Context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43236520

I love the concept of Solarpunk or anything similar. However, I fail to understand how to reboot modern industry in a post-apocalypse world.

Scenario: I think a deadly virus outbreak is far more likely and devastating than a thermal nuclear war. Let's assume that such an outbreak took out most of the governments and the population, and only local communities start to show up afterwards.

How do you reboot modern industry? I'm sure we can scavenge stores and storehouses for a while, but eventually we need to rebuild a very large portion of modern technologies, if not all of them.

For a start, how do we produce steel, aluminum and other common metal from raw materials? How do we actually mine them? How do we product antibiotics, needles and everything we need in a hospital? How do we build roads (I think this is actually not too hard)? How do we build transportation tools -- for sure we don't want to rely on animals? How do we build water processing factories, or at least, build water processing tools and pills? As a SWE I feel I know nothing about modern industries.

Modern industries are too complex for any small community to even start to think about them. Someone gotta at least preserve some detailed documents for everything so that our future generations have a chance to rebuild them. Take steel production as an example, assuming mining is not a problem (it is), future generations need to know how such a factory is planned, built and operated. I never worked in such a factory but I bet there are tons of papers for just one of them. Encyclopedias won't cut. They don't teach you the 10,000 checks you need to check for all those pipelines and machines. Only factories and industry associations keep such documents, I think.

How do we build such a knowledge preservation project? They gotta be so detailed that even laymen can start learning. How do we store them? If we store them electronically, we need to make sure that future generations have the tools to access them. We also need copies of such a project everywhere in the world, because post-apocalypse communities are small and far from each other.

I also think such documentations should include smaller scale projects so that communities can actually start using it. If the community only has 1,000 people, a project that needs 10,000 doesn't make any sense.

What do you think? Do you think your country already has it covered?

Submissions by hnthrowaway0315

Ask HN: How do you propose to rebuild industry in a post-apocalypse world?

Ask HN: How do you propose to rebuild industry in a post-apocalypse world?