[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

There is no shortage--even in the nongeek communities--of people who are good at putting things together. There are plenty of "junkyard engineers" and other craftspeople who would love to have a whole city's worth of spare parts to build steam-powered cars, long-distance gliders, restart a phone system (the wires are already in place) or bypass that and make ham radio communications.

I think those kinds of people would indeed be useful. The trick is getting enough of them to Disaster Stage 2 (ref earlier post about disaster stages) alive, healthy and functional to recover things quickly. If you have the numbers, recovery is fast. If you don't, it's slow and arduous. The other side of things is that modern parts and equipment is designed with a limited lifetime in mind. So while you may start out with a huge supply of spare parts, over time you'd have to either recycle what's out there, or build more because the other stuff would break, wear down, rust away, rot, etc. Now that's not saying you couldn't rebuild society with what's left behind, but without an infusion of new materials within the first 20 years, society will continue to regress until it reaches a point where it can produce a reliable, sustainable, sufficient supply of new goods.

Husband says: "Give me a semi-urban setting, a group of a few hundred survivors, and in ten years, I could give you steampunk level technology for the whole community." And he's not unique in his skills & interests, nor at the top of any field of mechanics or engineering. (Although he is ridiculously talented with vehicles.)

HAHAHA! Dude, if the world did come to an end, he sounds like the kind of guy I'd want in my neighborhood.

Originally Posted by gmw

It also pays to remember just how recent most of what we call "technology" really is. You don't even have to go back 100 years to find a very different world. Sure there are people out there now that try to keep up some of the "old" skills, but what are the odds of those few surviving some apocalyptic event.

Interesting factoid, there were people (aside from the Amish) as late as the 1980's who hadn't gotten electricity yet (they still burned oil lamps), didn't have access to supermarket foods, or phones, no running water (it was all hand pumped water, melted snow, rivers, etc), lived in dugouts (a type of half in the ground house), and lived in much the same way as our ancestors did around the turn of the century. Heck, there's still lots of places in Alaska that have no roads to them, and a surprising number with no running water, no power, etc. No joke.

I find it slightly amusing reading the posts here that suggest that simply having access to the knowledge (even assuming you have the means to access it) will be enough. Anyone here care to reproduce the work of the Wright brothers from Wikipedia articles alone? Apprenticeships can be long and hard for some of the skills (as opposed to raw knowledge) to be acquired, and they will be longer and harder if there are no masters to learn from.

Agreed. A book can only teach so much. The rest must be done hands on. Take a look at any recognized "trade" or job and you'll see that it takes years to perfect the skills you need to do it well. In ancient times people quite often began learning a trade as young as 5 and apprenticed well up into their 30's before they were considered a "master" or even a "journeyman" in some cases.