for the score, so who cares? It might as well be QI’s scoring system :)