Modern poor countries are definitely not steam punk. You have half the population toting smart phones around and the other half collecting cow dung to cook dinner with, and a whole lot of nothing between those extremes.
More like five percent with recent smartphones, and a whole lot collecting cow dung and using an old nokia or fliphone. Maybe one for the family or one for the village, or maybe one per person. Just because they all look poor to western eyes doesn't mean that they're at the same wealth level.
The fact is, humanity's industrial rise was possible because of cheaply extractable resources. Next time around, after a collapse, then we don't get those resources again, geddit? We already grabbed almost all the cheap stuff, the remaining stuff is either far remote from large-population-supporting areas, or it's now so costly to extract that we need dedicated high-tech machinery and processes to make it cost-effective. That sort of specialized mining requires high levels of knowledge and infrastructure to maintain.
That's a good point, actually. An apocalypse will hasten our transition into a less affluent post-oil economy. That said, wind and water power are pretty simple to set up, you pretty much just use the same kind of wheel that has been used for millenia, but with a magnet and a bunch of wires instead of gears and a millstone. Even if we can't extract coal* or oil, or the necessary rare minerals for solar and nuclear, as long as everyone doesn't die we still have the potential to return to an advanced society. It might see decreased social complexity (which we're due for pretty soon anyway) but I just don't see how the kind of thing people focus on for these sorts of things would actually be realistic.
So the recovery gets up to the late medieval stage of development and then you have serious metal and fuel shortages preventing society from boostrapping another industrial revolution.
Well, I'd say that bootstrapping a second industrial revolution actually doesn't make sense even just for purely geopolitical reasons. You'd have to have a very affluent area with a big influx of raw materials and eager and captive markets, as Britain did. But not having a revolution doesn't mean it's impossible to have industry, it's just not necessarily going to be revolutionary.
In that scenario, instead of getting energy from fossil fuels, which allowed economic growth beyond feudal agriculture, you'd have to extract fuel energy from plants, which would mean diverting agricultural output into making fuels.
I really don't see why you'd turn to biofuels. Most of our modern manufacturing is electric anyway, and has been for ages. The only time this stuff gets difficult to manufacture is when you've got to deal with batteries. That stuff (which, unfortunately, includes vehicles and mobile phones) would definitely be impossible until/unless industrial capabilities are pretty much fully restored.
And people would starve if you tried to do that to boostrap "industrial revolution mark 2", so society might well be stuck in late-feudal type stage for a long, long time, but with smatterings of technology that have been preserved.
Well, the green revolution is something that really can't be un-done no matter what happens** so starvation isn't going to be like it once was and with a decreased population, there might well be adequate overproduction to play around with biofuels in the first generations after the apocalypse, which is going to be when oil matters most anyway, but that's mostly a matter of smoothing transitions. With enough infrastructure destroyed that fossil fuels are no longer viable, the powers that currently subsidize them will be hamstrung***, and competition between food and fuel will cause market forces to incentivize alternate solutions. And that'd mostly be wind.
*This is kind of a leap, yes the easiest stuff is already taken, but there's a whole heck of a lot of coal.
**short of something that causes the destruction of pretty much all life on earth, anyway.
***Expect, for example, violence in the middle east to spread to Arabia, which I imagine pretty much any apocalypse scenario would see badly harmed anyway, and as a result for the fertile hills of Iran to birth another empire.
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3067642 times)