Indefinitely, but significantly less life expectancy than if it didn’t happen.
I’m relatively well set up and experienced for that kind of thing. Don’t get me wrong, it would suuuck. But I think we’d be okay. I personally would probably not live as long because living rustic is fucking hard work and my kids are still too young to help much. We’d have a rough time of it, but I am confident that with our help my kids would figure out how to thrive by the time my health is failing. So yeah at least another generation or two seems likely even though I doubt I could last more than another 10 or 15 years living that way. Especially given that the first few years would be the hardest.
I know a place I could last for months, depending on what time of year the power’s lost, but it’s a long ways from here. And then, only if bullets for hunting were still available (they’ll get scarce fast, faster than toilet paper when COVID came around). Once the bullets are gone, I’ve either learned to trap or become a vegetarian.
black powder tech is very simple, you just need a mediocre blacksmith - and that’s just a strong man (or a woman, maybe) - and a little bathtub chemistry. basic black powder rifles are not the most accurate, you need rifling for that (grooves that create a spiral down the inside of the barrel of the rifle), but it’s easily doable. long/recurve/compound bows are an option if you have the knowhow and material science.
trapping/fishing is an option, as is animal husbandry, but hunting would never disappear
So just to start on your first point, let’s assume the flare hit and you need to start making black powder from raw ingredients. Since there are no more available with supply chain breakdown, without consulting the internet (also down), where are those coming from within walking or bicycle distance with maybe a paper map if you still have one?
well black powder is just a mixture of charcoal (you need wood and mud to make a charcoal pit), saltpeter (aka potassium nitrate), and sulfur. nitrate is found in many household products - hence the bathtub chemistry. there’s a lot of that stuff all over the place, it’s in just about everything - from salts, makeup products, fertilizer, plant food, etc. I’d use that first while building a natural extraction process since it takes a long time, months usually.
you’d take dung from animals (horse works well or cow patties), wood ash, dry straw, and lots of urine (barrels of the stuff). a few months later you drain off the liquid, boil it with finely ground charcoal and then filter it with cloth. simmer the strained liquid until it’s reduced by 3/4, you want it really concentrated. spill it out onto very shallow pans and let it dry to crystalize the nitrates. sulfur is readily obtained from many sources - usually volcanic but these days its in a lot of building/construction materials like gypsum. basic chemistry will allow you to extract it. I live near geologically active areas, so sulfur would be relatively easy to obtain in the future.
there’s no real set recipe for black powder, but approx 75% dried & powdered nitrates, 15% dried and powdered charcoal, 10% dried and powdered sulfur. you want to grind each individually and then mix them together in those ratios. now you have black powder. keep it dry and away from spaks/flame/heat - bull horns work really well for this.
casting shot is just melting lead in a specific form - my father probable still has his old tools for that but if he doesnt they’re not hard to make. the only tricky bit in the whole process of building your own diy black powder rifle is the barrel - you have to hand forge those around a mandrel (a rod of a specific thickness) - I’d use high grade steel rods for that, since they’re just laying around. blacksmithing is usually a two or three person setup. once I had a water wheel constructed I’d probably build a hydraulic powered trip hammer to make things easier.
I feel like if this ever happened, you’d want to practice that first step, because it might be easier to get gallons of urine then extract from a number of those sources.
the average person produces about 5 cups of urine in a day, and a gallon is 16 cups, so a group of people could easily produce anywhere between 1 and 3 gallons every day. the standard drum size is 55 gallons, so that’s easily obtainable. it’s a very slow synthesis, lasting 6+ months, you’d have between 3 and 10+ drums full of urine saved up at that point.
the average black powder musket or rifle gets about 50 shots per pound of black powder, and it takes a good minute or so to reload if you’re skilled, so you really dont carry that much powder around with you at any point in time. I figure you wouldnt need more that 5 pounds of it every month in a survival/hunting/defense against random invaders (rural setting) situation.
If property rights are still enforced in the turmoil probably indefinitely. Doesn't mean I'd enjoy it, though.
I come from a place where survival agriculture was the norm well into the 1980s. Would have to start having cows and pigs again, need to work out a salting station, which we haven't had for a few decades. I remember soap making was a mess. We got rid of our wood-fueled kitchen at some point, so that's a problem until society settles back in enough to start selling those again. We'd probably have to go back to setting up a corner for a fireplace in the meantime. That's before my time but it should be possible.
There was a TV series based on that idea; it got weird after a while but does point out some of the complexities of living without power. The show is called Revolution and came out in 2012.
Personally though, I doubt a majority of people would be able to survive long due to complications of getting fresh water, food, not to mention medical care, etc.
Good point. Having a *really * good stash isn’t a bad idea. BUT then there’s the rubber hoses. To avoid the looters, then, means moving away from them … and not leaving tracks to the stash.
I know a couple of things about making log cabins. For someone who’s got food and my back.
Hopefully quite a while. I’m regularly in the wilderness, a holiday is 2-3 weeks off-grid. The only thing I use electricity for is lighting (torches and camp) and music/radio, powered off battery’s that are handled by solar.
I aim to extend food by fishing, which usually is week 2 after my stored meat is gone and I need more protein. I have a couple of different weighted bows, but rarely hunt as it requires extra licensing. Lots and lots and lots of expedition-level outdoor/survival gear.
Combine that all with still having a house for shelter, should be fine. Love a book and crosswords for non-electric entertainment, otherwise mountain biking or rock climbing. I won’t get bored.
I think fish wouldnt be as available as you think, since tons of desperate people will use less than ethical means to harvest every edible, living thing from the river systems.
Leaving to massive ecological damage, and possibly massive contamination as well.
maybe for the first few weeks but most of the population thinks fish comes from a can, and beef from the store. most people dont have the ability to live off the land - they’re just walking sacks of fertilizer
I think you misjudge, considering how massively popular fishing became during covid, as one of the only hobbies you could do that was outside and solitary.
oof, raw fish? most fish have parasites (which is why sushi/sashimi has to be frozen or chilled to a certain temperature). no, you’re right of course but those folks wont last long enough for it to matter.
and if, just spitballing here but lets say 75% of the population succumbs to this hypothetical disaster, then the remaining population will have significantly lower impact on the environment, giving it a chance to recover. if anything, it’d be a net gain as there’s a lot of intentional dumping of toxins right now.
Assuming an intentional EMP sent America back to the stone age, then America would respond in kind to China, N.Korea, Iran, Pakistan and Russia. England, continental Europe, Turkey, India, Israel, Japan, S. Korea would all have been hit with the same at the same time. If somehow we all just traded queens and stopped there, or if a prolonged solar storm hit the planet repeatedly accomplishing the same, I really think your optimistic limiting global losses to 75%
After the first northern winter I would assume 90-95% of humanity is gone. Those that can hunt are the most likely to survive. Seafood increases your odds of survival by orders of magnitude, as it requires some skill, but much less caloric investment before reward. By and large we’ve lost the ability to farm without fertilizers and pesticides, many will try but one early freeze will kill off dependant communities. Climate change making weather less predictable def does not work in our favor.
After the first winter I wouldn’t be afraid of strangers. Another person is far too valuable, when you remember that there are lots of things outside that will happily kill us. We only have strength when we’re in numbers.
oh I agree, if a military attack/emp were to occur we’d use our mutually assisted destruction weapon systems (military hardened bases, not susceptible to emp) & wipe them out. it’d be the literal end of the world over there.
yes, it was very optimistic. 5 to 10 percent of the current population of America (the rest of the world wouldnt matter at that point) is still 15 to 30 million people. even spread out there’s still a good chance to develop small kingdoms, and those would specialize as they always do. trade routes would organically develop over time. it’s true that we do get a lot of things from overseas but the North American continent has loads of untapped resources, it’s just cheaper to get them from somewhere else in the world right now (take coal for example over in west virginia - they’d specialize in coal extraction, processing, chemistry, industrialization).
personally, I think the climate would stabilize fairly soon after such a catastrophe, probably within just a few generations - and if not, so what? no one is going to be living in cities that are underwater anyway.
oh yeah lakes/parks that the noaa/fish&wildlife departments stock up would be emptied soon enough. a fisherman needs patience though - and as fish stocks dwindle, you have to be patient for longer and longer…
I think your point would be true in a high population city in a high population nation where most of it is accessible to the average person.
I live in Australia, though.
Fishing requires gear, skill, and knowledge. For much of our fish abundance the average person wouldn’t survive getting to the area or know what to do once they got there. This is why they have untouched abundance.
I think the immediate deaths would all be from people who need electricity to run medical devices.
Followed shortly by people who require refrigerated medication.
Followed by elderly who die from exposure to extreme, unconditioned temperatures.
and that would be in the first, oh, say… week or two.
Then, with fridges full of rotted food, your first major death wave will occur as masses of people lose their absolute goddamn minds in panic and fear and start food riots/try to rob from others/raid big industrial farms/neighborhood gardens/etc, which leads to mass deaths from starvation, exposure, exertion, desperation, and gunshot.
Which will even out after about a week or two.
Then you settle in for the slow burn. 3 months out you’ll have another, comparatively small wave of deaths from people who run out of non-refridgeration requiring medications.
Then another slow burn until manufactured canned goods run out in stores and scavanged homes until a wave of starvation.
All in all, I’d say you’d probably be over the bulk of the mass deaths after 6 months, and with a significantly reduced population… Which will be to the benefit of the survivors, since less people per mile will make farming/hunting easier, and life safer… because while raiders/thieves will always be a overarching concern and safety issue, at this point, most of the desperation should have passed along with most of the desperate.
There will also be, for at least a generation, possibly two, the lingering unspoken understanding that more people than anyone would ever care to count only survived the famines and fall by eating the long pig.
Yep. I’d have about a month and a half of insulin to use, since it lasts that long out of refrigeration. It would take a while to actually kill me probably, but yeah that would be what gets me I think.
You got it right. If you’re already in a hospital you’re screwed. Anyone on a ventilator etc. is dead in hours.Then there’s people who need special meds that require refrigeration. They’re dead in days. Depending on the season, many more are dead in weeks. Food would be an issue but there are lots of shelf stable/canned goods that could last for a bit. Scarcity would be the bigger concern.
The dead bodies themselves could also be an issue at scale.
The crazier issue in my mind are all the industrial plants, nuclear power plants, chemical processing facilities…
In any major catastrophe they are abandoned and likely the meltdown and other issues could render whole areas uninhabitable. Might be manageable in certain power loss scenarios… but anything major and sudden like if you’re country suffered a nuclear attack or a major natural catastrophe and you survived I’d stay away from nuclear plants or chemical processing facilities. Potable water will be hard enough to come by…
To be fair most people in a first world country don’t need to think about water since it’s just “there”, all the time.
But as soon as the electricity goes out the water supply goes out too.
No water supply means no water to drink, with no water the human body die within 3 days, so people will start to rely on any dirty water they can find.
About dirty water, no water also means no WC. I repeat: no WC so no evacuation of feces and urine. Within a few day a big city swill be covered with human excrement. Mixed with no clean water access it means that deadly waterborne diseases will spread extremely quickly.
I wonder about the population using non-refrigerated but still vital medication being “comparatively small.” There are countless people who would no longer be getting things they need to live, and only a very small percentage of those folks would have the ability to grow a plant or something and refine themselves a substitute of some kind. I am really curious how those numbers would line up.
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