Al and I were talking on the podcast about Dan Maloney’s recent piece on how lead and silver are refined and about the possibility of anyone fully understanding a modern cellphone. This lead to Al wondering at the complexity of the constructed world in which we live: If you think hard enough about anything around you right now, you’d probably be able to recreate about 0% of it again from first principles.
Smelting lead and building a cellphone are two sides of coin, in my mind. The process of getting lead out of galena is simple enough to comprehend, but it’s messy and dangerous in practice. Cellphones, on the other hand, are so monumentally complex that I’d wager that no single person could even describe all of the parts in sufficient detail to reproduce them. That’s why they’re made by companies with hundreds of engineers and decades of experience with the tech – the only way to build a cellphone is to split the complicated task into many subsystems.
Smelting lead is a bad DIY project because it’s simple in principle, but prohibitive in practice. Building a cellphone from the ground up is incomprehensible in principle, but ironically entirely doable in practice if you’re willing to buy into some abstractions.
Indeed, last week we saw a nearly completely open-source build of a simple smartphone, and the secret to making it work is knowing the limits of DIY. The cell modem, for instance, is a black box. It’s an abstract device that you can feed data to and read data from, and it handles the radio parts of the phone that would take forever to design from scratch. But you don’t need to understand its inner workings to use it. Knowing where the limits of DIY are in your project, where you’re willing to accept the abstraction and move on, can be critical to getting it done.
Of course, in an ideal world, you’d want the cell modem to be like smelting lead – something that’s possible to understand in principle but just not worth DIYing in practice. And of course, there are some folks out there who hack on cell modem firmware and others who could do the radio engineering. But despite my strong DIY urges, I’d have to admit that the essential complexity of the module simply makes it worth treating as a black box. It’s very probably the practical limit of DIY.
When I read “Al and I” — I of course read that as “Artificial Intelligence and I.”
Same. The good old HaD tradition of using brackets when referring to a person like [Al] may have helped.
HAD should stop using a font where upper case letter I and lower case letter l are the same.
HAD could simply refer to artificial “intelligence” as A”I” and it’d be clear…
I’ve suddenly got this picture of ‘Home Improvement’ appear in my head. 🥲
Same
Or they could just use all capital AL for the name.
“That’s why they’re made by companies with hundreds of engineers and decades of experience with the tech”
I thought they were made by companies with hundreds of industrial spies.
We have been living in the “blck box” paradigm for some time. I used to hold to the idealist notion that you should understand the inner workings of what you are doing. But a briliant friend of mine corrected me, he said:
“That was in the past, now things evolve so fast that you dont have time to keep up with in depth knowledge. Your job demands a quit development process, so you glue together some components or libraries that do the job, just understanding the minimum necessary to make it work. Chances are that you will never need to go back to it anyway. ”
Things dont get repaired, and companies actually discourage repairing because they make more money selling you new stuff. That is why you dont have schematics, parts or any support with firmware for “old” stuff (like the previous version of the product, maybe 1 or 2 years old…)
Software is actually the worst case, with fast iterations of any application or OS, making obsolete the concept of “full knowledge” of the system. I still remember the addresses for important stuff on the ZX Spectrum (23606 and 23607…) and we had books called “ROM disassembler”.
The last OS that I had deep knowledge was the DOS! How useful is that today?
So, it is not only a DIY issue, it is a general issue.
“The last OS that I had deep knowledge was the DOS! How useful is that today?”
It depends. The DOS commands in Windows NT or OS/2 are similar, still.
Also, DOS isn’t dead per se. There are a dozen systems that are DOS ABI compatible, MS-DOS is just one of them. FreeDOS and PC-MOS/386 are open source.
Multiuser DOSes like Real/32, DR Multi-User DOS exist, as well.
Then there are various single tasking DOSes, such as Paragon DOS, Datalight ROM DOS and so on.
Likewise, OS/2 still is pretty alive. It brcame eComstation first, now it’s ArcaOS.
And ArcaOS supports modern UEFI firmware, USB and 64-Bit CPUs.
All without loosing DOS and Win-OS/2. IBM Windows 3.1 still lives on in the DOS VM of OS/2.
With ODIN, Win32 applications like IrfanView or Winamp can be run on OS/2. Works similar to WINE on Linux.
Really, it’s almost like with Linux distros. There are many DOSes.
It might be niche, but it’s not dead. DOS is used by x86 single board computers. Just look for 486 SBCs.
You are saying that there is room for the “specialist” that is the rare individual with in depth knowledge of a legacy system. And that person can make a good income, while such systems still exist.
That is true but with some caveats: mostly niche applications and possibly short lived. COBOL programmers might make a good living in banking for some time, but for how long?
Besides, if my experience shows anything is that my “in depth knowledge” is as useful as that stock of electronic components in storage for decades; management just said that after 5 years it should be disposed of. Now we dont have resistors or capacitors, not that anyone needs them anyway… in a maintenance division… Just swap a board (not that you could fix the modern boards without the proprietary chips).
I used once my DOS expertise to recreate a Novell server, because I found a legacy ISA ethernet board that was supported by Novell drivers. But that system is now gone, the old hardware was trashed, and the floppy disks would be unreadable. Even the OS/2 servers had to be retired because there where no drivers for modern hardware. There goes the (more limited) OS/2 knowledge.
We where stuck with IBM AIX 5 because of the cost of upgrading to newer versions, and end up upgrading directly to Linux; there goes the (much more limited) AIX expertise…
“You are saying that there is room for the “specialist” that is the rare individual with in depth knowledge of a legacy system.”
Yes. But there’s more. If you had worked with DOS and Novell servers before, you have understood the concepts.
Moving on to Windows NT or Unix systems and TCP/IP doesn’t make your old knowledge fully obsolete.
It rather allows you to derive modern technology from things learnt.
The *nix terminal commands might be slightly different, but things like files, directories and pipes still exist.
Same goes for networking, the OSI model still is relevant and both TCP/IP and IPX/SPX use packet based communication.
Things like collisions and physical connections (RJ45 cabling) remain same.
That’s why I think that even outdated knowledge still can be valuable knowledge.
Because it allows us to compare, to derive from.
Your friends point of view seems to be a lame excuse for not keep thinking for himself anymore. Or maybe he’s just jealous about you.
Understanding base principles should always be a goal, at least. Black boxes or not.
Once we loose interest in the basics, we will end up like those poor souls in dystopian science fiction novels.
If you want a recommendation, stick to your previous mindset and keep going! 🙂👍
It doesn’t have to be all too sophisticated anymore, maybe, but the technological concept should remain clear to you.
Once we loose this understanding, we become slaves to technology and those who make it.
Btw, on a side note, it’s common these days that optimists are being almost instantly greeted with negativity.
It’s the current Zeitgeist. People feel miserable and want to drag others down.
That’s how science fiction series such as STD come to be.
Everything is made bleak and hopeless, with short moments of hope that will be crushed in an blink of an eye.
The message seems to be “see? your life is miserable, but others have it worse. your sad life isn’t that bad, thus.”
Sadly, such a mindset doesn’t make for a better future. In the 80s and 90s, people had to fear WW3 but enjoyed life, nevertheless.
I hope that the next decades will have more optimistic people again, who enjoy technology and open software/hardware.
I agree with your point of view that, of late, society is being driven by nihilistic and suicidal arguments.
But we must recognize where we are and where we are going. Because there are consequences if we keep going the direction we are heading, and a discussion must happen about this.
The path today is way beyond the “black box” paradigm, now it is “cloud” paradigm; you dont even have a physical “box” that performs the operation, you just pay for a service that is centralized elsewhere.
Most technical and support jobs will follow the path of the repair industry: generally extinct local repair and components shops. Because the expertise will be centralised, just like the components distributors that are mostly online and international.
Of late even the monitoring of the operation of servers and network devices is getting centralized. Try to operate newer equipment without it being online to receive ever more fractional licencing and firing alerts to the manufacturer to offer you a solution to the issue you dont even know you have.
In orders to operate systems completely offline we are being driven to use the almost out of production systems and open source monitoring systems. In a couple of years you cannot operate offline.
Take the WD issue that I have personal experience.
I just wanted a cheap local network storage, and without doing my homework, I acquired a WD myCloud home. Just had to disable the cloud feature, I thought.
But no, even for a local FTP access I had to go online! WTF! They actually had to make an extra effort to build a centralised system for this. As if you would access online your storage by an unsecure FTP protocol.
I actually had to hack the thing, disable all outside connectivity and enable the local protocols I wanted.
That is why I am one of the few people imune to the global crash of their cloud system that deleted the data people had on THEIR OWN devices.
Actually I find that everything I may be interested in buying sucks in one way or another.
Everything is released with bugs. No company is really interested in fixing their bugs, all development is focused on the next release with new features you didn’t ask for which you’re told make it better even tho you dont want “better” you just want your bugs fixed.
Or the growing trend for purposely engineering parts to fail. Rife in the automotive industry and of zero help to the consumer.
Putting “black box” electronics into things that dont need them just so it’s harder to fix and maintain – even stuff from the dollar stores. The E-waste mountain grows ever hire and true recycling is a myth.
EG: if we are saving the planet from not using plastic bags in the supermarket, why is everything packaged in plastic?
What I mostly find is that the relationship between company trying to sell you something and the consumer has moved from “please will you buy” towards the abused spouse model.
With very limited choice and mostly what were once good brand names now OEMing the same rubbish and just charging you more for it.
Funny thing is it’s mostly really easy to fix, at least for a frame of reference.
Depending on your juristriction, it’s the 50/60’s. it’s pre-plastic society. Before it became mainstream.
Before China dominated the world.
You are exactly right. We do live in a ‘black box’ world. I am a programmer by trade. And I use ‘libraries’ to build my applications. I don’t know the internals, nor do I care. As long as the library call works, I am happy. I just can’t retain ‘everything’. No need to re-invent the wheel every time.
I used to ‘care’ about DOS (a lot) and the Linux kernel, but not anymore. More interested in just using the presented interfaces to do the job if using an OS. Time is money so to speak, and one just can’t know it all. That’s a given.
The only space that I still deep dive (sort of) is in boards like the Pico and Pico 2. But that is because there is no OS. That said, I still ‘use’ the dev tools and libraries that have been developed… Not build tools, then programs from the ground up — usually.
What is neat to me though, is because we have these ‘black boxs’ we can go farther than ever before. Each of us don’t build micro-processors. We use them. You have to build on what has come before or civilization will decay. Simple as that. Ie. you do have to invent say Calculus over and over again. Just use it. Of course you have to have the select few that actually design and tape out, improve the micro processors, but the rest of us just ‘use’ them. Another tool in the tool box.
Dont get me started about linux.
The increasing speed of changes makes a lot of old software uncompilable, exactly because of the libraries. Then you need to dive deep and “fix” library calls…
All you said is true, but it gets to a point were you will have to remake the proverbial “wheel” because it doesn’t work with modern systems.
And that is supposed to be good according to the economists, because it opens up new markets and makes for reliable income from forced clients.
But the end result is not innovation, but rather dependency.
“….but rather dependency.” You can sure see that in the Windoze eco system, and Apple… At least Linux you can fix if needed and have the freedom to choose (distros, GUIs, applications, etc.) . And yes it comes with a price, but I am more than willing to accept the price for the freedom it brings to the table. No one forcing a GUI on you, dotNet framework, cloud solutions on you … that you have to pay for.
I totally agree with you, that is why I think linux should be very careful in maintaining retro-compatibility, so that all this work that has been done before can still be useful.
Or rather: so that all the knowledge that existed before is still useful.
Open source is our last bastion of defense against the “enshitification” of everything.
Right. Also, open source means I can use other people’s DIY in my DIY.
I think your friend is describing the switch from development to integration. No longer developing the components for a product, it changed to finding the components or the vendor that provides the components.
Perhaps is more of a division of labor. You can develop components or you can do integration for products.
For software, getting paid for components is tough. “Open source developer” is a thing.
I highly recommend the book “The Toaster Project” as an example of attempting to reproduce modern tech from the ground up.
In ham radio we don’t have this issue. In principle, we can build our radios from scratch and our infrastructure is independent.
And I really mean this literaly. You can build wires, resistors, caps, speakers, relays, microphones and diodes from materils found in the woods and mountains.
It’s just a task that needs a few weeks to complete, maybe.
A crystal oscillator is more complex, but it can be substitued by a conventional oscillator.
Heck, even an electron tube can be built in a medieval village.
It just needs patience and a vaccuum pump. A water-based one can be used, for example. Needs no electricity.
So really, all it needs is a village with a blacksmith and a glassblower and a shoe maker or clock maker.
Or some individual who has similar tools. Medival monks in a cloister are more than qualified to build a crystal radio or a simple tube transmitter.
That only works because it’s 100 year old technology that you could use to talk to other people using 100 year old technology. I’m not saying it’s useless, especially if a real large-scale catastrophy would happen, but that’s not what the author said. He said modern technology is nearly impossible to reproduce from first principles.
Could you make a MOSFET from scratch? How about an LED? Logic gate? All the way up to a very simple microcontroller flashing an LED? That would be incredibly difficult, and still be very close to useless.
That ancient technology is compatible with any modern 80m band radio.
Morse telegraphy and AM are no problem. FM, neither.
Creating SSB signals is more complex, merely. Needs filters.
A negative zinc resistance diode can be made from scratch and be used to create an oscillator.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfKlE4gze5o
A radio tube is doable, too. Amplification factor might be humble at first try, but good enough for an audio amp or RF oscillator.
With a lot of practice, the tubes get better.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulkGX0cK5-Q
But seriously, what to expect here? 🤔
That someone builds an ARM chip at the kitchen table?
And if he can’t, then DIY is pointless alltogether?
Recreating modern technology after an catastrophy is possible, but it had do be done step-by-step.
Which is possible if we start thoughtfully from beginning and improve over time.
Once basic infrastructure and school labs or university labs are rebuilt,
people could recreate an 6502 equivalent within 10 years using modest machinery.
From there on, with simple computers becoming available again, more complexer designs can be made each time.
– I mean, just look at how East Germany had managed to build Z80 compatibles and KBit chips using 50 to 80 years old factories (in the 80s).
If there are individuals out there who still remember the basics of math, electronics and know a bit about chip design,
the time for rebuilding can be shortened a lot.
And that’s my point, really.
If people keep being interested in technology they can contribute to rebuilding, join teams.
Optimism and patience is a key element here.
If you’re an optimist, you can perhaps fail or get stuck, but as an pessimist you never get started, even.
Hear hear!
“The optimist sees the invisible, feels the intangible and achieves the impossible.”
— Winston Churchill
“Optimism isn’t a belief that things will automatically get better; it’s a conviction that we can make things better.”
— Melinda Gates
“Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.”
― Thomas Friedman
Thank you. I needed this.
“Could you make a MOSFET from scratch? How about an LED? Logic gate? All the way up to a very simple microcontroller flashing an LED? That would be incredibly difficult, and still be very close to useless.”
You can build substitutes, at least.
Incandescent lamps for LEDs, logic gates and microcontrollers using relay logic.
That’s how telephone exchanges and early computers were constructed.
ROM memory can be made using diode-matrices, the radio amateurs used them to build morse ID keyers for VHF relays.
As an alternative, a wheel with dots and dashes and a light barrier were used to make an ID keyer.
Shift registers and CPU registers can be made using relays, too.
This may involve a counting chain and a set of flip flops.
A relay and a capacitor can be used to flash an LED or incandescent lamp.
The capacitor can be used as a buffer that helps keeping the relay powered a little longer once it has disconnected its own battery from the magnet (coil) once it gets power each time.
The second contact pair connects the lamp to battery.
Flip flops can be made using three relays, with one being self-holding.
A simple relay itself can made using a nail, a cork and wire at the kitchen table.
Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHjDrUwE7Pc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5k9SVVx2wc
Really, it’s all possible at the principle.
It might not fit into your pocket, but in your small home or in a suitcase.
I’ve forgotten to mention, there are also amateur satellites in orbit, with QO-100 being geo stationary.
The simple to operate ones do work in FM in VHF and UHF bands.
They’re like flying FM repeaters. In theory, they can be heard with crystal radios, too.
The 144-148 MHz band isn’t much above FM broadcast band.
It’s merely a matter of antenna efficiency here.
Here’s an example of an FM crystal radio.
It works by using slope detection.
https://worldgadget.wordpress.com/2007/09/18/fm-crystal-radio/
Btw, older Radio Sputnik (RS) satellites did operate in shortwave bands.
15m, 21m, 10m and so on. They were linear transponders, though, I believe.
Though some had a morse telegraphy memory (code store feature) on a dedicated transponder and could re-transmit morse messages.
Such satellites could be operated with 100 years old technology, too.
Provided they can module/demodulate. Spark transmitters and fritters/coherers aren’t really recommended.
AM receivers are fine, though, if they have a BFO, beat frequency oscillator.
On you go and try to make this in a few weeks with no modern tools or equipment and without access to books or the internet then.
You can talk about substitutes all you want but that isn’t the point. Everything you described is significantly behind the things that were suggested. An LED and incandescent bulb are very different, especially in terms of complexity. The same with modern CPUs and the other things mentioned.
Yes you might be able to get some basic technology working but quite quickly you would end up hitting limits.
You can label yourself an optimist if you want but why use it as a way to demean others? Someone else isn’t a pessimist just because they don’t agree with your opinion or think it is impractical. All the points made still stand, HAM radio still uses quite old and simple electronics, hence it may be one of the easier things to recreate from scratch, much easier than most modern electronics.
Hm. I don’t mean to disagree or play down the complexity of modern technology.
I simply mean to say that it is indeed possible to reach our current level of progress again.
It’s “just” a matter of remembering basic principles and then go on from there. Methodical, step by step.
Because that’s what happened in history before.
Those gamer PCs and smartphones many being so obsessed with don’t come out of nowhere.
We progressed from transistor to the PDA in less than 100 years, thanks to the many minds involved around the globe.
This is remarkable. Especially because the level of common knowledge of the individual wasn’t as high as of late 20th century yet.
(To be fair, city live also had cost us our previous experience of living in nature/on the country side. This could be regained, in principle, if family and schools would teach basic things again.)
And if individuals, ordinary people, around the globe remember principles, it might take even less the next time.
Alone the fact that someone remembers how an incandescent lamp or an electric magnet vaguely works is very valuable.
If you know that an incandescent lamp has a vaccum inside and some wire inside that makes it glow, then this is priceless.
Because it then will lead future researchers on the right track.
They know what to look for, they will do the right experiments.
If they also know from their forefathers what an electron tube was and that it had worked in a similar fashion to an incandescent lamp, the better!
And HAM radio? It’s not just about old men with steam engines and a morse key.
The radio technology (not just amateur radio) and the electric light simply are the foundation of modern technology.
Along with the steam engine, which lives on as an electric generator in power plants.
All the laws of physics haven’t changed since the pioneering days.
That’s why ham radio/the role of the radio enthusiast is so special, it’s the mother of homebrewing and DIY. Like philosophy is mother of science.
It’s not about being elitist or the ham license, either.
A radio amateur by heart can be everyone who has an interest in wireless technology.
Those pioneers who went on air didn’t even have official licenses sometimes, but were pirates by modern definition.
What’s also sometimes being forgotten is that not all hams are visible as such in society.
There are politicans, millionaires, artists, actors etc who are also hams.
Radio amateurs can be found in all social classes, planet wide, and many of them have interests in different aspects of amateur radio.
I understand that the picture of the ham is an old white man on an antique shortwave radio.
But in reality, radio amateurs do vary a lot. Some hate shortwave, even.
There are hams who are researchers and who never transmit but love to do antenna calculations or think about losses of coaxial cables.
Some are into radio astronomy, into weather, some into modulation types, or into propagation in the ionosphere.
For example, let’s take the Pactor IV or Vara modulation schemes.
The P4 Dragon radio modem (a Pactor Controller, PTC) uses very complex, DSP proccessed algorithms to provide high speed data transfer over poor mediums, such as shortwave. And it costs about 1700€, new.
The same underlying technology might also be useful eventually for fast underwater communications or space communications.
Or in locations with a high amount of radiation, electrical noise.
Or let’s take SDR technology, software defined radios.
In amateur radio, we tinkered with SDRs in early 2000s in the form of sound cards and direct conversion receivers who acted as down converters into AF range.
This was more than 10 years before SDR tech got mainstream.
A free software for DRM, digital radio mondiale, appeared in the form of Dream. It was made at an university.
A modified version for amateur radio appeared soon after.
Or let’s take the polar station Neumayer-Station III.
It has radio amateurs on board, along with shortwave radios and an QO-100 satellite ground station.
Same goes for ISS, it often has astronauts with amateur callsigns and there’s also a little amateur radio station.
Of course, these are all secondary uses of ham radio.
But it illustrates that ham radio isn’t exactly obsolete or antique.
Many researchers or scientists or engineers do have a link to ham radio in some way or another.
Exactly because amateur radio isn’t one single thing. Each amateur has a slightly different take on the hobby/service. 73s.
I forgot to mention the wired telegraphy, which was based on a simple electric circuit (battery, transmission line, a magnet/relay/buzzer, a switch).
Along with the steam locomotive, it had played an important role in history.
Easy question, just go to reddit, enter the Diwhy subreddit and take a look. DIY should end before any of the things you see in Diwhy
Thanks for the headsup!
Went there and it looks like Hackaday for poor people.
without much money.
for dev suites and Pi’s etc
Reminds me of The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites from back in 2012. It goes beyond black box tech. Everything we have is built on the progress of the past. Knowledge is pretty useless without the tools needed to execute it with.
Hackers have been resisting this forever, with a certain amount of success. Every new technology can be built from lower tech components, because that’s how these higher technologies are developed. We can still buy medium- and small-scale integrated circuits that perform generic functions. We can still buy discrete bipolar and both junction and insulated gate field effect transistors. Sure, some things like germanium transistors and most vacuum tubes have gone completely out of production, but that’s because there is always another similar technology that can be substituted. We can still buy relays and batteries and wire and nuts and bolts, bar and sheet stock, and ingots of any metal we need.
Sure, there is a greater distance between raw materials and finished goods, but none of the intermediate layers have disappeared. People still build airplanes out of wood and fabric. Very few build the engines that power those airplanes, but plenty of people DO build steam and internal combustion engines and electric motors, so they could if they wanted to. People DO build bicycles, even e-bikes, from nearly raw materials, and automobiles aren’t fundamentally higher in technology. People DO build working computers out of discrete transistors or relays or levers and gears. And how can anyone who reads Hackaday not notice that for every obsolete device, every unobtainable component, somebody is inventing a workaround?
If there is an “end” to DIY, it’s just in the number of layers of technology you actually want to do yourself.
I’d suggest that is a little bit of the wrong take – the question to ask is ‘is the complexity actually essential’. And awful lot of the modem spec and many other modern platforms as far as I can tell having only scratched the surface are so complex not because it has to be, but because nobody has applied KISS type principles to each new iteration – just keep tacking new junk on the creaking bones. In part justifiable for backwards compatibility type reasoning, sometimes because internation regulation is a mess, but still.
Carl Sagan:
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
Infinite regress is always possible, so the answer to “can I go deeper?” will always be “yes”. That’s an unbounded system you can chase forever, and very likely a waste of time.
A more useful question is, “how much will this improve my project?” If your goal is to write down a note, learning how to formulate just the right yellow paint for your DIY pencil probably won’t improve the note much. On the other hand, I have a whole library of schematics designed around parts that aren’t made any more, like the LM3909: an LED flasher that could run from a single 1.5V battery (applying ‘just use a microcontroller’ to that is.. nontrivial).
Another useful question is, “if I couldn’t get the exact piece I’m using now, what else could I use?” If you have something critically important and irreplaceable, that’s a risk. That’s a place where it’s probably valuable to break down the features your project needs, and to look for other ways to supply those features.
This whole “I can build a ham radio in the mountains with locally available raw materials” is absurd — if we have societal collapse billions will die —- because, well, all the diabetics are screwed, asthmatics, anyone who needs any life saving medications — tetanus shots are definitely not extractable from local materials. And welcome back to the world of worrying about clean water sources and safe waste disposal — or you know, Cholera, Diptheria, Typhus …
And oh yeah, you still need to eat …
James Burke in his 1978 series Connections poses some simple questions around a societal collapse. It’s worth reading in whole:
“So let’s say that, finally, somewhere far out into the country, you come across a place that looks right. And let’s say that you’ve had the good sense and the good luck to look for a farm, because that’s where food comes from, doesn’t it? Okay. So it’s a farm, so you decide to stop. Has anybody got there first? Or are the owners still here? Because you’re going to need shelter. And people don’t give their homes away, they barricade themselves in. So, sooner or later, exhausted and desperate, you may have to make the decision to give up and die, or to make somebody else give up and die because they won’t accept you in their home voluntarily. And what in your comfortable urban life has ever prepared you for that decision?
Okay, let’s say by some miracle the place is empty and it’s all yours. Is there enough food in the house? How long will it last? How will you cook it? Wood fires? Are you fit enough to chop all the wood you need before winter comes? If you’re lucky, you’ve got livestock on the farm. Great: meat. But can you slaughter and bleed and butcher an animal? Okay, supposing you manage that. You’ve got enough meat to eat until you’ve eaten all the cows. But at least you can start running a farm. But it’s a modern farm, remember? It’s mechanized. There’s a gasoline pump, but it’s empty. So you can’t use the tractor. What you need is a horse and cart. But when did you last see a horse and cart on a modern farm? And everything else here—the saw, the power drills, the light, the sterilizer, the water supply, the sewage system, the hoist, the milking parlor, the pumps, and everything on this control panel—demands the one thing you don’t have: electric power. Everything on this farm that you found doesn’t work. The place is a trap.
But there’s nowhere else to go. The only way you’re going to survive is if you find the one thing you need to keep on providing the food you’re going to have. And you don’t need a mechanized version of that thing. You need the kind people haven’t used in a hundred years. Ah! You need that kind of plow. You’re saved. Or are you? Because what it comes down to at this point is this: can you use a plow? It’s taken a series of miracles just to get you this far, and here you are, with the biggest miracle of all: a plow, and animals to pull it. So maybe, after few days of fumbling around with the harnesses and the bits and pieces, you manage to yoke up the oxen and plow the land. And then, and only then, can you say that you have successfully escaped the wreckage of technological civilization and lived off the land and survived—if you know how to use the furrow, you plow. I mean, can you tell the difference between an ear of corn and a geranium seed? Do you know when to sow whatever it is you think it is? Do you know when to harvest it, and eat the bit that you think isn’t poisonous?”
Big assumption that the individual or small group actually needs agriculture there – a hunter gatherer society or individual needs very little if anything they don’t hold in their heads – its the knowledge of bushcraft, their environment and problem solving skills, along with an environment to use them in that has let humans survive in many places well into the modern era as ‘primitive’ society. And as nature reclaims quite easily if you let it and everyone else will be too busy shooting each other, probably using old school black powder cooked up by folks like us that actually know something about history/chemistry…
I do agree lots of folks would be screwed if society as we know it now collapses, but that doesn’t mean its not worth knowing how to extract lead from ore, pull a copper cable etc at least in theory – as knowledge of the foundations is always good, should the worst happen it gives you a chance, and more usefully a better chance to avoid the boneheaded almost Darwin award seeking decisions due to your ignorance…
So we really should be pushing for a world where the abstractions and complexities are actively pruned down to the minimum required for function as though it would help the survivors should society collapse that really isn’t relevant. The point is a simpler to understand more robust world now, that will hopefully be less able to really collapse as more folks in society can actually understand at least the basics of its breadth and spot the problems building up.
The whole point of an agricultural based society is that it is able to overproduce and store enough food to provide for lean periods and to permit the rise of specialists in the society.
Hunter-gatherer societies do not have the ability to store significant amounts of surplus food for extended periods. And they’re usually too busy hunting and gathering to build things — they also have to continuously move.
This notion that rugged individualists will hide in the mountains, hunt bear and deer and rebuild society because they have an engineering background and know how to use a gun is great until the first case of trichinosis from under cooked bear meat.
Or, you know, societal collapse goes hand in hand with environmental collapse and there just aren’t enough deer to support more than a small family.
Returning to hunter-gatherer nutrition levels together with an absence of modern medicine, water purification etc. probably cuts average life span by about 75% and increases infant mortality by the same amount.
But sure, I’m certain it will be fine. The hunter gatherer ham radios made by pulling raw copper and extracting lead should be a big help in following the great buffalo herds across the plains …
Plenty of historical evidence for pre-agriculture and more mobile peoples producing astonishingly high quality crafts in complex materials, which rather proves you don’t NEED mass agriculture for an advanced society. What agriculture allows is to provide for a larger population in the same land area, and a static population – useful for speed but not strictly required for high tech. Seasonal work as your tribe roams to the right location to extract copper so you extract some copper along with all the hunting and gathering and preparing this site for when you come back next year is certainly slower than being able to support a few miners all year, but you still get the resources.
And if you have enough practical science and engineering knowledge to maintain firearms, build a HAM radio etc you likely know enough to build perfectly good water filtration (though without the massive population of highly polluting humans you probably won’t need to – nature will do that job for you rather well). Easy enough to create many medicine as well – so many medicines are just concentrated extracts of plant, or start that way before synthesis of the active element is figured out.
There is no denying our society is built on agriculture, which isn’t a shock as it makes scientific progress faster and supports a more rapid production of tools and weapons. Which as humans trend towards greedy and warlike… But that doesn’t mean you have to have agriculture for an advanced society that can live long healthy lives improved by tech – it just changes the landscape of that tech, with everything built to be enduring and serviceable, simpler to understand without all the magic ill defined black boxes so common today. Though humans being humans if one group goes back to agriculture and yours doesn’t…
Also the suggestion hunter-gatherer nutrition levels have to be bad is pretty false, it can be true, but it doesn’t have to be. For instance the folks doing a little hunting and gathering being in the countryside would tend to be the healthy members of society as everything industrialised – the city working populations that relied on the farmers are often not very healthy at all! Between the more highly polluted environment and the farmers only shipping an incomplete diet, because that is what can be produced and shipped in bulk. While the folks doing the farming will graze the wild produce and eat it while it freshest as well to pick up those essential minerals etc.
If everyone goes hunting, how long do you think the wild meat will last?
Until the last hunter kills and eats the second to last hunter.
A flawless plan for the survival of humanity! :-D
Indeed, something like that. Historical records report long pig is supposed to be quite tasty, can’t say I’d want to try it or trust those accounts really. But if your hungry and society is collapsing you will like everyone else be doing the best you can to support your tribe… I wonder if any particular ethnicity of people will be become a delicacy the way some folks go mad over a particular breed….
So meat will probably not even get very scarce, as between factional infighting, fights between factions over the existing resource stockpiles with a tin or two of beans being worth killing over, and a stock of good riles and ammo… The human population if society collapses will inevitably also collapse, and that probably very rapid reduction in the number of people means nature will be able to spring back pretty well to actually support the survivors.
How long it will last? It really depends on how much hungry Obelix is. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCLxwqfF8lo&t=50
This is an very American view, I’m afraid. Here in Germany, after WW2, people did rebuild the cities and not seldomly did help each others.
They shared resources. Same after floods. People helped. In general.
It wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine, sure, but they didn’t go loose.
It’s perhaps merely the US were people kill each others on street in need of food and other resources, not sure. Hollywood says so.
Here in Europe we don’t casually shoot strangers, after all. We don’t have this “stand your ground” mindset.
We don’t barricade ourself with a gun in our hand.
And by the way, people did get through all of this already not just once.
There was the plague and cholera pandemic in Europe and people have recovered from it, with big losses, I admit.
Agreed, though depending on just how rapid and complete society collapses the area over which people can co-operate reduces. And while Europeans are more likely to greet you with words seeking co-operation not bullets under that pressure the tribes will get small, and probably more likely to fight.
Very true, though even with those huge losses society didn’t collapse so much as hiccup – more extreme but similar to the hiccup Covid caused, lots of short term pain but it doesn’t last and all the production capabilities and knowledge remain with enough people to work them to support the needs of the now much smaller population.
Society will collapse like a wave on the shore, and it will fall back on the level that is locally available (ressources, knowledge, tools and leftovers) after the shooters eliminated themselves and what they can lay their hands on (the farmers won’t shoot, they will flee and come back when the last shooter starved). If you shoot, or waste ressources for the sake of it, or throw your cigarette butt on the ground, you cannot be part of the solution, because you are by free choice part of the problem. It is, however, most important to immediately welcome everyone who chooses to leave the ‘problem’ side, otherwise you become part of the problem yourself instead of the other. I don’t know which is harder to do in real life…
(and keep in mind, there is no possibility to sort out people until the very end, no matter how obvious it may appear, and in the end it will not be us who sort out)
“This whole “I can build a ham radio in the mountains with locally available raw materials” is absurd — if we have societal collapse billions will die —- because, well, all the diabetics are screwed, asthmatics, anyone who needs any life saving medications — tetanus shots are definitely not extractable from local materials. And welcome back to the world of worrying about clean water sources and safe waste disposal — or you know, Cholera, Diptheria, Typhus …”
Um, not sure what to say. I’m a bit confused by these strange first-world problems here, to be honest.
Because here in Germany, we used to live like that (in woods and other lonely areas) for centuries just fine, without your dystopian arguments.
In the 1920s, in the early days of radio, there were still some people who never left their village for entire life.
Hm. You’re aware that there are societies that live in insulation for a long time?
There are villages that around the globe that live all by themselves and support themselves, too.
I’m not talking about native tribes living in the rainforest or something along these lines.
There are modern people living on islands, in mountains and in valleys that have little contact with outside world.
They’re self-sufficient, and get in touch with the next bigger cities every once a couple of months.
“This whole “I can build a ham radio in the mountains with locally available raw materials” is absurd — if we have societal collapse billions will die —- because, well, all the diabetics are screwed, asthmatics, anyone who needs any life saving medications — tetanus shots are definitely not extractable from local materials. And welcome back to the world of worrying about clean water sources and safe waste disposal — or you know, Cholera, Diptheria, Typhus …”
Why is it absurd? That’s essentially how it all started, in the more or less pre-indutrial age back then.
A “fox hole radio” is no different to a crystal radio and had been built using everyday items.
The most complex item to gather would be wire, perhaps.
It’s needed for making antenna, coils and wiring.
Wire is a very old invention though. It had been used for making fences for ages, before electrics.
The other components had been made on a kitchen table in the 1920s.
Using toilet paper rolls, metal cans and carbon sticks.
Resistors were made using wire, too.
Capacitors (condensers) can be made using contains filled with fluids, such as salt water.
Batteries can be made in a similar way, using lemon juice, for example.
A potato battery is also a possibility.
For a crystal radio, the voltage is important. An 1v battery can help to get a diode, crystal or razor blade to demodulate under bad conditions (weak signals).
Carbon sticks are incredients of carbon batteries, such as the 4,5v lantern battery once so common in Europe and USSR (see 3R12 battery).
By using two sticks atop of each other (forming cross), you can build a poor carbon microphone.
A speaker can be built similarily, though WW1 and WW2 headphones had been the magnetic, high impedance type made out of metal pieces.
Crystal earphones are simpler to make, by contrast.
“And oh yeah, you still need to eat …”
Yeah. Not sure why this is always being mentioned in such a discussion.
As if rebuilding technology and living space is a contradiction of something.
Of course, you don’t build yourself a smartphone in the woods out of wooden sticks.
Me and others never claimed that. The rebuilding of technology happens weeks, months or years after people have found shelter, food, water and had built their shacks or houses.
“James Burke in his 1978 series Connections poses some simple questions around a societal collapse.”
A lot of these authors are wrong, though. They’re not seldomly angry old men, misanthrops, who hold a gruge against humanity.
Just think of infamous “lord of flies” book. Totally wrong.
In the real world, such kids do stick together.
There’s a real story about one event, in which kids got stranded and on an island and became sort of a family.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDz-331V-pY
GNURadio is a software package that makes wireless technology comprehensible — once you understand it!
There is much to learn….
Well, in a hobby, you can decide the level of abstraction that you want to accept. We see this in ham radio homebrewing. Some people are comfortable with the adstraction that usually comes with Software Defined Radios, or synthesized oscillators. Others want less abstraction, so they stick with discrete components (individual transistors) and build Hardware Defined Radios with old-school LC (non-synthesized) oscillators.
I would love to build my own NCO running at GHz, but there is nobody accepting orders with my hobby budget yet.
Speaking of GHz technology, my father had built microwave waveguides all by himself when he was young.
It was some work, but he had succeded. They teached metal works at his university back then.
I bumped into some knowledge recently that is as useful as it was 100 years ago(no, not a religion thing), so for me is worth to spend some time adquaring/remembering it, I’m talking about economics and trading, Stochastics, EMA, MACD, and of course the psicology behind trading. Some scholars suggest Fibonacci retracement levels were formulated in ancient India between 700 BCE and 100 AD, while others estimate between 480-410 BCE ! all of these blend good with Python (for instance), AI and hardware.
So it looks to me that in this always changing brave new world, human nature doesn’t change that much.
worthy— acquiring— Psychology —- my bad! where is the edit buttom when is needed? So grammar is also important to learn :)
I don’t know, “psicology” could be pretty lucrative in trading
yeah I know the Spanish word “psicología” keeps interfering with my English world “Psychology” but I mean why putting a “p” in the front and using “h” that do nothing ? any pway Its is halways pgood to learn economics, ptrading and some pGrammar.
No end. I want to see semiconductor printers in every house.
This. We desperately need this.
A subatomic 3D printer. Stream of exactly positioned protons, neutrons and electrons. In 30 – 50 years it should be here. Or, in case of some mild civilization collapse, in 100 – 500 years. Star Trek calls it Replicator.
Simple transistor is black box. Lump of tin is black box. Depends on limits of knowledge.
BTW this AL / AI confusing is already present for me longer time. Dear Hackaday team, please create some nice hack to eliminate it. In comments above are some ideas.
Nah they aren’t that different. A cell phone is one of the pinnacles of modern miniaturization technology. The blocks that they are made from are simple enough when miniaturization is taken out of the equation. The smallness makes them better for portability but isn’t really core to most of their function.
Interesting conversation. I grew up well below the poverty line and DIY simply started out as a refusal to do without things other people had, which usually involved developing skills where other people used money. My first guitar amplifier, for example, was built out of (or into, technically) an old Hammond organ in someone’s garbage. The tubes and even, to some extent, the speaker, were black boxes to some extent to my 11-year-old brain. But it worked, and I felt the thrill of the Hack. I certainly didn’t feel any kind of inadequacy because there were parts of the project I couldn’t understand.
I have built on those skills to create a career in software engineering and enterprise resource planning with no education after high school. At each step it has been a question of identifying areas of missing skills. Sometimes that’s about DevOps principles, sometimes it’s Python, LLMs and machine learning, and sometimes it’s psychological or coaching skills. It’s still DIY, and there will always be both black boxes and accessible but prohibitive limits. I think we crossed both those lines in DIY hundreds of years ago.
There’s that story of a guy who made a toaster from scratch to show what mass production does for us as a society. From memory it was prohibitively expensive and took a silly amount of time, but he was successful and it’s now in a museum (and many people remember the story and the point being made which is the best part).
Everything these days is an abstraction, building on the shoulders of giants as it were. I’d say if we were blown back to the dark ages it would take some time to get back to this technological era as those with the knowledge and experience of this time would die before we could manufacture the items to get here again.
The cellular radio module in the MikroPhone isn’t a black box because it’s incomprehensible. It’s a black box because it connects to a proprietary, commercial, highly-regulated network. The toolchain is geared toward commercial industry users. The firmware is encrypted to hide various secrets, and possibly to prevent operation outside licensed parameters.
I’m not offering a value judgement on the need for these restrictions, but they are neither new nor unusual. They have obstructed DIY efforts for decades, and they’re the very reason the Free Software movement exists. If the cellular networks were designed to accommodate free interoperation, then you would certainly see enthusiasts designing electronics to interface with them.
I think you meant “interfere”, not “interface” ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
The inability to DIY modern tech is not a limitation of DIY, it’s a failure of modern technology. We should not depend on systems we cannot fully comprehend or recreate. Modern civilization does not require our current level of complexity, and in fact is made more fragile because of it.