Thought of this in the shower after commenting on a post about securing boot partitions.
I’m not knocking on any of these things, only noting their similarity. When taken to the extreme, all of them seem to evoke a weird mix of paranoia and eager anticipation.
That made me think about what it would actually take to start rebuilding after a zombie apocalypse or some other disaster like that.
First of all, you would need to restart various bits of infrastructure, like water and electricity. On top of that, you would also need to restart the factories that manufacture the spare parts for all the machiens. Those factories also require raw materials, like metals, so initially metal recycling might be the easiest way to do it. No need to start mining new metals until you’ve already used up all the broken cars and sky scrapers littering the landscape.
So, basically you need to get all sorts of heavy industry up and running again. Those data hoarders can help out with the necessary engineering literature, but having some tools is also required.
I am not too worried about heavy machines, they work at scale, but require a lot of infrastructure to keep running.
In an apocalypse, manpower will probably be the number one resource of work available, so basic tools is needed, after we have a source of food, security and shelter, we can start looking at researching/refining better tools, once basic needs are met.
Initially, you just need to survive. I can imagine that next you’ll start building small communities and fulfilling their needs.
If you can’t get water purification running, the small village won’t grow to a town. If you can’t make your own tools and shelters, it’s going to stay in the tribal stage.
Water purification is a big problem, however water does not need to be treated to fulfill the standards for normal drinking water here, boiling collected rain water should be plenty good enough at the start.
Further up in the mountain we have soo many freshwater springs that most hikers don’t pack water as it is just dead weight.
Down here by the coast, fresh water springs does exist, but are way fewer.