Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire
I do wonder if there are enough people with the skills required to rebuild civilization or if it would come back at a similar (slow) rate to how our original industrial/scientific state evolved. A talented group of outdoorsmen, farmers, smiths, engineers, and other scientists could make quick strides if left unmolested to accomplish the task.
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Well, interestingly enough, the answer to that comes from the collapse of Rome. It's something that's sometimes referred to as "Critical Population Mass". IE, it's the point when a society has enough viable individuals to begin "advancing", or in some cases able to maintain what they already have. Prior to that they're stuck in primitive survival mode. There was a Stargate SG1 episode where one of the malevolent alien races infected another competing culture, causing 99% of the people to become sterile. As the old people died off they slowly lost their technology and were forced back into a simple agrarian lifestyle because there weren't enough new people to maintain all the systems their ancestors created. With a birthrate of less than at least 1:1, the society collapsed.
The same would be true in a post apocalyptic landscape. At first you'd only have enough people to achieve the basic survival needs of the community. Only when those were satisfied sufficiently, even to the point of having a sufficient surplus, could you afford to have non-producing individuals, like musicians, doctors, lawyers, inventors, etc. You would also need a birth rate of no less than 2:1 (2 births for every 1 living person) in order to get the society back into a viable state within a 100 year timeframe. Part of this is because 1) in a survival scenario, you'll have a high infant mortality rate. 2) You'll have a high rate of disease, killing off a number of children and adults before they get much past their 30's.
So in short you need "surplus", both of people and resources, and also "security" before you can have any hope of getting beyond a stage 2 society. For those who are unfamiliar with this ranking system, here's the list of disaster and recovery stages.
Disaster levels
* Stage 0 - Before the disaster. Everything is dandy.
* Stage 1 - The Disaster
* Stage 2 - The Aftermath (ie, survival)
* Stage 3 - Recovery (picking up the pieces and trying to achieve some kind of stability. The covering of basic needs by yourself, including growing food and other things begins.)
* Stage 4 - Rebuilding (Restoring the low and mid level needs of a society, return of commerce and basic resources)
* Stage 5 - Restoration (the return to normalacy, or what you lost before. Society reaches a state of "modernality".)
There's also issues with the severity of the disaster, as that too will determine how long it'll take to recover. Here's a list of the levels a disaster can take and the amount of damage associated with them.
Level of Impact
* Level 0 - No impact. Everything is completely fine and dandy.
* Level 1 - Minor impact. Sensitive items and systems disrupted. Destruction possible, but unlikely.
* Level 2 - Intermediate impact - General items and services impacted or disrupted. Minor destruction. Injury and death possible.
* Level 3 - Major impact - Noticeable destruction. Critical services interrupted, such as food, water transportation, etc. Some lives lost.
* Level 4 - Extreme impact - Major damage and destruction. Loss of shelter, cities, food, clean water, etc. Lots of lives lost.
* Level 5 - Apocalyptic - Massive destruction, loss of almost all critical elements, extreme loss of life. Very few survivors, if any, and if so, they're widely scattered with little to no resources.
So for example, a disaster with an impact rating of 1 would be something like a severe thunderstorm and would really go almost unnoticed, aside from a few general conveniences, and you'd never really fall out of the stage 5 level of society. Now a level 4 disaster could very easily put you into stage 1 and 2 very quickly. So it really depends on that as well. I also have an "area of impact" scale somewhere, but I don't have it handy, but that too is something to look into. On a small side note, as a bit of fun trivia, when using these lists to refer to a disaster, the method of denoting the intensity and severity of the disaster or its current state is SLA, or Stage, Level, and Area. So an S1L2A1 would be a stage one disaster with a level 2 amount of damage over an area 1 damage region.
Anyhow, just some useless trivia I thought you might find interesting.
