THASF

I would love to be self-isolating right now, but I work a transportation sector job that requires my physical presence, and I’m basically essential staff for an essential service. I keep watching my employers engage in a dizzying array of half-measures, one after another. First, they wanted everyone to wear nitrile gloves in public spaces. Then, they had them starting to spray disinfectant everywhere, almost pointlessly. It’s no use. It’s an airborne virus. Most people will pick it up from droplets or aerosols, not touching fomites. The moment a decontaminated room is occupied by infected people again, it’s instantly contaminated.

My father used to be into live steam as a hobby, building model steam engines. Modern technology has many important building blocks. If we don’t have access to precision casting or CNC mills, we would need to relearn more primitive methods of metalworking. Blacksmithing, filing, fitting, and machining and welding parts by hand. Tools like the file, hand drill, wheeling machine, and so on, would become extremely valuable. A recent post-apocalypse after a pandemic would be a paradise full of scrap metal and tons of valuable resources. Think of all the abandoned cars. That’s one of the reasons why I never really thought very much of most post-apocalypse stories; the survivors often leave tons of very valuable materials untouched, and there are always ruins and wasted land everywhere, even if there is plenty of untapped labor available to clear the rubble and start over. When I reached the Institute in Fallout 4, my first reaction was “Are you kidding me? If you have all this, then why haven’t you scrapped all those steel structures on the surface and built prefab shelters for people to live in?”

An understanding of biology and medicines is important, but also primitive medicines like herbal medicines, substances that can be used as antiseptics and stimulants, et cetera. Herbalism is often inferior in terms of effectiveness to modern synthetic drugs, but hey, you have to take what you can get. Metalworking, basic agriculture and crop rotation, the creation and use of various basic hand tools, etc.

I think one of the most troubling things about modern society is how far we’ve gotten from primitive tech. We’re reliant on tech that doesn’t really engage our hand-eye coordination or muscle memory. Skills with programming CNC mills don’t always translate into hand-metalworking skills, and many techniques and disciplines requiring hand tools are becoming a dying art, replaced by automation and sophisticated machinery. The most successful groups in any post-apocalypse will be those who have embraced a form of mild primitivism, because they will be most familiar with primitive tech. Horse-drawn carriages, shoeing horses, drawing plows, et cetera.

What’s your opinion on our loss of understanding of primitive tech?

What do you think about the report I’ve compiled on this disease?

https://1drv.ms/w/s!Au5YgiBXLakWohc1Ama7Fh8BCfU6

Is this fairly accurate?