Even in a semi mad max world, computation will be useful, and anyone who can get scavenged junk iPhones to aid with those will be very much needed. If anything a post apocalyptic scenario will really need computer engineers.
Start a tribe of computer worshipers and wear broken screens as helmets or something
Computer geek will be one of the top titles in a post-apocalyptic commune, don't worry.
If you can fix the village computer, you will 100% be safe.
we'll all get super ripped legs from hours on our exercise bikes retrofitted to generate electricity so we can charge our phones long enough to keep using them through the evening and all internet access will be local and completely decentralized
we'll also have great community events like "hoist the giant concrete block" where we store energy in the form of giant concrete blocks that descend slowly, generating power and needing to be re-hoisted every several hours
could even combine the block hoist with getting the plumbing back online by hoisting water-filled containers to make small water towers - when it gets back down you can refill it and hoist it back up for continued water and light
also we'll have to learn the secret* of LEDs
*the secret is that they're vastly more efficient at low/mid brightness and have a vastly longer usable lifespan when run that way (due to not generating as much heat), you just need more of them to reach a comparable lumen output. I mean vastly more efficient - if you have, uh, 100 low power LEDs in a "filament"/"vintage" LED bulb (that bulb style is actually comprised of tiny LED strips, often ~25 LEDs per strip, and coated in a diffusing material so as to appear continuous) and run them at max brightness you might consume 9W of power but 200 LEDs at half brightness will consume like 5W, output the same amount of lumens, and have a working lifespan several thousand hours longer
"why don't we make bulbs like that, then, if they're so fucking good?" you may ask when presented with this knowledge. that's fair. consider however that light bulb makers are ruthless bastards who have colluded to make bulbs that require frequent replacement since edison first started stealing all of his "inventions" and they continue that tradition to this day. Also, they do make bulbs like this but they only sell them to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. google "dubai bulbs" or watch this youtube teardown
The real reason is the cri of leds ran that way is absolutely awful. Dubai bulbs make everyone look near death, and makes food look disgusting. Living under low cri lighting is mentally harmful over time, I know from experience.
The CRI on them isn't that bad, it's somewhere around 80, which is entirely standard for LEDs. Fluorescent tubes commonly had an absolutely horrible CRI, just missing large chunks of visible spectrum, and they were used for decades in every application imaginable.
Fluorescent tubes are hated by everyone because of the awful green tinge they have. And the LEDs that have a CRI of only 80 or so are the shitty dollar store ones that also flicker and give people headaches, and as such are also hated. The standard for cheap leds people will tolerate is more like 90-95. The name brand cheap bulbs are around 98.
Number one easiest way to make a space feel less shitty and claustrophobic is to replace the contractor special lights with name brand ones. Everything feels cleaner even, just doing that.
And the LEDs that have a CRI of only 80 or so are the shitty dollar store ones that also flicker and give people headaches, and as such are also hated.
Cree's branded LED bulbs are very highly recommended, I'd consider them both name brand (Cree and Philips are the two largest manufacturers of LEDs) and pricey (at around $4-6 a bulb), and their normal bulbs only have a rated CRI of 80 (usually slightly higher in testing, admittedly). They do have a few "high CRI" models rated at 90 but they've mostly been discontinuing them. I have never seen an LED bulb rated anywhere near 98, and I've been looking. It's just like with flashlights, everything uses the same small handful of LED elements in their design and the performance and flicker has everything to do with cooling and circuit design.
Just did some googling, this is a very recent development. As in, in the last year or two the CRI of lightbulbs rose a ton. It looks like this is due to some California regulation requiring 90+ CRI lightbulbs.
of course they make them way better immediately after I replace the shitty CCFLs in my house with the highest-CRI LED bulbs I could find, I should have known
You didn't completely miss out. CRI is a measure that's easy to cheat, as it was designed not as a consumer standard, but an industrial one. A lot of these new high CRI bulbs aren't actually as good as their rating suggests. So that's a whole rabbit hole to go down.
Why wouldn't we just use windmills to hoist the stuff for us when it's windy
we’ll all get super ripped legs from hours on our exercise bikes retrofitted to generate electricity so we can charge our phones long enough to keep using them through the evening
Biking for an hour only runs a lightbulb for a few seconds. Human manual labor will never generate significant electricity.
Doesn't that statistic assume a 60W incandescent? There's plenty of entirely functional computers (and lights, for that matter) you could run for several minutes on that much power, and with a fully distributed generation system comprising manual labor, geothermal, hydro, and some form of energy storage, everyone could manage a few hours of light electrical use a day. Biking may not be an ideal example, but there will be means of turning labor into electricity when fuel runs out.
Clearly other options are preferable, but if there's nobody around to keep the reactor online, fabricate new batteries, or build new solar panels after the old ones cease functioning, people will come up with something. The internet might become a series of BBSes hosted and accessed on microcontrollers with pager LCDs that use milliwatts of power and communicate over shortwave, but people are going to put in real work to keep something reminiscent of modern tech going.
Doesn’t that statistic assume a 60W incandescent?
yea, but the best LED bulbs are something like 4x more efficient.
So biking for an hour runs a LED lightbulb for 10 minutes maybe? I don't remember the exact figures but it's ridiculously impractical
a fully distributed generation system comprising manual labor, geothermal, hydro, and some form of energy storage
it's also impossible to make a system that takes advantage of the type of post-collapse labor you'd be doing. People won't be riding exercise bikes when you're trying to survive off potatoes and milk
I clearly made a bad joke that didn't go over well. I was not advocating for any of these things. I know they're wildly inefficient and impractical. My point was that humans will do desperate and ridiculous things to keep tweetin' their tweets and getting into flame wars in the comment section of youtube videos, so power generation options which are obviously terrible are still on the table.
"using a stationary bike in the post-apocalypse to generate just enough power to press 'send tweet'" was meant to be so incredibly absurd that you couldn't take it seriously as a viable suggestion and my defense of that example was intended as a continuation of the bit
Human muscle as an energy source has always been a terribly inefficient prospect. That's why we literally started moving away from it in 7000 BCE.
Gravitational potential energy will probably be our best bet for energy storage, but we will be using appropriate-tech solar and biomass and wind and hydro (probably in that order) to charge it.
Further reading: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/05/could-we-run-modern-society-on-human-power-alone.html
I fucking love low-tech and no-tech magazine
I understand and agree with you, and conceded that biking may have been a bad example elsewhere in the thread. My point, however, has much less to do with the details of power generation than the assertion that people will do inefficient, bone-headed, and desperate things to try and keep their phones alive in the time between running out of traditional power sources and having built reliable alternatives (the "appropriate-tech solar and biomass and wind and hydro" you mention). I am not suggesting that these things are good ideas. They are silly and their suggestion was meant to be humorous, not instructive.
Not the crank ones, personally, but I have used the ones you shake like a shake weight. The generated runtime is longer than the time you have to shake them, but it's not good.
From my experience, I'm pretty sure no one uses the hand-powered ones more than once or twice before getting sick of them.
learn how to use/repair/program old computers, the pre-ROHS stuff that had large, simple components you could solder by hand, with leaded solder that doesn't grow dendrites
learn BASIC and C and ASM for the 8086 and Z80 and 68000, learn everything you can about microcontrollers so you can harvest and repurpose parts from everything around you (Intel 8051s are in goddamn everything)
build and run old versions of Linux on PCs with less than 1MB of RAM that have been retrofitted with tiny amounts of flash storage
in the event that new manufacturing and availability of new hardware is constrained to industrial applications only or worse, completely unavailable, those are going to be the machines that will actually run for decades
I mean if you have access to power via solar or whatever then computers will still be invaluable in pretty much any society.
I don't know about you but my techno-barbarian warband will need plenty of programmers
we will have thousands of half fucked computers that will be invaluable once mass manufacturing breaks down
imagine the roving theater troupes, performing the most off-broadway productions of anime and marvel movies, dressed in tattered cosplay and adorned with props so thoroughly worn that they've become unrecognizable
I have been thinking about this recently, and do suspect that there will be some rollback on the use of computers. On one hand they dont use that much power on their own, but on the other, if there is a need to drastically reduce enrgy use, that will mean return to simpler internet, possibly less frequent access and use ...
some rollback on the use of computers. On one hand they dont use that much power on their own, but on the other, if there is a need to drastically reduce enrgy use, that will mean return to simpler internet, possibly less frequent access and use
I think people will absolutely work their asses off to continue using computers using whatever means necessary. This will be in forms like alternative/decentralized energy like I mentioned elsewhere in the comments and a reduction in overall computing power. Server farms and datacenters will be shut down and communities will basically communicate through a raspberry pi in someone's basement. Gamers and bitcoin miners will get the wall and their systems will be liberated and put to the only purposes that can justify that sort of electrical use, like physics and chemistry simulations and weather modeling.
Oh, computers are good. And will be incredibly useful. But yes, I do agree that large scale server farms and datacenters will be shut down. But so many of them right now serve little purpose anyway, and you can still run a great internet with probably a fraction of what it is now.
I don't think so. All this stuff doesn't use that much power. Even data centers don't actually use that much power when you look at how much they serve. It's just so much activity concentrated in such a small space it looks like a lot.
Don't worry I've got a copy of https://xkcd.com/505/ printed off, we'll be fine
etching memes into slate tablets to sell after the fall of the industrial world and mass internet access
My mom crying saying I’ve killed us bc I used the last of our money to buy a bad ass shrek meme tablet instead of corn or whatever
you see her bawling her eyes out, screaming, and just say "better out than in I always say, ay Fiona?"
