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Comment by Bender | Hacker News Reader

Many would starve but I and many around me would be fine. It would not be easy but it is doable.

I agree that there is far too much dependency on electricity and many of the people that knew how to do without it are long gone. There are books on how to do regenerative farming and homesteading but fewer people read books now. That process needs to be started a few years before the electricity is gone.

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No electricity means no pesticides, no fertilizer and no machinery. Farming productivity levels would go back to around 1800 or so, and we could barely feed a billion people at that time.

Farming productivity levels would go back to around 1800 or so, and we could barely feed a billion people at that time.

Agreed. That's why each community would have to do homesteading and regenerative farming on much smaller and more distributed scales like we used to. All centralized mono-crap farming would be gone and cities would have to break up and move into rural communities. People would need to have more kids to do work around the homestead. People here would know this concept as "horizontal scaling".

> oh geez oh no how can we possibly survive without poisoning everything we touch?

We very well could survive, but maybe only after 6-7 billions of us starve. 1-2 billions of people is considered to be natural carrying capacity of Earth.

Perhaps we could do it gradually enough where nobody has to starve, we get rid of the "REPRODUCE REPRODUCE REPRODUCE" propaganda, and we just naturally end up back near a natural population instead of overpopulating until we die of a metaphorical heat death.

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