You know what would be useful in a societal collapse? Electric vehicles and solar panels.
Hopefully peppers aren’t building zombie busses because they’ll be useless in 6 months after the oil stops flowing.
An ev with a charger panel and bicycles will be useful indefinitely.
Solar panels and batteries require massive supply chains. They require our rarest minerals and highest tech, with highly educated workers to develop and produce and state of the art clean rooms and factories.
If we stop producing them, the current stock will be useful for like 50 years tops. Then it’s back to fossil fuels, I’m afraid. Diesel generators last for a long time, and they’re easier to maintain and produce.
I remember i read a doomer theory stating we should be stockpiling coal for the humans that remain to rebuild society since there is nothing we can do at this point and fossil fuels is the only thing that will outlast the collapse. I’m not that pessimistic, but i can see what they mean.
Lol, Diesel can on average only be stored for 6 to 12 months before degrading. Good luck with that.
If a collapse ever happens I’d rather have solar panels and an EV. Fuel production and transport would instantly grind to a halt and the existing fuel goes bad soon after.
Yeah, it’s true diesel degrades quickly, but oil does not. Depending on where you live, you could more quickly set up a low scale refinery than a solar panel manufacturing workshop. Most likely, people would use coal in most places without access to oil in short distance since it’s more widely available and simpler to use.
The doomer theory variation I read is that we’ve played out most of the accessible fossil fuels. If society has to rebuild, they have no way to get past the stage of fossil fuel use, because advanced extraction like fracking would not be possible. The very things that made our society possible, are bridges were burning as soon as we cross them. There is no rebuilding
When society collapses, upwards of around 95-100% of us die. That’s reality.
That’s why Musk is backing Trump and Putin and trying to turn the world into Thunderdome. EVs will reign supreme.
you would get murdered for those rather quickly, i’d imagine. what would be useful is to get far away from strangers somewhere defendable near fresh water.
That would be only one of the many competing reasons for my murder.
I do have camping gear, woodworking hand tools, a good bike, I know how to shoot and clean fish+game and cook, and I have knowledge of some remote areas with sparse populations including their flora.
On paper it all sounds good, but I would likely die miserably in the first Canadian winter.
Even if you did everything right there isn’t that much wildlife to live off of. A single human requires a vast healthy wilderness to live off of foraging only.
Maybe. I’ve wondered about that. It’s easy to imagine a Mad Max scenario with bands of raiders looting all potentially useful technological remains, but does solar change that? You can’t as easily steal that without destroying it. You can’t just put it to use without some technical knowledge. It’s not immediately useful to loot.
Destroy, sure.
