How should technology progress in a post-apocalyptic world?
Assuming those living in the world have no knowledge of the old world, a bunch of people coming out of cryrosleep with complete amnesia, or a new species evolving to sentience from the wildlife after the advanced precursors, with not even knowledge of the language of the ones who came before them.
How long would it take for functioning society to develop? How hard/easy would it be for them to figure out how to work the technology scattered around them? Would they develop their own primitive technology or would they just strive to make use of the old relics tossed about?
I'm trying to figure out exactly how the tech-level of the setting should be, I'd like guns and ammo to be limited, though stuff like energy weapons could exist, mostly I was thinking scavenged melee weapons, bows, slings and other thrown weapon would be the more common implements, and guns would be fairly rare and mostly in the hands of only powerful warriors, with the natives possibly only able to make blackpowder and crude reloads, to make muskets, basic pipe guns, or run dirty and unreliable in the ancient guns found around. Though at the same time I'm imagining them able to do things like have solar powered facilities reclaimed from the ruins, and modern amenities scattered about mixed in with their own inventions, powerboats, some cars, seaplanes, etc, and "magic" that is more just nano-bot manipulation they don't realize isn't magic.
Logically how would such a scenario actually play out and develop? I want my setting to feel organic rather than contrived.
If it's a new species evolving, anything we leave behind will have long eroded away, except maybe nuclear waste.
Any "amnesia" society is probably going to be hunter/gatherer, following the weather and food migration and ignore all the junk aside from using it as temporary residences or pieces of weapons.
The visual style you're probably going for would require people with moderate technical skills and education right away, but with no infrastructure or tools restore the old civilization. That thing in your picture is a tetanus and mold nightmare.
Gavin Collins
>anything we leave behind will have long eroded away Futuristic sci-fi materials could probably last a while. And I was thinking less natural evolved, and more like planet of the apes style accelerated evolution.
How long would it take an amnesia society to develop beyond the hunter-gatherer stage? Say they have knowledge to decipher the language of the ruins around them, there could be some helpful AIs and such still active withing some facilities to give them a head start on limited fields, and that kind of thing.
Jayden Richardson
>anything we leave behind will have long eroded away
Depends on how long it's been after said apocalypse. There's structures from Roman times that are still around now and will continue to be for quite some time due to the materials in their construction. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete#Material_properties
That being said, modern materials are much less durable. It is extremely unlikely you'll find anything lasting longer than a century without upkeep.
Isaac Jenkins
Plus I'm imagining a different planet, not earth, this would be materials made with space colonization in mind and such, and therefore should be able to stand for a very long time.
Ryder Harris
>Penguin swimming forwards >That wake from the rear of a boat >In front of the penguin.
N-nani?!?!
Jacob Young
>How long would it take for functioning society to develop? >Assuming those living in the world have no knowledge of the old world, a bunch of people coming out of cryrosleep with complete amnesia.
If I'm reading into your thing correctly it wouldn't matter what was left behind as they'd be basically stripped clean of any previous memories and left to their default setting: only instinct and they as they physically existed would remain.
People would be back to square one and would have to rely entirely on their genetic memories and instincts- you didn't even leave them language, so they'd effectively be devolved back into animals. It would quite possibly take hundreds of thousands of years for them to develop back into even a paleolithic society and it doesn't matter how much technology or ruins you left behind as with having their minds wiped clean they'd have no concept or contextual knowledge to even begin to understand.
You need to understand that primitive people didn't even know that sex caused babies and it wasn't until we discovered animal husbandry did we start piecing things together. This is all being generous though as it's assuming they at least retain some genetic memory to understand what would or could be good to eat- foraging is a learned behavior after all that requires context. Even something like a rabbit needs to pay careful attention to what it's mother eats in order to know what's good to nosh on.
Your people would be fucked.
Isaiah White
>Your people would be fucked. Humans did pretty fine starting from square one back when we started being humans.
Angel Campbell
>Humans did pretty fine starting from square one back when we started being humans.
That wasn't a single point though- it was a continual, unbroken chain, of half-monkeys raising other half-monkeys into ape people that eventually churned out humans. Even when we were animals we had anthro-pithecuses and Pan-troglodithecuses to take care of us and teach us the basics.
You can't drop something intelligent in the wild with no memories or context and just expect it to be fine: it has to be taught, raised, etc.. It's like how in Jurassic Park all the dinosaurs were dysfunctional psycopaths because gen.corp didn't give them a childhood.
Isaac Martinez
Wouldn't they get over that eventually if they were able to survive long enough and through multiple generations? A rough start would be expected in a situation like that.
Juan Stewart
So lets say they had basic instincts, survival knowledge and language, possibly not literate initially, but able to verbally communicate, no other memories. What then?
Colton Bennett
Looks like a track, but that raises more questions.
Colton James
Tech progresses in a practical way. things that make food grow better/faster and engineering that make more secure shelters are likely to be at the top of the discovery stck
Ryan Davis
I don't see how you're seeing a wake from the back, it's all coming from the front, the water spreading from the prow of the penguin. It's a train, never meant to be a boat, but the world flooded around it. Also it's just surrealist art, so there's that.
Jeremiah Collins
Humans are fairly clever and once they have the basics down and aren't in constant danger of being eaten by super fauna, they develop fairly fast. I think societal level should be Classical era - Early Medieval. So fuedal societies, early oligarchal republics, trade empires etc
Alexander Thompson
>advanced society in which the populace has Amnesia >moody sax music intensifies
Brandon Rodriguez
I think there is a railroad track sunk underwater, and penguin swimming forward where the track lays is just coincidence and is not really related.
Luke Lewis
Look at the signs on the building, especially that banner on the far left, tied to the tree. It's a penguin train.
Dominic Parker
Would there be drive to develop their own tech beyond the primitive steps of survival, or would they rely mostly on the remains of the precursors?
How long would it take to understand the ruins around them? To be able to properly use the resources they've been given? To actually build their own?
I'm trying to figure out what kind of time-frame I would want between the introduction of these people into the ruins of the old world, and where the setting would actually take place, starting from a basically cave-man level of existence, thrust into an unknown world and forced to make something of themselves, to advancing to a societal level.
I want scavenging to still be important and new things out there to discover, I'm thinking combat tech being mostly melee based and primitive weapons, with modern guns being either rare, unreliable, or complicated, but I also think having powered boats, rarely planes and even more rarely submarines, as well as things like trolleys and train cars that still manage to work in places, ruins with computer systems still functioning and all that, but I would really like to retain the post-apocalyptic feel as well. Some places could have things like old food replicators working, water purifiers, automatic medical machines, solar power and wind generators, but the people living there having very limited understanding of how to make their own, simply maintaining the existing relics they are given, though they strive to unlock their secrets.
Another problem I'm thinking they'd have is that these post-humans are small (I think 4-5 ish range, basically child sized) so items left behind designed for a space-faring human race averaging 6 feet tall would be a bit large for them, if that would inhibit their unlocking of technology at all.
Christopher Jenkins
>Would there be drive to develop their own tech beyond the primitive steps of survival, or would they rely mostly on the remains of the precursors?
A mix of both I imagine. Humans, on the one hand, tend to instinctively not expend more energy or effort than we need to. On the other, we're intensely curious. Technological development would largely be focused on things that the precursor tech cannot provide or be used for, which brings us to next:
>How long would it take to understand the ruins around them? To be able to properly use the resources they've been given? To actually build their own?
Depends how advanced they are and how intuitive their use is. Since these are supposed to be colony tools, I imagine the answer to both is 'fairly'. I imagine they'd figure out the basics within a few generations. Building their own stuff is harder: they have no understanding of the underlying science. Their ability to construct precursor technology would probably be limited to whatever said ruins ALLOW them to reproduce, like simple tools out of a fabricator etc. So the pursuit, and study of these ancient relics would be important, as would scavenging for them. Your basic assessment sounds good to me, user.
>tiny people
Why on earth would post humans be SMALLER?
Wait, is this a veiled Made In Abyss thread?
Brody Martinez
>Why on earth would post humans be SMALLER? They're mixed with animal DNA as a product of gene-modding.
It's actually a no longer thinly veiled CATastrophe thread. But thank you for telling me that Made in Abyss exists, looks interesting.
Tyler Fisher
The plot twist is humans are watching from space, the whole thing is a huge sociological experiment. They made tiny cat and people as a joke
Dominic Wood
Look at game of thrones if you want a reference point for something like this.
Jaxson Price
if thats the case, IIRC CATastrophe actually has a special caste of salvager/scientists, called Shinificers? (a portmanteau of SHINY and Artificer)
The inherent problem of CATastrophe is some anons didn't want there to be any conflict because that violated the feel of comfy tropical cute kemomimi living idyllic Tail-Spin lives
But you need conflict to have an actual, yknow, game.
Benjamin Ramirez
Also adding on to my response since I forgot to, because it's 2am and my attention span is short.
>Since these are supposed to be colony tools Well, most of what would be left would be functional city stuff, and more permanent settlement intended stuff, it would have been inhabited for a while before the complete cataclysm lead to it being untouched by sentient life until our fresh new post-humans are ejected from their failing research facilities, born anew into the world. Colonial tools would still exist in older facilities though, but the idea of them being city remnants helps explain the durability of them to be able to last so long. Plus the colonial facilities being the older, more hidden, more dangerous ones, also being the ones that hold the more useful potential rewards makes a good drive for fueling exploration into them and ADVENTURE.
I'm still not sure what I want to have happen to the humans in this setting. This is going to be on Venus I'm thinking pure-strain humans are either dead entirely, existing only in isolated containment facilities or deep space hibernation, or at the least not present in the Solar System, Earth was ruined somehow, far beyond repair, many made an exodus to Alpha Centauri, some tried other targets such as Mars or Venus for terraforming into livable environments, but as far as the post-humans know they are alone.
For some reason, the idea of the humans having died entirely and their legacy is left in only the post-humans they seeded their old creations with to carry it on really appeals to me. A melancholy and seemingly bleak scenario, yet also full of hope and childlike innocence.
Really now? What aspects of Game of Thrones? It's something I haven't really looked into, but I assumed it was a mostly just dark low fantasy not!Europe type setting, does it have elements of civilization forming among the ruins of an advanced precursor like that?
It's ironic that this theory exists when Wheel of Time's canon timeline is post-apoc.
Owen Barnes
That's part of the reason I am decidedly making mine a spin-off rather than trying to revisit CATastrophe directly. While I like non-violent comfiness, and I want, at least early game, to be light hearted and low violence, that's pretty unrealistic honestly, and conflict is necessary to have real story and interest.
Which that balance between light-heartedness and grit is something I'm struggling to work out, though I do have my end-game ancient evil planned out, if I ever play with this setting long enough to reach that.
Brayden Howard
So is Sword of Shannara. And a few other recent works, like Prince of Thorns and Warded Man. I think some people want that twist.
