Quote:
Originally Posted by VydorScope
My guess is that the biggest problem would be power. Once you could reestablish some small part of the power grid, you could start building tools to do the rest. My guess is the rise back up would be pretty fast after some power plants are brought online. Coal, wood, and etc. would probably be the easiest source to generate power. I would also guess that whoever controls the power plants rules the world, at least for a while.
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There's a reason we switched from coal & wood power to petroleum... it packs a *lot* of power in a small space. And we're using it up very quickly. Unless we find some amazing breakthrough in basic physics--fusion power, teleportation, fine control of magnetics, alien spacebat assistance--we won't have access to the amazing wasted power we throw around today. (2/3 of the electricity generated at power plants is spent delivering it. This could be changed by keeping it within a few miles of the plant... and cutting off power for anyone who lived far away.)
For more politics etc. on this topic, google "peak oil," which will first get you a bunch of sites about "peak oil debunked," which is much like "global warming debunked"--a whole lot of people are invested in the current system and spend a lot of effort convincing others it'll never change. You have to search for "peak oil survival" or similar terms to get the sites with facts. (And speculation. But it's speculation based on numbers, rather than the insistence that, since we found something to replace wood to power our stoves, of course we'll find something to replace oil to power our cars.)
Back to bookish discussion: whether or not one expects us to rebuild our current culture, or something similar to/better than it, I am surprised at the number of post-apoc stories that assume we'll all plunge directly into the dark ages rather than *using* the resources we've got, both physical and informative.
We have mass literacy, which was *never* the case in any previous collapse. We have libraries *everywhere,* and not just in big public buildings which, yes, are likely to be looted & burned for fuel. We have computers which, whether or not we get a network running, the Occupy movement showed you can power with a bicycle--a good collection of farming, weatherproofing, windmill/water wheels, and textile production info on disc could get an entire community set up in a village that doesn't need most of what modern life considers essential.
E-ink readers with solar power could work for decades, and there's your new library-of-Alexandria in a six-ounce box.