why is there no electricity after the apocalypse?
something people writing post-apocalyptic fiction always seem to forget is how extremely easy basic 20th century technology is to achieve if you have a high school education (or the equivalent books from an abandoned library), a few tools (of the type that take 20 years to rust away even if left out in the elements), and the kind of metal scrap you can strip out of a trashed building.
if you want an 18th century tech level, you really need to somehow explain the total failure of humanity as a whole to rebuild their basic tech infrastructure in the decade after your apocalypse event.
i am not a scientist or an engineer, iâm just a house husband with about the level of tech know-how it takes to troubleshoot a lawn mower engine, but i could set up a series of wind turbines and storage batteries for a survivor compound with a few weeks of trial and error out of the stuff my neighbors could loot from the wreckage of the menards out on highway 3. hell, chances are the menards has a couple roof turbines in stock right now. or you could retrofit some from ceiling fans; electric motors and electric generators are the same thing, basically.
radio is garage-tinkering level tech too. so are electric/mechanical medical devices like ventilators and blood pressure cuffs. internal combustionâs trickiest engineering challenge is maintaining your seals without a good source of replacement parts, so after a few years youâre going to be experimenting with o-rings cut out of hot water bottles, but fuel is nbd. you can use alcohol. you can make bio diesel in your back yard. you can use left-over cooking oil, ffs.
what iâm saying is, we really have to stop doing the thing where after the meteor/zombies/alien invasion/whatever everyone is suddenly doing âlittle house on the prairieâ cosplay. unless every bit of metal or every bit of knowlege is somehow erased, folks are going to get set back to 1950 at the most. and you need to account somehow for stopping them from rebuilding the modern world, because thatâs going to be a lot of peopleâs main life goal from the moment the apocalypse lets them have a minute to breathe.
nobody who remembers flush toilets will ever be content with living the medieval life, is what iâm saying. letâs stop writing the No Tech World scenario.
the thing *I* get mad about is no one goes and fixes up any of the hundreds of thousands of airplanes lying around, or even puts together any new ones. like the big fucking stumbling block for all those thousands of years for humans seemed to just be no one managed to combine the idea for a propeller with an engine that would spin it fast enough. but now the genie is thoroughly out of the bottle: drawings of planes have the propeller on it. we will remember that the secret to airplanes is smallish airfoil wings and a very very fast propellor (or three) for a thousand years, until all the books and drawings and planes themselves have decayed away.Â
like yeah you couldnât make commercial jetliners in your garage, but if you camped out in an old airfield, you could probably bang together some kind of working franken-cessna.Â
I have an uncle who got bored and built a flyable franken-cessna in his garage a few years ago based upon his knowledge as an automotive worker so you really donât need to be a specialized aeronautics expert to build a plane. You just gotta be able to stop your dogâs weird anti-aircraft vendetta long enough to put it together.
but yeah, the electricity thing bugs me so much. Solar panels are everywhere these days. It isnât super hard to set up small wind turbines. But! the thing that bugs me the most is the assumption that the whole power grid of a continent would just fall apart all at once and never get back up and running (assuming your apocalypse doesnât explicitly state why that happened).
like look at the 2003 Northeast Blackout in North America. Cascading failures sent about 250 power plants offline. But even in areas hit by the blackout there were pockets that were fine. Either they had local power generation or they caught on to what was happening and separated from the grid before it hit them. Or they got back up and running the same night. And it didnât expand beyond the northeast area because the whole of north america isnât connected to each other. You could have something hit the east coast and the west coast but Quebec and Texas would be there happily flipping everyone off as they basked in their separate grids.
And! different types of power generation are going to have different levels of protection. A solar farm probably has a fence that will keep out the local hooligans. A wind farm is just fuck off tall and leaves it to sheer height to stop people from fucking with it. Hydroelectric dams depends on how big it is, could be dedicated armed security, could be the two dudes on duty to run the turbine that day whoâre just annoyed theyâre missing lunch. Nuclear has an entire department whoâs sole purpose is to fuck you up and they are very bored and would like to have a reason to use the armoured truck. So yeah, you canât just walk into most of these places with the intent to âdestroy the gridâ or if you can walk into them people are going to be like, why is that random dude out there literally tilting at windmills maybe someone should stop him.
Also, I am always disappointed when north american authors forget that ARES (amateur radio emergency services) exists. Itâs a bunch of local volunteers who are super into radio but also they will drop everything and head into disaster zones to run emergency communications. Your cell phone might not work, your internet might never come back on, but buddy down the road has access to a radio and a can do attitude.
some fantastic additions here!
and to everyone who was like âyou canât use your devices directly off a turbineâ oh my god i knooooow, did you think my post was a tutorial? you can do the farming part of the postapocalypse. please leave electricity to people who know there are reference materials.
And guys, many satellites will still be up there for like⌠several decades after the apocalypse (assuming weâre not talking massive solar flareâ and even then it would only take out the ones in view). Get yourself a satellite phone, and youâve got international comms again.
Thereâs a story in the Defying Doomsday anthology (âDid We Break The End Of The Worldâ by Tansy Rayner Roberts) where one of the protags knows how to recycle and rejuice every day batteries. I didnât even know that was a thing that could be done under normal circumstances before I read that
