Tech in the Post Apocalyptic World (Part 2)

where we left off with our post apocalyptic discussion. We will conclude this episode with our talk of our favorite post apocalyptic stories and settings, So enjoy. Okay, let's talk about our nuclear facilities, because I know I have at least heard or read that, like a nuke, your reactor goes for a long time without needing refuel. Yeah, like more than a year. Yeah. So, I mean, you've got those rods in there, they're doing their things. You don't

need to replace them. But like the other plants, this might just be an issue of maintenance and monitoring. Yeah. Um. The I was reading the reports from or really the estimations from someone who had worked in power plants, and they had talked to various power plant engineers of different types of plants to get their estimations. And when they said, when I talk to the nuclear guys, they said, are you crazy, because it was like, look, I'm just trying

to answer a question about zombie outbreaks. I'm not crazy. And they said, well, maybe if everything went well, if there were none of these little same thing, like, if there were none of these alerts that pop up that would necessitate a shutdown, you might go as long as a week. And they're they're just looking at the probability of one of these smaller events that would lead to

an automatic shutdown occurring. I said, you know, if a human is there to deal with whatever the issue is, you could go for more than a year without having to worry about refueling. And after that it would be tricky depending upon how many people are around, because it requires a lot of special equipment to refuel a nuclear power plant. But up to that point, you could supply

power for a year. But if there's no one there to monitor it, probably maybe a week would be about as long as you could expect before something leads to an automatic shutdown. So the best one so far, But then we have the the best one of all if you are getting your power from a hydroelectric plant, assuming nothing's gone wrong with the dam, then you are in great shape. Fuel. Yeah, your your energy is coming from

water flowing through those turbines. As long as nothing mechanical is going wrong with that, you could probably get power for weeks or maybe even a month without any interruption. Yeah. Now, when would you have to have major maintenance intervention? I guess it would maybe if the if the water flow changed dramatically, if there was flooding and you needed to

change the levels of the floodgates or something. There could be that, or it could even be through the transmission of power, not even the generation, but just the transmission lines. Like there are a lot of different parts that are that are involved in this and many different power plants.

Like typically they would have engineers come in and step up or step down the amount of power being put out due to demand, Like the grid typically is making just as much electricity as the demand warrants, Like it's that's it, like as much as we need, that's what the power grid is providing. In this situation, you no longer have someone there to make sure that that's what's happening.

So so problems could result ultimately from that. You know, there are actually a couple of different post apocalyptic movies and fictional scenarios I can think of where the main goal certain characters had was getting hydroelectric plants back up

and running. Yeah, I'm not surprised. I mean that to me would be well again, it's it's the one where as long as you have the mechanical knowledge of how to do repairs and maintenance on the system, and uh just general knowledge of how the transmission system works, it's the most reliable, right, Like it's it's more reliable than solar or wind because the water is always going to flow unless something really major changes the nature of the area,

in which case you probably have more things to worry about than your electricity. Um uh. But otherwise, yeah, I would imagine that would be a top priority. It's the simplest of all the things because you think of things like coal. You have to mind the coal. So even if you even if you had people to keep moving coal into the the power plant, most coal firing plants have enough coal on hand for sixty to seventy days of power. So after that sixty seventy days, even if

you had the people there to look after it. You would have to then go and mind more coal. You have to get your hands on more coal to keep the coal plant going. So hydro electric makes way more sense in that case. Yeah, I just trying to think what different types of alternative or imagined power plants would be the most resilient to Earth disasters, you know, whether it's zombies, nuclear bombs, nuclear zombies, asteroid impact, cyber attacks.

And the one idea I came up with it was most interesting to me at least, though perhaps wrong, is orbital solar all right, so let me take a guess what you mean. And I'm literally guessing because I have not I have not looked at these parts of the notes. You added this while I was recording a different episode. So this would be a network of solar power capturing satellites that would then use a means like a microwave beam to beam energy down to the surface of the planet,

which then would be distributed through a power grid. That's exactly right. So you you've got solar farms, except you're moving the solar farm itself from the surface of the Earth to orbit, and that has some pretty obvious advantages. I mean Number one, you're not dealing with cloud cover intercepting that that precious solar energy you need. The receivers

are out there in space, so they're always getting sunlight. Also, you don't have night time because at geosynchronous orbit, these things will almost never be blocked from the Sun. They might pass, you know, in the shadow of the Earth in very rare cases, they don't spend much time in it. So these are giant solar panels in space that can

receive almost uninterrupted sunlight. They convert the sunlight into d C electricity, which would then be converted into some type of radiation that could be sent via a targeted beam down to receiving stations on Earth. And the two major candidates for the beam radiation are lasers and microwaves, and microwaves are really where it's at today, So these solar

power satellites are usually sps s in the industry. LINGO would be a really daunting project to create because they have to be absolutely huge and you need a bunch of them to really cut into Earth's energy demands. And there was a former Department of Energy NASA joint research project from the nineteen seventies that envisioned a fleet of sixty satellites, each one about fifty five square kilometers in photovoltaic surface area uh together all generating about three hundred

gigawatts of electricity okay um. So then of course there's the question of the wireless energy transmission, which has been a problem historically, but we're getting better at. In fact, just in the past few years there have been some

projects that are that are making strides in this. In fact, I just read an interesting article in the I tri Police Spectrum from last year about Jackson that the Japanese Space Agency's plans two possibly look into creating an orbital solar farm, and they're doing preliminary research on that, like on these wireless energy transmissions, and so these days it looks like most of the people who are still interested

in sps are talking about microwaves rather than lasers. And so this would be a microwave frequency transmission from the satellites to the Earth, and then the receivers on the Earth would be what things that are called rectifying antennas, their antennas that receive the microwaves and then convert them

into electricity. The microwaves are generally considered better than lasers for beaming the energy to Earth because lasers in the visible spectrum or wherever they would be, are more likely to be intercepted by cloudcover, and the microwaves are much more resilient to penetrating the atmosphere. Apparently low frequency microwaves, so the really long wavelengths are the best at penetrating the atmosphere. They're they're much better, but they of course

come with the problem that you need really big antenna's. Yeah, your antenna's size is uh is reliant upon the length of the wave, the wavelength of whatever you're trying to

pick up. So I couldn't exactly figure out how well the space based you know, life root of the microwave beam would survive cloud cover that was based on particulate matter instead of water vapor, because I was trying to imagine, Okay, let's say there's an asteroid impact, supervolcano eruption, or nuclear bombs create nuclear winter, whatever it is that puts ash

dust particles into the atmosphere and blocks the sun. Would the microwaves from space be able to penetrate that any better than the sunlight itself would just get to you know, solar panels on your roof or in the desert, and I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, that's one of those things that probably doesn't come up in a lot of the white papers on the subject. So in the case of nuclear winter, this would still provide power.

So yeah, that's just one interesting possibility of sort of like outsourcing our our energy production needs away from the ground in places where an earth based catastrophe might not touch them. Though they're like I said, some scenarios that might interrupt power from those sources or might not. It's hard to tell. I mean, again, it all depends upon the nature of the disaster, right, And of course you can still imagine that some kind of space weather event

could could very well fry those satellites. Sure, yeah, solar flare might might end up disrupting that, or it could be something on the ground ends up frying the transmission infrastructure, not not necessarily the receiving antenna, but just the means of getting electricity from the receiver site to the places where it's needed. If that's fried, then you know, you could still be generating electricity, but you can't get it

to where it needs to go. In other words, if the power lines themselves are damaged as a result of whatever the catastrophe was. Then you're really you're still stuck. And and some of the things that would come out of this, I mean they're really pretty grim, like even the immediate effects. And this is the people who have gone through blackouts, Uh can talk about the these There was a big one in UM two thousand three that had people trapped on subways, had people trapped in elevators.

You know, you couldn't things that relied upon electricity for operation stopped, and then you know, you could be in a place like an elevator where you also no longer have climate control. Yeah, imagine getting stuck in one of the elevators here during this month, like Atlanta has been incredibly hot and humid this month. So you're stuck in an elevator. Let's say there's like seven other people in

there with you. The elevator stops, climate control stops. After an hour or two, you know, you are already with a bunch of other people crammed in this small space that's gonna get intolerably hot. Um. And that I mean they can get to a point, depending upon where you are, I could get to a you know a point that's that's very dangerous, particularly for people who are already in

poor health. Uh, subways similar problem. You know, you don't necessarily want to immediately evacuate the train if it's a temporary power problem. Then once that comes back online, you've got that third rail that would be of deadly to come into contact with it. So it's one of those

things that you definitely need an evacuation plan. Uh. I've read that if you had a blackout that lasted longer than a few days, like a true blackout that lasted longer than a few days in New York City, then the many of the subways would end up having flooding issues because they no longer would have some pumps that would pump water out. Yeah, I've read the same thing. Yeah, they have to be pumped out every single day. Yeah, even if it's a day that's there's no rain, they

still have to be pumped out. So then you you have infrastructure problems that once the power comes online, that electricity going through the areas that have water that can actually end up causing debreed to catch on fire. And then you got fire on the tracks as well. I mean there's lots of issues that roll out just from losing power. That sounds like a great like folk album title, Fire on the Tracks, Fire on the Track, it's the

lost Johnny Cash album. Uh. Also, you got you have issues with traffic because if all the traffic signals are out, then there's no way to regulate traffic. Yeah, Joe, I'm sure you've driven in Atlanta after there's been power outages where Yeah, how how lovely is it to come up to one of those intersections? Well? Are now? Are you talking about the intersections that have the flashing lights? Let's or it's just blank, It's just blank. I've come on

that too. It's not fun. People are eager for their turn. Yeah, there there are times where like it's odd. I don't know if this is the case in lots of different cities, but in Atlanta, Uh, people either treat everything like it's a four way stop, even if it's a blinking yellow light, which means proceeded with caution, not stop. Um. But people will treat everything like it's a more y stop or do they treat like nothing is a more rated up?

And either way it's not good. And just imagine like this is nationwide you've got no means of regulating the traffic. You also have no way of of being able to have emergency responders get to where they need to go in a in a fast way because everything's clogged up with traffic as people are trying to get home, or people are worried about how much fuel they have. That's

another big issue if the electricity goes out. Most fueling stations, in fact, nearly all of them required electricity to operate, so you can't refuel your vehicle, but you can siphon someone else's and that might end up being an issue too. Uh yeah, so uh, cell phone service might go out.

A lot of cell phone towers have backup generators, but that will only last as long as the fuel does not all cell phone towers have backup generators, so once it goes out, there offline, which means your phone might work, but a person you're trying to call they might not have a working cell phone tower and range. And then, of course, remember that in many major catastrophes and events, you're gonna have so many people trying to access the

cellular system they're flooding it. We've seen that happen. We've seen that have even in even a non emergency situations when there's just a large number of people, like when c e S happens every year or Comic Con, there's so many people trying to connect to the local network that it just overloads it and nothing goes out, uh, and nothing comes in. It's like the Willy Wonka factory before they opened it up with the golden tickets. Nobody ever goes in and nobody ever comes out. Uh. Yeah,

so it's it's a pretty grim situation. We'll talk a little bit more about um possible uh, the possible toll in just a bit, But before we do that, let's talk also about some of the other systems that because of the power outage, would be affected. We we just touched on one the communication system. So satellites would largely be unaffected by any Earth based catastrophe. If it were a solar flare, then obviously satellites would be Actually they'd

be the most vulnerable. The further out you are, the more vulnerable you are to to like a solar flare or coronal mass ejection. UM. Then you know you could end up having the electronics fried on the satellites. A lot of them are shielded pretty heavily for that sort of stuff, because it's more likely to happen to a satellite than it is to electronics here on Earth. But a truly powerful one, and there have been some in

the past, could really overwhelm those satellites. Uh. Anything connected to the power grid obviously would be it would be vulnerable. So uh, you might be able to get radio signals if you have a battery operated radio, which, by the way, you should have a battery operated radio. Hand Yeah, hand crank operated radio would be great to Uh, either of

those are both. You know, there are a lot of combination systems up there where you can get one that works on either battery or hand rank I recommend having one of those. Of course, that will only last as long as the radio broadcasting power has, you know, has a supply of power from whatever source it's pulling it from, like a generator, a backup generator. Once the backup generators out of fuel, if the blackout continues, then that's going to go dark too. So communications might last a little

longer than the power does, but not it won't be indefinite. Um. I've also seen people recommend that you go ahead and invest in walkie talkies because they can provide for communication over sometimes miles of distance, uh, and could be invaluable depending upon where you are. So uh, cell phone towers

and radio stations will all go offline eventually. Are actually some developing nations that are making certain that their cell phone towers are not on the power grid at all, either because there's out of power credit in those remote locations or it's just so unreliable that in order to have a stable communication system power supply that a lot of them are running on their own generators, and many of them are using solar power as a primary means

for generating electricity for during the daylight hours. So that's pretty interesting, and we could take a note from that, like we could start building out infrastructure to be robust in that same way and independent in that same way. Uh. And you know, like I said, just because you have access doesn't mean everybody else, you know does. It could still end up being a big issue and you might

not be able to get in touch with anybody. So that's power and communications, But you know, there are other things that we rely upon that we take for granted, like, hey, have you ever gone up to a faucet and turned on the knob and nothing came out. I've done that in my home before. Isn't that a terrifying experience? It's yeah, it's It's especially bad when it's like your mouth is full of toothpaste. Yes, that's not that's not good. Yeah. Um. Running water is one of those things that we often

take for granted, and uh uh. If the paragrine system is down, running water will follow. Maybe not immediately. You might actually be able to have running water for a day, maybe a little bit longer. If you happen to live in a place that has a lot of water in its pipes like New York City, actually could potentially hold

a couple of days worth of water in their pipes. Um, just because that the water pressure that's built up and the water supplies are enough to go for another couple of days, assuming that everyone's not immediately thinking oh, humanities, every container in the house, yeah, or which I mean, honestly, if I thought if I thought that the apocalypse was happening, the first thing I would do is fill up every

container in the house with water. Yeah, me too. Also, I'd want to run the washing machine to clean on my underwear because I'm sure that it was very recently soiled. That's all scared I would be. I would soil not just the under where I was wearing, but every pair I own. Um. But no, you would you would think that that would very quickly eliminate the supplied water. In the United States, we mostly are creating our water pressure through water tanks. The water tanks are elevated. Um. It's funny.

There's actually a very specific formula. Every every foot of height provides point four three one pounds per square inch of pressure. So if we want to convert that to the metric system, for every thirty point four eight centimeters you get two point nine seven two kilo pascals of pressure. Uh, that means nothing to me. I have to do the pownds of the pressure that the per square inch of pressure.

But a municipal water supplies run between fifty and a p s i or three five to six nine kilo pascals, and most water towers contain enough water to supply the surrounding community for a day, assuming normal use, not that everybody is trying to. Yeah. So the problem is that to refill those water tanks, you have to pump water up to those and yeah, those pumps maybe running on electricity, So if they're not running on electricity, they're running on fuel.

So either they're running on electricity and therefore you can't use them anymore because the grid is offline. So once the water's gone, it's gone, or they're running on fuel. And then once your fuel runs out because you aren't able to transport or refine more of it, or or get your hands on more of it, the water runs out. Either way, the water runs out. It's just a question

of time. So that's a huge issue. So it would really make you wish that you had access to clean well water, and you might depending on where you are, Like we live in an urban environment. We don't have access to clean well water. I think. I don't know. You don't have a well in your backyard, do you If that I do have one, I don't know about it,

but I don't know. There's some weird stuff buried back there. Yeah, it all depends on how often you do yard work, you know, like, yeah, I don't know what's back underneath that mass. Sometimes ghostly creatures come crawling out of my backyard. So oldridge horrors are not necessarily an indication that there is a well in the nearby area. It's a common misconception. Uh yeah, So unless you have access to clean water,

that's gonna be a huge, huge problem. And for much of the population in the United States, that is in fact a huge problem that you don't you know, you don't necessarily live near a place where you can reliably get potable water. Uh. Even bigger problem in other parts of the world, obviously, So that's another issue. Then we have the cars and fuel. So your car, let's say it's an electromagnetic pulse, some of your car systems might

get fried. But in general, you know, we're talking about good old internal bustion that's not affected by electromagnet neetic pulses. That's not an issue. It's a mechanical system. Not well, I understand it is largely I mean, wouldn't there be electronical electronic Um Uh yeah, it is, of course largely mechanicals, you know, combustion. But I wonder about the electronic components, especially if you have one of these newer cars that's

all computer brains. The newer, the newer your vehicle, the more prone it would be to a real issue with an e MP or solar flare. Uh. The older your vehicle, the more reliable it would be in those conditions, assuming that everything is in good working order obviously, but even so, you can't get to the gas. If it's a gas powered car, then you are You've got as much as you have in your tank, and that's pretty much gonna be it. Right. You can't go cut down some gas

from the forest next door. Gas has to be refined from oil, yeah, and so the refineries are going to be offline. The even if even if they weren't offline, do you still have to have transportation, like you have to transport the fuel to the different fueling stations. Fueling stations will be offline because they need electricity to run. So it's a big, big problem. Right, You would have enough gas to get you wherever, you know, however far your tank of gas will take you, assuming you've got

a full tank. Uh, And that would be it. Once you ran out, you'd be pretty much stuck unless you were able to again siphon gas out of some other vehicle of Max's car, but be careful because it's booby trapped. You're talking about Mr mad Max. So then if we're looking at diesel engines. That's a little different, right, Some diesel engines can run on bio diesel, which is some

of them can actually run on vegetable oil. You know, I would say that's an ideal scenario, but then I'm like, well, you don't encounter vegetable oil anymore commonly in nature than you do. That's also something that is has to be expressed in an industrial process. Yes, yeah, you could. You could run out and buy as much as you could from assuming that you have some way of buying. I mean, I don't care you that much cash on me on

any given day. So maybe, like in your imagining in the early days of the apocalyptic scenario, there is less price gouging on vegetable oil than there is on gasoline, and probably water would be the biggest one actually that I would guess water would be chief. But yes, I do think that, um, at least initially, so you would have to, you know, somehow have a means of purchasing this stuff, assuming that people have faith in the currency.

It all depends on what the nature of the catastrophe was, obviously, but um, you would also have to have currency if you don't If you don't have cash on you, you're probably stuck. Uh but yeah you could. You could presumably use vegetable oil or some other means of oil to to fuel your vehicle at least in the short term. But then once you once those supplies are out, then

you're just as stuck as everybody else. Uh So, Yeah, the Mad Max future where people are fighting over water and they have cars that magically are fueled by means that I don't know like how that works. I don't know how they're able to keep a system in place to capture and refine fuel and then distribute fuel. But apart from Bartertown, which is run on methane. Yeah, that is also in the second movie, The Road Warrior. Isn't the little settlement that the raiders are attacking. They're there

like extracting oil from the ground and refining it. Aren't they like set up their own refinery. Yeah, it just it makes me wonder like, if you can set your own refinery, couldn't you set up a desalination facility, because the big issue is water in the Mad Max world.

That's the huge water and gasoline. I mean, yeah, it seems like they're both pretty but I mean, if you're if you're able to get your if you're able to set up a refinery after this whatever the apocalyptic event is, uh, then you probably also could create a desalination plant, which would, assuming are anywhere close to the ocean, would solve a lot of your water issues, or at least at least

diminish them. Um So, then getting the cars all the way, assuming that we haven't reached this mad Max magical world where we can still operate a refinery but everything else is gone completely bonkers. What about personal electronics there? Yeah, I mean what are you going to do with them? Yeah, they might have a battery that'll work as long as the batteries charge, or you need to plug them in somewhere and that'll work as long as you have access to power. But if you do, why are we talking

about this? You could you could potentially have solar panels to recharge electronics, Like, there are a lot of things to do that. But so again we sort of said at the beginning, like if you've got off the grid power, you're in a whole different situation. Then mainly you got to worry about who's coming to get your goods. Well, I'm just thinking back to when I got a house stuff works backpack that had a solar panel built into

it where I could charge of it. That came up with so much power twelve hours of having it sit in the sun would charge it would charge your phone. But that's twelve hours of direct sunlight on that panel. By the way, sun does not stay still for twelve hours, so you gotta like you would have to continuously position the backpack to have an ideal amount of sunlight in order to generate the electricity necessary just to recharge a phone.

Uh so, yeah, you could potentially have some electronics last a fairly long time with rechargeable batteries with solar power, it would be sporadic, and also the underlying infrastructure that supported them is no longer there, so you're not getting a lot of use out of it unless you're just like, well, it's the am I downloaded all these episodes of I don't know whatever I was just thinking. I was just thinking, like about the apocalypse and everything's gone to hell. But

at least I can still play Angry Birds, you know. Yeah, yeah, so it's um Lord Humongus will kill you for that ip, right, So, so the the electronics problem also non trivial. All right, so let's talk a little bit about what would happen during one of these blackouts. Actually, uh, you linked to a an article that was part of a National Geographic special about this. Yeah. It was written by Patrick Jake Tiger,

who writes for house Stuff Works. Yeah, so one of our one of the members of the family, he wrote this thing and and it was a really good article. And it also linked to an interactive page that was all part of this package National Geographic put out depressing but very interesting called American Blackout. And uh, the page that was interactive was really cool. It was it was telling you how a nationwide blackout in America might unfold

over the course of ten days. They assumed that after ten days, whatever the issue was has been resolved and power can be restored. But within that ten days an amazing amount of catastrophe and chaos would occur. Um and they looked at, uh, the potential death count of a

ten day blackout, nationwide black blackout. Keeping in mind, this also affects things like hospitals, So people who would be reliant upon medical facilities to keep them in and keep them alive, they would be at most at risk obviously, and they figured that it would have a death count

of around three thousand thirteen people after ten days. That's a that's without factoring in whatever it was that caused the blackout in the first place, of course, right, So if there was some other catastrophic event that happened first, obviously that death toll would be in addition to this number. Uh, and the numbers would be much higher depending upon whatever catastrophe it was, zombie apocalypse through the roof um. So

then you've got the financial impact. So assuming that it's something that we could recover from where it doesn't stay post apocalyptic for very long, like whatever the issue issue is, we resolve of it. Uh, after ten days, it would be a cost of one point to trillion dollars of lost productivity, of damages, of all those things kind of lumped in together. Yeah, but just think about all that pent up demand. It sounds like a great time to

start a business. Think of how much you would save on your electricity bill because you haven't been able to use it for ten days. So then we will have a real brief section here just to talk about what you what you might want to consider to have as kind of a preparedness kit. Yeah, these are your five tips, and this is in case of you know, these these

blackout situations which could happen for lots of different reasons. Yeah, you want to stock enough food and water and any medical supplies you might need for everyone in your family to last for seventy two hours. Now, obviously this is referring to food that would not need to be refrigerated. Hours worth of mayonnaise has to be like canned goods, that sort of stuff. And uh, you know, you might also want to go ahead and invest in some means of like like like some non electronic means of heating

said food if you want to have it cooked. And of course, as Harlan Ellison would remind us, you need a can opener. Yes, a can opener would Yes, a manual can opener would be very important. Uh. You also want to make sure you have a stocked first aid kit, which makes sense. Uh. Flashlights and a battery powered radio plus batteries doesn't do much good if you don't have any good, reliable batteries to use. Candles and matches, perferably

waterproof matches also a really good idea. And if you have a car, make it a habit to avoid dipping below half full on the gas tank, because if one of these events happens, you want to have enough fuel for you to be able to get home or get away from whatever the incident is, if it happens to

be localized to your area. Yeah. Now, obviously we've said several times now your your best case scenario is to be energy and dependent, Like if you actually had a bunch of solar panels or some kind of way of general rating power in your home, that's not going to run out there. You go, yeah, I've actually seen I was looking into this. Tree Hugger did a article about

the various types of power generation you could do. Our electricity generation you could do at home, and solar power is good, except, of course, if it is super volcanic canoe or dust or whatever. There's if there's something that's blocking the sunlight from getting to the earth, that's not gonna help you too much, right so, um, but then you would also have much more serious problems than not being able to charge your eye pass such as like

crops won't grow we're breathing. That could also be a problem. Wind turbines also are a possibility, possibility depending upon where you live and the regulations there. Personal wind turbine would a generate I mean like a like a reasonably sized one that you could build on your own property. Would that get enough energy? Wind turbine with a four foot diameter of blade diameter would be enough to power a

an average home without running all your major appliances. Like you're like, you wouldn't be able to run the dryer on that. You do not need a one with a nine ft diameter to generate enough electricity to do that, assuming that you're getting reliable amount of wind where you live. And obviously this would be more for people who are not in a denserving environment. So if you have to live out in a rural area where you could build

such a structure, um, that would be a possibility. I've also seen even micro hydro electric power where if you live near a running stream that's running with enough force, you could have a micro hydro electric power generation. I've heard of this. It's a great idea because again, like just like with the major hydraulic systems or hydraulic system hydro powered systems, you don't have to worry about running out of fuel. So great if you have the accessibility

to that sort of thing. So let's conclude this by talking about some of our favorite post apocalyptic stories. And you know this, this isn't so much on the technology side as as just the the worlds that have been imagined by various people that take place in in you know, on on Earth where something like this has happened, like some some catastrophic event has happened. Sure well, these tend to divide between like the very serious and then the less serious. I would say so, so both of us,

it's hard to compare The Road and Mad Max. Yes, both of us really like The Road. That is one of my favorite books of all time. It is a very sad, very disturbing book. But it's also very moving. It has a very uplifting ending. Uh Some might say that it's at least it ends on a at least an but from my reading depends on an optimistic note. I would yeah, so it's but it is it's a hard read, guys, I mean it's not it's not uh pleasant. Yeah, yeah, it is imagining sort of the last gasp of humanity.

So it's not one of these where you know that we've we've just had the the apocalyptic event. It's it's one of these where there aren't many people at all left. And the really cool thing, or one of the really cool things about the book is it never explains what the event was. Yeah, so it describes lots of things like their earthquakes. Um, the sky is constantly gray and all of the plant life is dead, presumably because the sunlight has been blocked by the cloud cover in the skies.

And when I first read it, I assumed, well, I think it's probably talking about nuclear war or something like that. But then I read and I wish I could find this. I tried to go back and find it and couldn't. I read a blog post years ago on the Internet somebody had put together explaining their theory of why they thought the the event, imagined by the author Cormick McCarthy, was a super volcano eruption, and I remember thinking that they made a really good case, but then I couldn't

find what they wrote. Yeah. I think the best argument for that is I don't recall anything in there about a fear of radiation. Yeah, whereas a super volcano could cause many of the same features as a nuclear winter, but without the nuclear fallout. Um. Yeah, that's a that's a great it's a great story. It's again tough read, but a great worthwhile Along the same lines, I guess some people might consider this lower form of art, but I was actually really impressed by the story in the

video game The Last of Us. I'd say that definitely, hands down had the best writing of any video game I've ever played, and in the world they imagined was kind of sad and beautiful and and it was a post apocalyptic scenario caused by a fungal infection that created a zombie like stage. Yeah, it's a it's essentially another zombie outbreak story, but without it being uh yeah, without it being magical zombies. It's it's based more on on things that we have actually observed in nature, though not

with humans but with other life forms. Right, Yeah, it's based on the fungus that infects ants and changes their behavior, gets into their brains. It's just kind of like, well, what if a fungus could get into your brain and make you want to bite people? So that is that is another good one. I also enjoyed World War Z, which I would argue still falls on the serious side.

I haven't read the novel I saw the movie and was not very The novel is entirely different from Yeah, I've heard that I heard the novel was in fact and just like completely different in format and approach. There there are tiny elements that happened in the novel that are touched upon in the film, but they are not at all related otherwise. It's the novel is really more of a collection of uh stories. It's it's told as there's a journalist, not well journalist who's working essentially for

the u N collecting the stories from survivors. This this is post zombie outbreak, post war with the zombies. The humans have won the war. Zombie Outbreak has been largely defeated. There's still some zombies in the world, but they are few and far between and are are often you know,

rounded up and killed off. So humanity is on the rebound now, and it's more of a discussion about what happened leading up to and throughout this zombie war, whether and I. And it's told in a way where you don't really know what the actual precipitating event was um,

which is very realistic. I think, you know, like as as someone who wants to hear a story you kind of want to know all the details, but if you were actually a person there, you wouldn't necessarily have all the information available to you, especially when you consider that a lot of the people who might have been responsible in some way or another or had observed what happened are no longer around because they've been turned into zombies

or killed in some other way. UM. Very powerful story though, and also very interesting to hear kind of the human psychology that might be involved in something like that. Yeah, so in both of the ones I mentioned so far, there was a pretty much a total breakdown of of the larger function of technological society. Though in the last of us there there, you know, there are still people who get some power from generators and stuff. It seems

like somebody is still locating gasoline somehow. But also that's one of the examples I was mentioning. Another one would be Dawn to the Planet of the Apes, where people are trying to get hydroelectric plants back online, because that, as we mentioned, that does seem like a really good bet for trying to revive at least a local power grid in a post apocalyptic scenario. And in that world, I mean, it's only like a tiny bit of San Francisco.

I think that's still alive or is the concentrating you mean? And Dawn to the Planet of the Apes, not the last none, last us, last of Us. It's all spread out all over the place. Yeah. Uh so, here's another one along a maybe sillier line. I love Dawn of the Dead. I like the way things are progressing there. I like watching they're the scenes that depicted the breakdown of discipline in the media, like the TV stations that are still trying to broadcast but people are sort of

losing focus. I assume you are talking about the original don yes, not the remake. Yes, the one that was also a commentary on consumerism. It's a great movie for for me. One of the big ones. The Fallout series of games. Fantastic weird tone mishmash of comedic and tragic in those games, but I think it works. Yeah, there's this this kind of almost almost manic optimism that is being portrayed in a lot of the stuff you come across as a character in those games, despite the overwhelmingly

awfulness of the world. Yeah, it's the gallows hum. It's that nineteen fifties style of you could do it, but meanwhile, like everything's on fire and everyone's terrible, right. Yeah. Also, another way that it sort of has a mash up is it's very high tech low tech mash up. So it has you know, lasers and exoskeleton power suits and robots, but also you know extremely you know, bow and arrow kind of logs, and the aesthetic tends to be the nineteen fifties style of our vision of the future, not

how things actually turned out. So it's a really it's it's an alternate past leading to a an alternate, bizarre future. Um, and you've got some other ones on here. In fact, these are also some of my favorites. Well, yeah, a couple of the Mad Max movies. Of course, you I could not neglect Mad Max. I have to confess I've never actually seen the first one all the way through. Yeah, the Road Warrior is is a more entertaining film. Oh yeah, so you start with the second one. I love The

Road Warrior. Can't get enough beyond Thunderdome. I know a lot of people think it's bad. Maybe it is kind of bad, but I still love it. It's it's definitely more campy. Yeah. And then so folks when I saw Mad Max Fury Road. It's not necessarily that it's the best movie I've ever seen in my life. It's that once I walked out of the theater, it was the only movie I had ever seen in h I love that movie so much. It just it hit all of the happy places in my body and in my brain.

It's also funny that on forward thinking, somehow we managed to bring it back to the doufwagon every few episodes. That was just such an amazing, amazing reality that they created. I think what I told Rachel when we walked out of the theater was I feel like I could rip Australia in half with my hands. All right, now, you've got to tell everybody what Zardaz is because unless they are, you know, a fan of being movie schlock science fiction,

they probably have no clue. Well, Zardas actually touches on something kind of interesting, despite the fact that it's a

very weird and very intensely bad movie. Yeah. So it's got Sean Connery wearing this like red diaper and carrying a gun, and he plays some kind of I don't know, future post apocalyptic wasteland policeman who mostly just murders people from what you can tell, and then he gets sucked into a giant head that's actually a spaceship and taken to a strange sort of commune of immortal psychic people.

It's very hard to describe the plot of Zardas, but done a pretty good job considering it's one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen, and for that reason it's actually worth seeing despite the fact that it is. It utterly fails to be good, but it is never for a second boring. Yeah. Anyway, but I mentioned that it

touches on something interest. It actually does the idea that past technologies, through a sort of like dark age imposed by I don't know, catastrophe of one kind or another, could be rediscovered, but we wouldn't remember how to use them or how to maintain them. I mean, it's possible for dark ages to happen and then to re emerge from them and to rediscover all of the scientific and technological sophistication of an earlier age that that's actually happened

on Earth at times. You know, you had the Bronze Age collapse, you had the you had what are sometimes called the Dark Ages in Europe. Now a lot of historians look back and say, well, that's maybe not the most accurate way to describe that age in Europe. But at least then you had times when a lot of the technological progress that had been achieved during say the Roman Empire, suddenly people didn't know how to do this

stuff anymore. Yeah, not until the Renaissance, where they began to rediscover and build upon those those advanced is from ancient times. Yes, so Zardas kind of touches on that. It's got all these people who are in some ways sort of interacting with high technology, but they don't understand it. So I recommend if you've never seen Zardas, you don't need to seize Ardas necessarily, but definitely seek out the trailer,

which is on YouTube and is amazing. Yeah, especially if you love the names Zardas, because you're gonna hear that a lot. Yeah, you're gonna hear Sean Connery say it in his accent over and over. And then the last one you have on here, Robot Monster. Well this really belonging post apocalyptic? Yes it does, because the premise of Robot Monster is that this race of aliens, who the main one we meet is the robot monster named Roman, I believe, and he is a guy in some kind

of ape suit. It's like a gorilla suit with a it's like a gumball machine on his head, and that's his costume. And he represents this species of aliens who I think comes and conquers Earth. I don't remember all the details, but suddenly they're just like five people left on Earth. But Roman has an extremely difficult time conquering these five people who seem to be about a mile away from him. Yeah, I uh, I think of that as a movie where the audience feels as if they've

been through a post apocalyptic event. Uh, not necessarily the film itself. Well, I think that was on an episode of Mystery Science Theater, wasn't it. You know. I want to say I know that. Well, they've done so many, but I want to say that that was one of the ones they've done. Um, they certainly have alluded to it before. Well, Joe, thank you so much for coming on here and doing these these pair of episodes about post apocalyptic technology. Well, thank you for inviting me. It

has been a whole barrel of fun. Yeah. I enjoyed pulling that tune out of the basket. It also, like, like I said with the Manhattan Project episodes with Ben, I was like, it's kind of like, you know, the stuff they don't want you to know is I think of that as the other side of the coin of forward thinking, Like that's those are two. Forward thinking is the big, optimistic side typically and stuff they don't want

you to know is like the dark, cynical side. Yeah, And in a way, this is also kind of like the other side of the forward thinking coin. It's very different from the stuff we do over it forward thinking. We wouldn't normally explore this kind of topic over there, but it was fun to be able to explore it here on text stuff um and and talk about some of our favorite post apocalyptic stories as well as the actual things that we would expect in those kind of scenarios.

I hope that largely, really, I hope that does one of two things. One, it convinces people that, yeah, it's important for us to think about ways to make our various infrastructures more robust so that in the case of something catastrophic happening, we can localize it. We can we can separate it from everything else, and we can deal

with it. So that it doesn't become a wider problem, and too that it alerts them that there are things that we as citizens can do to protect ourselves, so that you know, if something like this happens, or when something like this happens, if you're looking at along the time scale, we get through it with the minimum amount of problem, knowing that you know, it's not going to be necessarily fun or easy. Easy to get through it, but there are things we can do that will make

it less traumatic, and that's important. So I think those are the messages to go home with. Not not that you know, I'm not trying to scare anyone. I'm more like, just be aware. It's it's good to know that way at least, at least if something like that happens, it's not a total surprise. Uh. But you can find Joe's work over and forward thinking. You can also find his work on lots of different stuff. You were your fun

Stuff to Blow your Mind. I've had a busy week. Yeah, So I am now one of the hosts of Step to Blow Your Mind along with Robert Lamb and Christian Seger, and recently I just appeared on a video and podcast with stuff they don't want you to know about paid online manipulators, so jumps all over the place. You can check out his work there. And of course, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of text Stuff or future guests I could have on the show, you can

write me. Let me know the madresses tex Stuff at Houston works dot com, draw me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. They handled all three US tex Stuff phs, W and I'll talk to you again. Really sick for more on this and bathands of other topics because it has to have works dot com