This reminds me, I've been toying with the idea of starting a github repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario occurred. It would be crowdsourced and bake-able into an ebook for offline reading. Anybody interested in it as a "Show HN" post?
> […] repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario occurred.
There's a book (ISBN 978-0143127048):
> Maybe it was a viral pandemic, or an asteroid strike, or perhaps nuclear war. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it has ended and you and the other survivors must start again. What key knowledge would you need to start rebuilding civilisation from scratch?
> Once you’ve scavenged what you can, how do you begin producing the essentials? How do you grow food, generate power, prepare medicines, or get metal out of rocks? Could you avert another Dark Ages or take shortcuts to accelerate redevelopment?
I'd imagine that prioritising getting metal out of old components would be a more efficient process. It's my understanding that there aren't many easily accessible metal deposits left, as there would have been thousands of years ago.
This would be a great starting point for the repo. The goal would be to have this layman-level knowledge like this and then flesh out the extreme technical details by crowdsourcing verified experts. I'm especially interested in how to organize traumatized people in a productive way, since that will likely be one of the biggest hurdles to overcome.
Like a wikipedia, but condensed, useful, and navigable. Preferably able to store offline / locally or decentralized. Would have to identify what basis is necessary for rebuild and what is luxury. A large majority of things today are simply luxury. I love the idea of it though and would def try and contribute somehow even though my skill and knowledge base isnt comparable to others.
An offline dump of Wikipedia would be a valuable addition to such a library. I've been thinking of storing something like this on a durable laptop stored in a Faraday cage, along with solar chargers and so on.
If such a major SHTF happens that it warrants rebuilding the society and figuring out how to survive, then Github will be down, internet will be a rare occurence and your computer isn't likely to work for very long either.
Electronic distribution and consumption of media isn't very resilient if one expects a large-scale SHTF event. For such a scenario, it'd be better to pump out tons of copies as cheap paperback books.
Of course, this depends on the definition and scale of the SHTF. Personally I don't think it's much of an SHTF if one still can consult e-books in any form.
An even better plan would be to learn the skills that you would put in that book. The amount of information you can put in a book is only enough for a rough starting point (and that's if the book only has one subject). The practical experience necessary to do these things correctly and efficiently is only really gained by doing them repeatedly.
A further improvement would be to build a small community that practices these skills and tries to be as independent as possible from the current grid. These are all orders of magnitude more complex and difficult than the last but just imagine how much more difficult it would be to bootstrap society in a real SHTF scenario.
I completely agree with you. Any book would be at best a memory aid or a reference.
One step above the "small community of off-the-grid preppers" would be to come up with ways to make today's societies more resilient to systemic hick-ups, small and large, using either the means available already today or those which are very close in the technology tree.
Doing so would require a lot of decentralization, e.g. by localizing production of electricity and other consumables and making these smaller units more autonomous. Think not big cities with a power plant each, but rather groups of houses sharing solar panels and a wind mill.
Then again, this would probably be a kind of a pipe dream, as decentralization is by definition not completely under centralized control. This creates all kinds of friction. For example, if everyone produced their own electricity locally, what would the power companies do? And what would the state do with the lost tax money? There are plenty of problems like this, and I doubt one can find a win-win situation where the nowadays centralized things would not lose in some way.
Imagine that scene from Planet of the Apes where Gary Oldman powers up an old broken iPad. But instead of looking at pictures of his family he opens up a digital copy of "how to rebuild society after the end of the world".
I have a waterproof kindle and a portable solar panel for charging. That's more what I had in mind with an ebook version. It can store more content, easier/lighter for travelling, read at night, and waterproof.
Just because TCP/IP was made to be robust enough to survive holes in the network topology caused by nuclear bomb devastation, it doesn't really mean that TCP/IP networks would magically keep on working after a large-scale nuclear war.
I mean, during a nuclear war, the networks would only need to stay working until a counterattack could be coordinated and launched.
After that point, the devastation would be so large planetwide that I think any potential TCP/IP users roaming the irradiated wastelands looking for food while coughing up blood would have other things on their mind than network access in any case.
For smaller scale events, sure, but while the networking design might be robustness-focused, there is still a huge amount of auxiliary stuff required, these need power and cooling, maintenance and administration, repairs, and so on.
Some parts of the internet system might be robust and resilient, but the whole system certainly isn't.
I think we can just assume that in a nuclear war or major EMP event the Internet will be one of the first things to go.
But this is one of the best uses of a Raspberry Pi. A Pi with an external USB drive and a small display will run off solar battery power, but still have enough storage for a complete Manual for Rebuilding Everything.
Add some EMP protection [1] and update the Manual from GitHub once a month or so, and you're set.
Indeed, a Raspberry Pi that could presumably work fine for the short term.
However, I don't think it'd work for the long term given a suitably large catastrophy. This may sound like a No True Scotsman argument so let's just for the sake of argument define "suitably large" as "permanently disrupts the current industry base for things like chip fabrication facilities".
Once the tiny computer and/or its peripherals fail for whatever reason, such as simple wear and tear, that's it -- no new parts will be available for the more advanced components. Spare parts could be scavenged, but even that is a limited resource, and will just push forward the moment when the reference library goes away. At that point it had better be either useless or fully memorized.
So I think books are better for the longer term. Of course, books are brittle too in different ways, but they don't need to be paper books... A book could be printed on Tyvek like some hiking maps are; Tyvek doesn't mind water and can be folded and doesn't rip so easily.
Please note I might be biased since I really love books :)
I'd argue that the digitized versions would likely last several years. After a catastrophe stuck, one of the instructions after securing immediate survival would be to transcribe the contents to whatever media is available for longevity. Likely entire libraries of books. Otherwise you'd need to store and maintain those entire libraries everywhere prior to the event, which would be harder to accomplish and keep safe.
it would be interesting to find out just how much would survive.
ok, maybe not "find out" but... speculate?
Cellular networks have been resilient because they're possibly distributed mesh networks. I'm pretty sure the carriers have some gurus who officially or unofficially have figured out what happens.
DSL/cable type networks might be different.
I'm pretty sure dns and similar systems are widely distributed.
I wonder if a proper analogy might be the roadways. Even though one road or freeway might be blocked, people will be able to drive around and (maybe) get through. Who knows, maybe there are some "blocked mountain crossing" equivalents with the internet.
On a personal level, a laptop, a cloned git repository and a solar panel. :)
I'd recommend you check out Kiwix [1], an app but also a decade-old effort to make portable, offline working wikipedia copies. Coupled with a decent phone/tablet and there you have it...
Or maybe you're more inclined towards a "FM 21-76 US ARMY SURVIVAL MANUAL" kind of project?
I interpreted the report as: "There are 9 unguarded remote sites which, if damaged maliciously or accidentally, would lead to complete collapse of the U.S. as a nation."
And then experts focus on 2 unlikely generalized scenarios of an area EMP effect incidentally affecting the sites. As for the more obvious catastrophe of someone specifically targeting the locations? I guess that's being discussed separately?[1]
I must have missed the "unguarded remote" part of the article. I read that there are 30 critical sites, any 9 of which would be a problem if taken out.
To me, this sounds standard risk management. It sounds like a clear picture that it falls in the "Low Likelihood / High Impact" quadrant, though, which is the toughest quadrant to address, because you get into exactly the kinds of questions you alluded to - unlikely, generalized ideas of what could happen, but having to balance that with everyday operations which are absolutely going to happen. Even with a known mitigation of stockpiling resources to recover from such an event, at a price tag of $300M, there are many other things that money could go to.
And while I'd like to feel safe knowing they have a solution ready, I don't know enough about the budgetary limits or what other programs would have to be reduced to make that $300M be available to give a solid personal opinion on any of this.
The US government is operating at a deficit. And budgets are assigned to specific departments, who still try to fit all their programs within it.
A better analogy might be that we all live in a very grand house, but can't afford the mortgage. Sure. a family meeting could certainly find the money in a drawer somewhere. But until we have that meeting, everyone is just sitting in their room doing their own thing.
People have tried to destroy mobile phone masts in the mistaken (and deluded) belief that they cause Corona virus. Never under estimate people's stupidity.
The chances of an EMP attack
Q: I’ve heard a lot from you about how dangerous an EMP attack could be. But how likely is it that anyone will actually try to attack us with an EMP?
A: Unlike the EMP Commission, most national security experts view EMP attacks as a second rate threat. While perhaps some small terrorist groups or rogue nations might launch a localized EMP attack that might take out a substation or two, it’s unlikely that any country capable of launching a major EMP attack would actually do so.
Q: Why not?
A: Because to launch a major EMP attack, a country would need a large nuclear weapon. And if a country was planning on using a large nuclear weapon, it would make more sense — in the morbid logic of war — to conventionally drop it on a city than to launch an EMP attack which would at most cause some brief power disruptions in a few states. As physicist Yousaf Butt put it, “A weapon of mass destruction is preferable to a weapon of mass disruption”.
This is very wrong and just tells me we should be even more cautious due to it being a blind side. The defense industry has for over a decade had highly deployable, targetable, non-nuclear EMP. (ex1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh1rgy25XhU) If there is one thing I know, it's that the tools we develop for war in other places tend to end up being used back at home. So I would also disagree with the casual dismissal of the likelihood of use domestically. Further, part of the entire reasoning in natsec circles for the increasingly egregious violations of the constitution is because of the increase in ability for non nation-state actors to be able to perform in new types of asymmetric attacks, and I would say non-nuclear EMP would be just one in that list.
The good news: I think most of these problems are solvable, and will assist us in being more ready to explore the extreme parts of our world and beyond. Making tempest and EMP shielding default in electronics manufacturing for example. It would also assist in reduction of the totalitarian surveillance regime... so I say lets all start talking about how to do shielding properly. There is a lot of misinformation out there about it. I do wonder though, how much of that misinformation is on purpose. Like encryption, at what point does the government decide to suppress a technology because it might hinder their power? Things to ponder.
> Q: I’ve heard a lot from you about how dangerous an EMP attack could be. But how likely is it that anyone will actually try to attack us with an EMP?
> A: Unlike the EMP Commission, most national security experts view EMP attacks as a second rate threat. While perhaps some small terrorist groups or rogue nations might launch a localized EMP attack that might take out a substation or two, it’s unlikely that any country capable of launching a major EMP attack would actually do so.
> Q: Why not?
> A: Because to launch a major EMP attack, a country would need a large nuclear weapon. And if a country was planning on using a large nuclear weapon, it would make more sense — in the morbid logic of war — to conventionally drop it on a city than to launch an EMP attack which would at most cause some brief power disruptions in a few states. As physicist Yousaf Butt put it, “A weapon of mass destruction is preferable to a weapon of mass disruption”.
It seems like an EMP attack would be best bet against the US for an actor with a very limited number of nukes. From the field strength maps I've seen, a single large nuke (not sure if NK's nukes are large enough) would affect all of the US, two nukes and they could hit the coasts.
Nuking a city destroys a city, destroying the electrical grid takes out most of a nations industrial production and forces them to focus on short-term survival.
An EMP taking out the power grid across the US in a way that isn't quickly recovered from would likely be a lot more devastating - definitely in terms of industrial capacity, possibly also in human losses due to starvation and general collapse - than nuking two major cities with the same yield.
Any nuclear exchange will be focused on preventing the other side from using their nukes first and foremost. If the US has N locations to launch nukes from, then an attacker better have N+1 nukes if they want to spend one in the atmosphere for EMP too.
Delivering a conventional strike on N transformer stations would probably be a better idea since there would then likely be a conventional retaliation and not a nuclear obliteration of the attacking country. I guess with North Korea you can’t know.
Whenever I read about EMP it reminds me of an interesting device called an explosively pumped flux compression generator (EPFCG). It generates an EMP using explosives but the blast is not the goal it's generating a massive electrical current (millions f amps in a microsecond).
From what I can understand an EPFCG needs an explosive-driven ferromagnetic generator (EDFMG). I imagine the EDFMG is used like a fuse or blasting cap for the EPFCG.
If this subject interests you, I'd highly recommend the book "Sunfall" by Jim Al-Khalili. It's the physicist's first venture into fiction and is based around the threat of coronal mass ejections and a flipping of the Earths magnetic field. He also weaves hacking, encryption and other science themes into the plot.
As you might expect from a theoretical physicist, it's based on solid science, with a small amount of poetic licence that he describes in the afterword.
It's been described as "The Day After Tomorrow meets Neuromancer". Not sure I'd quite go that far, but it's a damn good read.
So I am not an expert in this field, and actually I only have a vague idea in what a transformer does, but is there a reason to believe this would not be repairable? We are not talking about a usual bomb, so most of the materials and infrastructure would still be there. It would not make any sense to build a new one instead of repairing or replacing the damaged parts.
For an EMP attack to be effective on modern electronics, you need to blow up a multimegaton nuclear bomb close enough for it to take out whomever is using that piece of electronics...
No. Optimal altitude for an EMP attack is actually a few hundred kilometers up. The "base case" usually considered in these scenarios is a nuke going off about 400 km over Omaha. At that altitude, the ionosphere helps you create a "slow" E3 pulse which induces a field in the tens of volts per kilometer at ground level; and since you can see most of the continental US, you have plenty of kilometers to work with.
My understanding could be wrong, but wouldn't this mean exposing a 1 cm wide component (and/or components that have one cm long traces attached) to at least 250 V?
Wouldn't this be expected to destroy not every single component, but enough components to make enough hardware inoperable to collapse all industrial and power generation capabilities? (If you destroy 10% of ICs on only 10% of control boards in a power plant or factory, I'd assume that plant goes down hard and isn't coming up any time soon.)
From what I’ve read about Project Orion, the physical damage from nukes is mostly in the shockwave. The material shockwave doesn’t propagate very far in space, so satellites won’t be blown up by a space nuke.
The EMP is, if I understand right, created by a shockwave in the extremely diffuse plasma of the ionosphere, affecting electrons and ions differently, creating a massive charge separation, and the collapse of that charge separation is what produces the actual EMP. That said, this article is the first I heard of the E1/E3 distinction, so I don’t know enough to be sure of what an EMP would do to satellite electronics.
Naively, this map makes me think that a single such EMP means enough electronics break that every major power plant or industrial plant is down and not recoverable for weeks.
An EMP attack is of course a plausible and realistic, but a rather costly, dare I say, somewhat of a science fiction formulation of an attack.
Any attacker is unlikely to choose the most costliest and fanciful form of attack. Wouldn't it be much more cost efficient to send multiple groups of people to drive around and snipe or blow up equipment of transformer stations at key places?
That doesn't help you if you can't get the fuel for it. Most industrial facilities can't just run on generators. Data centers can in theory, but I somehow doubt those diesel delivery contracts would be fulfilled, and good luck calling around asking for alternatives when the phone networks go down.
It starts to make sense once you know how nuclear EMP attack works. The detonation would happen high in the space (400 km) and would not cause direct effects or radiation on the earth.
EMP pulse in a continent wide nuclear EMP attack is not coming from the nuclear detonation directly. It comes from synchrotron radiation when free electrons in upper atmosphere interact with earths magnetic field
i'm assuming this is now being discussed due to the recent kurzgesagt video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo . Key takeaways are that solar flame detectors are only 33% effective and we don't have a stockpile of enough transformers.
I think the EMP situation can cause permanent damage to solar panels and batteries, even in off grid configs, though they would indeed help people who are out of the damage zone.
Oh but most wargame EMP scenarios assume full blanketing of the USA with EMPs so no such zone will exist.
Grid resilience is probably more appropriate in this case and is independent of generation technology.
I think the answer is not "nope" but "probably nope". That video is perhaps overconfident in our ability to detect these storms.
From the article:
> One-third of major storms arrive unexpectedly, according to the SWPC’s own 2010 analysis. And that’s not just the small storms. According to a news article in Science, the SWPC might be also be poor at identifying the characteristics of severe storms, since they are so rare.
Q: Should I be more worried about EMP Attacks or solar storms?
A: Opinions differ. But the EMP Commission is more worried about EMP attacks.
Q: Why?
Here's where I expected the answer to be:
A: Because it's the EMP Commission. It's right there in the name. The Solar Storm Commission is down the hall on the right.
(I personally imagine it in the voice of John Cleese)