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Comment by flexd | Hacker News Reader

It's very interesting to see how quickly things turn ugly (or at least uglier) in situations like that. With power down for two days, did they see any increase in crime beyond what you described?

As it happens I was watching a TV-series yesterday that has this exact plot/theme, not exactly HN material as it's Sci-Fi but anyway: The world loses power globally. Anything using power is dead. Planes, Cars, batteries, etc.

Not sure if it's a hit that will last but I found it entertaining and it made me think a bit, what would I be able to do to survive something like that? What would my plan be?

I'm not about to go all doomsday prepper but I guess it does not hurt to at least have an idea.

Or just be prepared like in the story, preparing for the worst as we usually do when designing redundant solutions.

http://www.tvrage.com/Revolution

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Revolution is the silliest TV show ever contrived. 15 years in the power outage, they still wear clean tailored designer clothes. Resistance fights the only organizing and governing force, why?, just because. Electricity is out (or rather blocked), but diesel engines don't work either - surprise, many diesel engines don't depend on electricity to operate.

Well yes, I'm not saying the show is not flawed or silly. But I found it entertaining enough simply because it made me think 'what if .. ?'

In a similar vein is S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire series. While it requires some suspension of disbelief, especially in so much as being able to accept the premise that certain technologies suddenly cease working, it's an enjoyable 'what if' senario of a series.

I think I'm largely blind to such things when it comes to TV entertainment (and mostly movies). I never even thought of diesel engines not needing electricity, but that did not stop me from finding the show entertaining. I think I just naturally assume that since it's fiction anyway, the rules do not have to be followed. If entertainment and fiction always had to follow the rules of physics and our world, we wouldn't have anything like magic.

> If entertainment and fiction always had to follow the rules of physics and our world, we wouldn't have anything like magic.

OTOH I'm surprised how much in terms of magic could be expalined given the technologies we have or can imagine right now. For instance, if we ever get our hands on working nanotech, all the elixirs and magic potions that change you in different ways could be reality (you'd just be ingesting a bunch of pre-programmed nanorobots / viruses along with a tasty juice) :).

That's true! You could explain 'magic' as simply being something your current technology could not explain.

If you were able to show a person from the past a mobile phone, some video or even the time machine you would need to do so.. they would probably believe you were some kind of god or that the things you showed were magic.

That's so clever it's a miracle nobody thought about it before. Oh, wait:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Also, see A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Does that make me as clever as the guy that first said that? :-P I think I've probably read that somewhere before.

The science doesn't have to be technically correct but if you start waving around magic wands it's simply not sci-fi anymore, which is a shame if your interest was piqued by the 'sci.' Some amount of rules always has to be followed in narratives; e.g., 'the parrot did it' in a whodunnit is (most likely) not acceptable.

I like the premise because exploring the ramifications is interesting and useful. Unfortunately they then turn to magical plot devices. I was very let down by that; it got steadily less entertaining after the first few episodes (just like Fringe).

Yeah, I love the idea of the show, but then I read about the execution ( http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-10-dumbest-things-tv-so-far-... ) and have nothing to do but sigh.

Furthermore, they seem to have spent 15 years killing each other while nobody attempted to build or rebuild any non-electric infrastructure: They mentioned not being able to produce bullets, there seems to be only one train that is restored, and so on. The industrial revolution happened before we had electricity, so you'd think they'd find a way to restore some kind of industry.

Is one of the plot points that every skilled worker was wiped out? Otherwise I have a hard time believing that in just 15 years people have forgotten the basics of electricity and thus how to rig up a simple generator(among other tools).

The uneven-but-mostly-OK post-apocalypse show Jeremiah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_%28TV_series%29) dealt with this problem in a better way: the Apocalypse MacGuffin was a disease that killed everyone who had been through puberty. The show was set 15 years after the "big death", so the characters were all people who had been too young to understand how these things worked when they were still working.

(Some were smart enough to figure the basics out, of course, which made them highly valuable.)

The plot is that electric things to not work, at all. A perfectly working generator would just stop at the time of the incident.

Overall crime wasn't that bad, I think that the people that were doing these things were in part doing it simply to get home (the guy with the hose, I'm not sure what the guy that took off with the fireextinguisher was up to, presumably no good and removing a fireextinguisher from a gas station is a pretty serious thing).

On the island there was no increase in crime, in the rest of Ontario no more than otherwise or maybe even less, I have not researched this but it definitely didn't turn into a riot. The gas line was special in that it was isolated and that everybody there had 0 resources. But it still gave me quite a bad vibe.

I think some crime is to be expected, people break the law when society is working, and I guess if you are already breaking the law to survive, if something happens you aren't suddenly going to change your ways.

If the power is out over a longer period of time it's the lack of food and clean water that will cause a problem, mostly, but because of the concentration of people in cities the modern society relies too much on food being brought to us.

I guess you have already thought about this to some extent, I just know that most people in the city have never been hunting, and depending on where you live I guess they never have gone fishing either.

I think I would like to be able to survive on my own out in the forrest/woods by hunting/fishing, even if there hopefully will never be a need.

Edit: English is complicated.

A much better series was the original BBC 'Survivors' from the mid-70s, then re-made a few years ago. Though it was a plague not power outage, the basis of society then does look at using mills and other early-industrial revolution technologies to help survival.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(2008_TV_series)

I actually did watch that (the newest one), but since it got canceled it's not really worth starting to watch now.

I like to think of it as "the world that bicycle fans dream of," but I doubt that the showrunners recognize that.

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