New answers tagged post-apocalypse
4
The most immediate change in the genetics of post-human animal life would be the collapse of the artificial barriers which we have built up to subdivide domesticated species into breeds. In the absence of humans to selectively breed them, the liberated domestics would choose breeding partners without regard for human definitions of beauty or purity.
So a ...
2
One obvious subset would be domesticated animals. There are many instances of previously domesticated animals going feral in the world right now: dingos, wild boars, feral horses, and feral cats, for example. The changes to their behavior and even appearance are notable after only a few generations. After 1000 years it would not be unusual to expect ...
1
Very few deserts are actually empty. You have a lot of choices, depending on the lifestyle and tech level of your people.
Hunter-gatherers might inhabit places like Alta Toquima: https://www.amnh.org/research/anthropology/curatorial-research/north-american-archaeology/projects/alta-toquima-nv https://www.thearmchairexplorer.com/nevada/alta-toquima-...
3
You'll need to make some decisions about the rules of your world... which is good!
This discussion is going to see-saw back and forth a bit so you can see where you can create rules to rationalize your world.
First, note that 99.99% of the technology we enjoy today was invented in the last 150 years. You're estimating 110-200 years after the apocalypse. That'...
-1
Concrete Homes
The recipe for concrete has been known since Roman times. Given all the construction going on in both major cities and small town, there will be hundreds or thousands of now unused cement bags lying around. There will also be plenty of gas powered cement mixers.
Modern concrete homes are poured all at once and have molds that can be setup ...
5
Mud
Much like old middle-east or african cities still in occupation today.
In a post nuclear war world, presumably there is a severe deficiency in:
Manufacturing
Transport
Fuel
Machinery
Education
That last point is essentially the major one: Expect educational systems to break down during the conflict and people returning to medieval levels of knowledge. ...
1
Simple real-world example to show it's possible:
Your temperatures are not far from has already been done many decades ago. Specifically, the cockpit of the SR-71 spy plane. It was more efficient to put the pilots in basically spacesuits and cool them than it was to cool the whole cockpit.
It will be much easier on the ground because you aren't ...
0
I think going underground is good, because it is colder further down. Then there is no need for air conditioning and special materials for insulation.
The hot air is full of water, which will condensate when the air is pumped underneath. All food production would need to go underground. This needs a lot of water. You need to pump a lot of air/water gas and ...
0
In addition to refrigerating the living compartments, you will need to move waste heat from the reactors out (significant amount). Note that 500F is pretty close to normal temperature of a steam cycle (for a nuclear plant). So, you'll probably need to use conventional cooling (say water recirc) and then massive refrigeration of the heated water. This may ...
0
You could have environments that improve with altitude.
You may have elevated temperatures and environmental conditions that wreak havoc on life except at very extreme altitudes. Maybe life forms that are able to survive at the most extreme altitudes. Adjust for as much of the Himalayas, Andes, .... that you wish to qualify.
Some hand waving is liable to be ...
6
Mountains
As others have noted, cooling 250 C is quite feasible using existing technology. After all, scientists quite regularly cool experiments to near absolute zero, which is more than 270 C below (water) freezing. Most MRI machines use liquid helium* cooled superconducting magnets and can operate essentially 24/7 in a hospital environment. Note that ...
23
There is no reason not to live above-ground in well-insulated and cooled buildings. As far as the infrastructure goes, that's clearly much simpler. The reason it's not crazy is that the effect of insulation has an exponential relation to the thickness: Say, your house is in Canada and its insulation reduces the heat flow from 20°C inside to -20°C outside — a ...
6
No intrinsic problem:
Given enough expense, the only limitation to a refrigeration system is that the place where you dump your heat must not be so hot that your hot-side of the refrigerator gets destroyed.
Also, your power generation method must not create more waste heat than can be handled, either by dumping into the environment (the usual way) or be ...
10
Short and imprecise summary of refrigeration: A refrigerant is compressed, causing it to heat up. The heat is shed by pumping the compressed refrigerant through a radiator. The cooled compressed gas is then pumped into the cooled area and depressurized. In order to expand it must heat up, which it does by absorbing heat from it's surroundings. This is why ...
17
Heat can be dumped into an area hotter than the area being cooled; if that weren't true, we wouldn't have refrigerators.
Now, these would have to be spectacularly good refrigerators. Normal refrigerants probably would be insufficient, and they'd be on permanent cycle, and their failure wouldn't just involve a call to Maytag.
Happily, 500F isn't all that hot....
6
Answer flavored by talking to a startup founder from the Phillipines who showed us how much educational material is lost due to cyclones and big storms.
The usual assumption is, even if we lost the internet cloud, libraries persist.
However, if there was a weather side-effect of continual, hellish cyclones and overall extremely humid climate, almost all ...
-2
What would be a reasonable timeline for this to happen?
Optimistically, 500 years
In order to lose reading and writing, you need to almost utterly destroy humanity. Not just in the sense of survivors going back to farming, but actually on the level of a near extinction level event. If you want to guess numbers of survivors, I'd put a maximum of 10 breeding ...
1
Knowledge is basically sticky. No matter what events transpire, knowledge will be preserved and eventually restored. A nonfiction book that illustrates this tenet is How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill (ISBN 0-385-41848-5). While I am aware of criticism regarding the specific facts Cahill presents, the basic idea, I think, holds sway.
...
1
Short, but with some decent points.
If people survive the apocolapse, which people did, then they would pass knowledge generation to generation. Bombs also only permanently eradicate things close to them, there shoudl still be plenty of rubble and the like scattered around the remains of the city. Plastics also last an absurdly long time, so take that as you ...
15
It's very hard to lose knowledge
I'm afraid most of the answers you've been given make some serious assumptions that are, frankly, false. It's very, very hard to lose substantial information — even after a nuclear apocalypse.
I apologize that this seems trite: but generally speaking, people aren't stupid. Almost everyone who survived the apocalypse would be ...
9
4 Generations (140ish years), if electricity went down.
Once the people who were around for the Fall are dead, it's mostly over as far as retaining modern-day information goes. If you blast humans off the Grid, all you've got are books. If it takes 30+ years to get computers back into use, even things like CDs and flash drives that survived the apocalypse ...
25
Whatever you want
Scenario 1: Small rural town continuously occupied by rational authorities, war occurs "today". The town keeps itself together and starts repairing key infrastructure and scavenging from areas that were hit harder. Record-keeping may be a bit spotty for the period immediately after the Big Boom, but in 50 years when they have ...
2
By the time two generations have passed most unessential knowledge will be lost. Anything nonessential for survival will go in the dumpster. No one cares to learn about art history if survival is your primary concern. There will be some people who are interested in preserving other areas of knowledge, but they will be seen as strange. These "librarians&...
4
Tim will die of old age before he runs of food. The average supermarket has enough calories canned or vacuum packed to keep you alive for 50 years. 70 if you dont mind dog food.
Find a place with a rainwater tank. I understand these are pretty rare in some parts of north America. By law every house in my city (south Australia) needs one. You may need to use ...
0
TLDR: I feel both can work, depending on your preferred setting (clever/lucky boy with radio vs miracle with light), but I feel you should rather change some details:
Radio is more difficult to make for the boy, but not too implausible - the easiest and most likely approach I see is finding an old radio that is now supplied by lemon battery or something to ...
1
What fits the World?
I think you need to decide what your world looks like before you decide which way to go. With the increasing complexity of technology, the parts and equipment to either build a radio from leftover parts OR for someone to have an aircraft will require some real worldbuilding choices.
Radio: To build a radio in the reasonable near future ...
13
It would be very plausible that a clever 12 year old might be able to construct a crystal radio receiver (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio) from electronics scrap given some simple instructions he may have found in old books or magazines. Especially if he was looking at ones targeting young readers since there was a time when they were quite ...
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