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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

After civilizational collapse you won't need computers, you'll need bows, arrows and basic agricultural tools that don't require motors. Forget about electricity or anything requiring it, that will be the least of your problems. Assuming there is still sunlight enough to keep photosynthesis running. If not, you may want to find some place high.

And if you are going to do something like this then you really should make it entirely self hosting and forget about networking and communities and such because by the time you need it those will all be gone and the best you'll be able to do is sneakernet. I hope your USB sticks will be EMP proof... papertape?

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DuskOS is specifically for the interregnum period before full collapse, when microchips are still readily accessible, but can no longer be produced.

(I think the author’s predictions about the collapse of civilization are overblown, but still, if you’re going to engage in a middlebrow dismissal, at least do us the courtesy of reading and understanding what you’re dismissing.)

> (I think the author’s predictions about the collapse of civilization are overblown, but still, if you’re going to engage in a middlebrow dismissal, at least do us the courtesy of reading and understanding what you’re dismissing.)

You should probably do me the courtesy to not make assumptions about what I've read and understood. This is such a common trope on HN that it made it into the guidelines.

The whole idea that the collapse of civilization is something slow is a massive assumption, it could be all over in a few microseconds so fiddling around with tech at a level like this is an exercise in futility: if this is the level that you end up at that's pure luxury and proof that civilization has not collapsed and likely will not collapse in the near future.

Microchips are not going to be much use in any situation where they can no longer be produced. They are the pinnacle of a very large pyramid and without the base the tip is next to useless.

A better - and far more immediate - use case would be to target the re-use of scavenged chips in the present day undeveloped parts of the world which are 100% dependent on imported goods.

Economic war, if it were to become full-blown, could result in locally constrained availability of microchips while civilizations still go on, no? Pandemic x5 or so. What if India and China decide to trade some nukes? It's not likely, but it's a possible scenario.

It's a possibility. But in that case an all out effort to recreate a competition free fab in the west would be able to put something usable together in a few years. I don't see that as a scenario where you'd need to go for scavenged hardware, any old cellphone has enough power to deal with factory automation at that level and well beyond it.

We know exactly what to build and how to tie it all together, the reason we currently do not is economics, not because we could not.

Personally I think the degree to which the Western world is making itself dependent on supply chains like that is irresponsible, but I also think that to some degree it is the same kind of thinking that went on in Germany to make itself dependent on Russian gas. It goes something like 'let's tie ourselves together at the hip in an economic way so that a shooting war is no longer an option'. This presumes rational actors on both sides. Which was a giant mistake in the case of Russia and which may well be a giant mistake in the case of China and Taiwan. But then there is still Korea and possibly Japan.

> But then there is still Korea and possibly Japan.

If china becomes that aggressive that they are in open war with Taiwan, Korea and Japan won't be an option either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35046551

"easy to imagine - a large enough collapse that making new ones is very very hard, especially compared to scrounging and repurposing the huge amount of existing ones. Imagine a huge population decline, and search parties looking through the ruins for useful tech, like computers, decades later.

Such a society could probably make new computers, but the cost of making new, much worse specced computers, may not be cost effective for a long time as long as old computers can be found and repaired.

Edit: such a movie or novel would make for great Fallout-ish world-building. Imagine for instance a large hotel in a big city running the booking system on an old laptop in a central secure location, and new 8-bit computers used as terminals at the front desk. Public access 8-bit computer terminals at public libraries connected to copies of WikiPedia running on some old gaming rig and such things. :-) "

Yes, it would make for a nice movie. But real life isn't a movie and of course I'm fine with individuals making their own decisions I still think we should look at the general picture through the lens of finding out what the likelihood of certain scenarios is first. Prepping for an intermediate stage is ultimately not a very good disaster mitigation strategy, you plan for the worst and hope for the best. This intermediary stage of a slow slide isn't going to be stopped because of some FORTH code if and when it happens. But I wish those who believe it will all the best.

edit: I think this sort of thinking is more of an excuse to scratch an itch than a realistic scenario. We are not so addicted to computers - yet - that we could not revert back to some stable society without them, but some of us are so addicted to them that we can't imagine a society without them. The first couple of hours of any major crisis will likely correct that in ways that are going to be very unpleasant. Effectively aiming for something 'in the middle' is aiming for a crisis that isn't a crisis. Anything that actually is a crisis would be better served by acid free prints of Wikipedia and the designs of common farm implements that can be made with just bench tools. You'd be on your feet again in a short few hundred years. But if you remain addicted to playing around in FORTH while the world goes to pieces around you chances are you'll be kicked out of any community you're a part of because you're slacking off your farming duties. Any world where you think you might need this will be so drastically altered from the one you live in today that you won't need it, you'll be way too busy to try to stay alive.

Och c'mon. Agriculture even from 200 years ago can feed much more than 2/3x people than directly working with it. There always will be place for people tinkering and trying new things and or trying to bring old things to life. Computers do have legit use cases like communication, access to knowledge etc... There will be place for comp geeks in post apo world, but certainly not for many. They will have to prove themselves useful though.

Yes it can. But whether or not we'd be able to maintain that level of efficiency is very much an open question, it presumes the availability of 10's of millions of horses and people that know how to use them as well as a ton of tools that we haven't got. Cut the power and you have a problem on a scale that is hard to imagine.

I think some comments here have lost track of how absurdly labor saving simple PLC applications of computers are. There is a lot less farming duties to do when the computers manage irrigation and keep track of schedules.

Light at night to work was a major achievement for humanity and there are still many lacking it reliably today. It would continue to be useful post collapse. Portable solar panels + lithium battery banks would be quite useful indeed.

They will last a few hundred cycles and then you're done.

Anything that you rely on in a situation like that should be 100% maintenance free and should not rely on technology more complex than what you can make today in your garage with hand tools. Go over that level and it will just buy you a little bit of comfort but it won't last.

Candles: yes. Solar panels+batteries+inverters: forget it. Even a basic charge controller would be a major feat of engineering under those circumstances. I have some ideas on how I'd make that work if I really had to but I'd probably be too busy defending myself from marauders and taking care of my crops to be able to work on it...

What's interesting here is that plenty of the stuff that we take for granted is absolutely state-of-the-art engineering and there is no way that you'd be able to continue to rely on it for more than the available stock that you could still lay your (likely very grubby) hands on for spares, and even those have a limited shelf life.

Bootstrapping to the present day level of technology where working semiconductors can be taken for granted will take a long, long time. Even if you have the knowledge. Assuming that enough of the eco-system survives that you will be able to survive and procreate I'd estimate at least several generations, if we didn't entirely regress to some more primitive state. Mad Max would be an amazing level to bootstrap from, having working computers means you're focusing on the wrong thing. Electric light might be a good idea, but personally I would not count on LEDs or bulbs to last long enough in quantity and if you're going for batteries keep it simple: lead acid flooded cells (You'll need some basic chemistry tools and materials to make sulphuric acid, but that's probably doable).

We can get to working semiconductors in our garages relatively easily. They won't be anything like the integrated circuits we have today.

It would be an interesting hard sci-fi novel to see the village black smith replaced by the village semi-smith and wind mill replaced by the nuclear mill.

> We can get to working semiconductors in our garages relatively easily.

Yes, if you rely on a bunch of hard to obtain tech, a stable energy supply, relatively pure starting chemicals and a whole pile of tooling. I'm aware of Jeri Ellsworth and Sam Zeloof, both are off the charts smart and capable and put the lie to the 'relatively easily' for anything approaching usable devices in quantity.

You'd be better off to learn how to wire relays, assuming you're going to find enough power. It's much easier to get to reliable logic circuitry via that route than it is by homebrew semiconductors, that's an optimization that you can do without if you have nothing. Even tubes would be simpler. And much, much easier to make. Nothing that you couldn't do with early 1900's technology.

Nuclear power in such a situation will likely only kill the operators. Wind power could be relied on for many decades, the Jacobs Wind Electric powerplant that was installed in the arctic still worked decades later under some of the most harsh conditions on the planet. Keeping it simple is key to anything that needs to work in such a setting.

Windmills with simple generators and no (or very simple) batteries could work.

Some electricity some of the time is very useful compared to no electricity, ever.

Or waterwheels, which would work most of the time (unless there's drought) and historically the main non-animal powered motive force for most cultures pre-steam (alright, wind too in the form of windmills and sails, but water always flow in rivers...)

Lithium batteries will be dead within a decade. Solar panels within 3. Think about that the next time you cheer on a huge solar installation as a win for the planet.

Schottky solar cells are pretty simple to couple with thermoelectrics.

Solar panels will work a lot longer than 3[edit: 0] years. I've got a batch here of 16 of them that are from the early 00's and that are still producing ~80% of their rated power. They're not even particularly good cells.

Lithium batteries will indeed likely not last for a decade but that has nothing to do with solar installations, though you could combine them (but you'd have a choice of chemistries and for stationary installations where weight and size are not usually the limiting factors you can do better than Lithium).

Parent comment said solar panels would last 3 decades, not 3 years.

Ah yes. But still: solar panels will just degrade, they will work until they are physically damaged. People replace them because they want more power for a given surface area, usually not because the panels no longer work though there were some pretty bad batches from certain manufacturers where the backing delaminates or where there is water ingestion. Those are no longer safe. But well made panels should last a long, long time. They are warrantied for 30 years, I'd expect them to last a multiple of that unless they get impact damage.

I assume they meant three decades.

Yes, indeed they did, see other comment.

Solar towers have lifespans longer than our own https://clearspanenergy.com/renewable-energy/solar-tower/#:~....

As opposed to fossil fuel infrastructure? I am not seeing your point.

I'm currently using equipment that's working perfectly well running on NiCads and solar panels that are only a little younger than I am. I expect in another 50 years they'll be a bit on the tired side, but it won't be my problem.

It won't be your problem but I'd expect whoever inherits it from you to still be able to get between 20 and 30% or so of the original capacity out of it. Which is likely ample to run simple stuff, assuming the simple stuff itself survives that long.

All the flashlights at my home are powered by ~14 year old 18650 cells scavenged from old lenovo battery packs (I think mostly x61 batteries).

Usually the case is that one cell in a 'dead' battery has far lower capacity, and might only run a flashlight for 20 minutes (which is still useful, though I dispose of those). The other cells are comparable to new ones in capacity (maybe they're 90% or whatever of their original).

We often have a distorted idea of lifetimes and reliability because absent real scarcity we're overly prone to discarding things which can be fixed (e.g. using 5 bad laptop batteries to make four good ones) or are still usable. If you have no other source of light at night a flashlight you can only use for 20 minutes is still a life changing transformative device.

One could imagine searching for battery technology with much longer lifetimes. But I think you'd be better off with the best batteries you can find out of thousands of lithium cells ambient around you than just a few 'super batteries', esp if you're only talking about your lifetime or the lifetime of your children.

Are we currently doing all we can to prevent collapse? It seems like they vaguely try to stop pollution and WW3, but what about the Carrington event? And why does it seem like individuals are far more interesting in preparing for collapse than preventing it?

It really feels like people would rather live in 1800 than continue with industrial society, even if the environmental toll and body count was far higher than what future tech could achieve.

> And why does it seem like individuals are far more interesting in preparing for collapse than preventing it?

That is a great question for which I don't have an answer, but thank you for asking it, it is something to think about.

Based on how many people seem to have a bit of understanding for Kaczynski... I would guess that a lot of people kinda like the idea of collapse....

Or it just doesn't seem like there's much an individual can do.

Prevention requires mass action, preparation can be done by the individual

You ever watch videos where something horrible is happening but all the people in the video who could do something are also recording with their phones?

I think there's a connection here.

The main source of power for early radios in pre-rural electrification 1930s West Texas: small windmills that charged batteries for them - the wind is almost always blowing in West Texas. Zenith Radio Windcharger was the main type I remember seeing at the American Windmill Museum in Lubbock, a must-see if you find yourself in Lubbock for some reason.

On that note, learning CW (Morse Code) well enough to understand it by ear would be one my technical priorities if I were seriously worried about civilizational collapse, as well as more about early (pre-transistor) radio technology.

Yes, windmills would be a good choice.

I've made a whole trip around the USA to make pictures of these old windmills, an amazing number of them are still around, sometimes even in working state. Waterpumpers for the most part but also lots of other uses including electricity generation.

> about early (pre-transistor) radio technology

I dunno if that's a good tradeoff. It's fairly difficult to make good tubes and the performance of pre-tube radio technology is extremely poor. Yet your home alone probably contains hundreds of transistors which could be scavenged to make radio receivers and transmitters.

Constructed correctly these devices have no significant wear out mechanism.

My solar powered encrypted radios let me take your basic agricultural tools without worrying too much about your bows and arrows. :D

> hope your USB sticks will be EMP proof.

You don't keep your spare computers in a steel and copper clad safe?

Right next to my supply of tinfoil...

I'd bet the US national grid would be back up in some capacity within a year. People tend to assemble in times of crisis.

I'd bet it wouldn't. You might have some tiny local grids but anything city sized would require a lot more coordination than you might think.

Likely there wouldn't be as many services, but don't you think long-range transmission and a good set of scattered plants would provide at least some "modern" facilities within that time? I'm sure the ownership and management structures would look very different as well as usage patterns (probably many services would be centralized in communities).

Think about the infrastructure behind those plants required to keep them running. maybe you could keep a hydro plant running for a while, at least until the bearings fail. But anything relying on high tech, fossil fuels or nuclear would stop long before solar and wind power became unavailable.

Which is probably acceptable to a lot of people, who would have adapted to the new reality by then. Capacity would have to be rebuilt.

The grid is always changing in capacity and output. What makes the grid "the grid" is the ability to transmit power long-range based on demand. I'm saying that that kind of high-level coordination would be a pretty high priority for people in the face of apocalyptic disaster because people tend to be like that. Just trying to counter the cynical doom and gloom that nudges people toward hard-libertarian/ancap/mad-max mindsets.

Have you been in a coma during the past decade? I can’t fathom how you could possibly come to this conclusion after COVID.

Despite all the kerfuffle there were massive mobilizations of people and resources still, and that was even in the face of a silent killer, one that didn't trigger apocalyptic feelings in a critical mass of people as much as, say, widespread EMP attacks from nuclear explosions in orbit that affect every piece of electronics we've come to rely on, or a horrendous chemical spill that changes the atmosphere's chemistry. The latter are much more immediate and appeal to deeper instincts as regards risk assessment than an invisible microbe that only infects a few species of mammal.

You're assuming a sudden collapse, rather than a gradual deterioration of society

Yes, because that is (1) more likely and (2) much harder to recover from. A slow and gradual collapse of society can be slowly and gradually reversed and is as long as you can't point at something catastrophic going to stretch the definition of collapse unless it is so slow that it is indistinguishable from change.

'slow collapse' is a bit of a contradiction in terms, all collapses that I'm aware of are sudden, they are events on the timescales that we normally care about, even though if you zoomed in on them enough they would show plenty of detail. Once started they will run their course. Gradual deterioration of society isn't something you need to make contingency plans for. It will happen, or it won't but your FORTH based OS isn't going to make a meaningful difference. For the aftermath of an EMP it will be useless and for a deterioration that takes a year, a decade, a century or even longer there will be other, far more effective mitigation strategies.

But fine, if that's the pretext the OP needed to build their thing I'm perfectly OK with it, I just don't think that's in any way a realistic premise. See also: preppers and shelter fanatics.

The people that are best positioned to deal with all of this are the Mennonites.

Dr. Strangelove had a different opinion on what was needed after civilization collapse…

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