Let's do a mental experiment.
Aggressive viral plague struck humanity. Spreading at incredible speeds across our modern world through dense cities and international flights, it wins in a few weeks. Civilization no longer exists, and most of humanity will not return. But you survived. You are incredibly bad, but some kind of internal immunity has allowed you to survive the virus. You wake up in your cold dwelling, without electricity, water or gas. On the streets it is terribly quiet, in the sky there is not a single chemtrail of the aircraft. You survived the apocalypse.
All these plots are well known to you from books, films and games, for example, “The Last of Us”, “I Am Legend”, “Mad Max”. As a rule, in these scenes the main character is covered with tight skin and travels through the desert. How realistic are these scenarios?
If you ever find yourself surviving a global catastrophe that destroyed most of humanity, what will you do? What knowledge is needed to survive and ultimately experience this moment? This is where our lone hero fails. Obviously, we were able to break through history and build the modern world only by working together; humanity is a deeply social, collective species. Therefore, no matter how deep the shock, mankind will very soon re-enter society.
And here's the question: what's next? What will be the first priorities, what skills will help society to recover in the coming years? So that would look like a chronology.
First few days
After people stop observing and maintaining power plants, the network will fall pretty quickly. But after cleaning the solar panels or connecting portable generators, you can provide yourself with electricity for the first time.
The Internet will disappear as soon as the servers lose their energy supply and automatic backup generators burn out, so don’t think you can go to Wikipedia for useful hints. But this does not mean that your smartphone will become a useless brick. The compass uses an internal magnetometer, so you can find the path you want if you want, and the last loaded map will continue to navigate with GPS.
The GPS satellite network will continue to work quite well for several weeks after the crash, but after about six months, the positioning accuracy degrades to almost useless condition. Your priorities in the early days will include finding bottled water and canned food, as well as clothing suitable for outdoor use.
First weeks
In the first few weeks, you will likely encounter other survivors. You will have to treat strangers with great care until you find a small group that you can trust. The same group will increase the efficiency of distribution, storage and search for supplies.
By now, the city zone you started with will be pretty unpleasant. The stench of countless rotting bodies will fill the air, and starving domestic dogs will become more aggressive. In any case, the modern city is an artificially inflated bubble, supported only by the civilization that built it.
Without electric grids that serve elevators and lighting, natural water sources will become polluted, and the earth itself will sink in asphalt and concrete, so life in the countryside will seem much more attractive to you. A traditional house with a fireplace for heating and cooking will be more pleasant after the collapse than modern high-tech apartments. You can always make a marauder raid on collapsing urban areas to replenish supplies of consumables.
First months
Your primary concern will be ensuring safe drinking water and combating waterborne diseases that have been the scourge of humanity for thousands of years. Boiling - an unmistakable way to kill pathogens - requires a large amount of fuel. Cleansing pills will end very quickly, so soon you will have to resort to chemical tricks to purify the water.
Water can be chemically disinfected by cleaning with kitchen dishwashing detergent or even pool chlorine (sodium hypochlorite and calcium hypochlorite) diluted so that it kills germs but does not poison you. So, you will use the chemistry of chlorine, which underlies the tap water that we drink today - historically it is this hygienic means that allowed us to live in fabulously dense cities.
Until you understand how to do chlorine on your own, you can use another primitive method of disinfecting water: solar disinfection. This method is taught to developing countries by WHO and simply includes filling a plastic bottle with water so that it stands in bright sunlight for a day or two. The ultraviolet rays of the sun will pass right through the bottle and kill any pathogens.
Simple hand washing is also extremely effective in blocking the transmission of the disease. Soap can be made by hydrolysis of animal fat or vegetable oils - boiling with alkali. Alkalis have long been one of the most important classes of chemicals, they can be mined in natural conditions. Potash (sodium carbonate) can be extracted by filtering water through the ashes of a campfire of hard wood, and soda ash can be obtained from burned algae or other salt-resistant coastal plants such as solyanka. Collecting seaweed for soda production for centuries has been an important business along the Atlantic coast of Scotland and Ireland.
Early years
When the canned food is over, you will have to restart your own agriculture. Growing your own vegetables and fruits may not be difficult, but how many of us today know how to grow our own basic cereal products: wheat, rice or corn?
Cereals, in fact, are types of grass; they grow quickly and produce nutritious grains, but the human body is not very biologically predisposed to them, and we do not have four stomachs to digest the grass like cows. Instead, we have to rely on our brains and solve problems with technology. We need to physically grind grain into flour, and then use the transforming power of fire in the oven to bake flour into bread that our bodies can digest. To do this, we need a millstone in a windmill or water mill, and for baking bread or boiling rice, the pot is like an external digestive system.
The main problem is the productive cultivation of grain - an excess of food is the basis of any successful civilization. If one person can feed ten others not involved in the fields, the society will become more developed. Tools for working with soil like a plow or a harrow can be done by reprofiling steel products with a simple forge. But the most important trick that did not succumb to medieval farmers was how to keep the fields prolific for many years. Without modern fertilizers you will have to replenish the supply of nutrients in the soil by plowing the soil with the use of manure and individual legumes - peas, lentils, clover, alfalfa. Dissolving the bones in the acid will provide you with phosphates, and scattering the crushed chalk or limestone will help to contain an increase in soil acidity.
First decades
As your society becomes more self-sufficient, rather than relying on the legacy of a previous civilization, you will have to re-examine traditional skills such as blacksmithing and the manufacture of metal tools in order to run machinery and engines. Civilization has grown thanks to the growth of mechanical energy: windmills and water wheels, then steam engines, turbines and internal combustion engines. They all eased the hard labor of human muscles.
Civilization also needs fuel. Until the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the use of coal and crude oil, the source of an important chemistry — acids, alcohols, solvents, tars — was “dry distillation” of wood; baking wood in an airtight container and collecting vapors as it is converted into charcoal. You can even start the car's engine on the gases emitted in the process of wood pyrolysis; during World War II there were more than a million wood-powered vehicles.
Without access to crude for reloading (our civilization has already sucked all easily accessible oil), you can also make biodiesel so that the machines run on used animal fat or vegetable oil that reacts with methanol (wood alcohol) and alkali (obtained by reacting soda with quicklime of hot chalk or limestone).
In your nascent chemical industry and other easily recoverable substances will also find many uses. For example, ethanol from fermented and then distilled grains will include concentrated alcohol, which is a universal solvent and an effective disinfectant. Charcoal is useful not only for obtaining high temperatures for forging metals or creating bricks or glass, but also as a “reducing agent” necessary for smelting metals from rock ores.
First centuries
In the long term, the only way for a post-apocalyptic society will be to recreate the knowledge and possibilities of understanding the principles of the natural world and to apply this understanding to create useful technologies. The best way to understand how things work is a scientific method: rigorous testing of their theories with the help of carefully planned experiments or observations of natural phenomena. The scientific method is an invention in itself.
To effectively explore the world, you need tools, and there is one substance that is absolutely indispensable in our scientific progress in history. It is relatively durable, chemically inert and completely transparent. This magical material is of course glass.
You need glass to make test tubes and learn about chemical reactions to make thermometers and barometers and understand temperatures and pressures. Glass is needed to manipulate light, to create lenses of a microscope and a telescope. To make simple glass, you need three ingredients: silicon dioxide, soda and lime, which can be found in the form of sand, seaweed and chalk or limestone. Robinson Crusoe could try to make his own glass right on the beach.
And so, with all these scientific tools, armed with rational and inquisitive thinking, you could try to recreate society from scratch in a fairly short time. It will be dozens of years, but society will be restored. The only question that remains is whether it will be our past society, with its mistakes and problems, or something new, better, developed?
The article is based on materials .
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