Comment on What do to if I survive a nuclear blast in my city?
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
This brings to mind something David Mitchell said once on Would I Lie To You (British panel show):
In response to Kelvin MacKenzie’s claim that the “This Is My” guest had built him a nuclear bunker:
David Mitchell: If there’s a nuclear war, I don’t want to live…I have no skills. Okay, society is destroyed by a nuclear war, we’re basically - we’re back to the bronze age…how long is it gonna be before people start pitching panel shows again? It’s gonna be at least 2000 years!
(as quoted by TVTropes)
Watch it here if you want, it was annoyingly hard to find.
However I don’t think David - who is a comedian - is precisely right about how such a war would affect the state of technology. If there are survivors, I don’t think we’d really be back to the bronze age. Even if all technology was destroyed (which it wouldn’t be), give humans a few decades, we’ll have some sort of modern technology back up and running. Maybe not computers, but some certainly some analogue electronics - the knowledge isn’t lost. Communications would be one of the first points of focus, so television would follow closely behind.
Counterpoint:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
When you’re functionally immortal like Lazarus Long you’ll have time to learn all that. Most people only live long enough to master one profession.
None of that’s about mastering professions
The thing is, people inherently want to live. It’s instinctual. Secondly, everybody - regardless of skill level - can learn to be handy and useful. If everything is destroyed, and society is to be rebuilt, a lot of manual labor will be needed for cleanup and rebuilding. Even the “I pick things up and put them down” guy is perfectly suited for this type of work.
Thank you for the clip! I once found the show on youtube by accident, it is such a gem. It all started with the cabbage feud. (But I have come to notice that James Acaster only tells true stories, alas.)
I absolutely don’t get the point system though but nevermind.
I never tried to keep track, but I always assumed each correctly identified lie/truth gets a point, and each mistake gives a point to the other team. Keep in mind that the show gets edited down and you don’t see everything that the audience did, while the score probably includes those things you didn’t see.
But like, absolutely no one watches this show for the score, so who cares? It might as well be QI’s scoring system :)
peopleproblems@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The longest stretch would likely be chip fabs. You need precision electronics and hazardous chemicals and plenty of power.
But considering that some form of electronics will survive, and it wouldnt take long for people to get rudimentary electricity going, I don’t see why we couldn’t have world Internet within a decade.
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Yeah, chip fabs are exactly why I think computers would need more time. I’m not super familiar with this, but I’d wager such a factory can only be built using tools and machines that come from other specialized factories, and so on maybe 3 levels down before you get to a relatively rudimentary manufacturing process that can be reasonably achieved within a few years. It would take a lot to get that back up and running.
Zoot@reddthat.com 2 months ago
However… Just think about how many chips are currently just sitting around… Between scrapping and searching you would likely be just fine for a few decades.
Mammothmothman@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
EMP would fry most of them though.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 month ago
By the time nuclear war happens, most chip manufacturing capability will be underground or in hidden sites and therefore not targeted.
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
How could you be sure of any of that? For all we know, nuclear war could start tomorrow. Or, a bit more realistically, next year. How fast can these factories be built?