There's been an Event. What sort of tech can you rely upon after the zombie outbreak? Or solar flares? Or whatever?
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, John, that's Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you? It is time for a tech Stuff classic episode. It's also time for us to continue last week's classic episode. So if you have not listened to last Friday's episode that was called tech in the post Apocalyptic World Part one, now we're gonna listen to tech in the post Apocalyptic World Part two. And Joe McCormick of Stuff to Blow your Mind joined us for this episode. Hope you enjoy. We want to go back to 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 new clear facilities, because I know I have at least heard or read that like a nuclear 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 our 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 UH 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 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. I mean doesn't need fuel. Yeah, your your energy is coming from water flowing through those turbines. As long as nothing a 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 posts to pop elliptic 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 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 fire ring plants have enough coal on hand for sixty to seventy days of power. So after that sixty to 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 was 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 Alright, 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 capture ring 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 to 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 cloud cover, and the microwaves are much more resilient into 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 to 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. That's one of those things that probably doesn't come up in a lot of the white papers on the project. 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 in tall, terribly hot. Um. And I mean they can get to a point, depending upon where you are, I can 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 infrastruct your 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've 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, 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 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 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 proceed with caution, not stop. Um, but people will treat everything like it's a four way stop, or they treat like nothing is a Moore Wi stop, 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 the 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 in non emergency situations when there's just a large number of people, like when c e s happens every year are 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. UM. Anything connected to the power grid obviously would be uh, 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. Handk Yeah, hand Craig operated radio would be great to uh, either of those are both. You know, there are a lot of combination systems out there where you can get one that works on either battery or hand crank. 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 gonna 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 not a power grid in those remote locations or it's just so unreliable that in order to have a stable communication systems own power supply. The 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 it'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. We'll be back with more of this classic episode of tech stuff after this quick break. 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. 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 paragrid 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. Uh, that's all scared that would be I would soil not just the underwhere 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 for 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 prounds 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 to six kilo pascals, and most water towers contain enough water to supply the surrounding community for a day, assuming normal, not that everybody is trying. 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, uh, 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 backyarddea. If 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 I don't know. 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 of 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 products 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 combustion that's not affected by electromagnet neetic pulses. That's not an issue. It's a mechanical system, not a well. I understand it is largely I mean, wouldn't there be electronical electron um Uh yeah, It is, of course largely mechanical, 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's 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 against siphon gas out of some other vehicle. 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. 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 gasoline. I mean 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 the 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, 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 barter Town, 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 their their 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 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 you 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 has 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 will 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 lot of things to do that. But 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 gotta 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 apologism. I downloaded all these episodes of I don't know whatever. I was just thinking. I was just thinking, like the apocalypse and everything's gone to hell, but at least I can still play Angry Birds, you know. Yeah, yeah, so it's some Lord Humongus will kill you for that iPad. Right, So, so the the electronics problem also non trivial. Alright, so let's talk a little bit about what would happen during one of these blackouts. Actually, uh, you linked to 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. It was a depressing but very interesting yeah, 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 um 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 nine 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 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 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. Just think of how much you would save on your electricity bill because you haven't been able to use it for ten days. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this Tex Stuff Classic episode right after we take this break. So then we will have a real brief section here us 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. Seventy two hours worth of mayonnaise has would 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 you much good if you don't have any good you know, 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 generating 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 they're personal wind turbine would a generate I mean like a like a resprobably 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 don't 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 dense servant environment. Yeah, exactly, So if you have to live out in a rural area where you could build such 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. Yeah, I've heard of this. Yeah, 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 an you know, on on Earth where something like this has happened, like some some castrophic 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'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 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 earthquake. 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 worth while 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 state. Yeah, it's a it's essentially another zombie outbreak story, but without it being uh dumb, Yeah, without it being magical zombies. It's it's based more on on things that we have actually observed in natured 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 I've heard that I heard. The novel was in fact and just like completely different format. 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, uh 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 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 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 gasolines them how 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 vet for trying to revive at least a local power grid in a post apocalyptic scenario. Right, 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 concentrate mean you mean? And Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, not the last No, 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 there 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 Dawn, yes, not the remake, Yes, the one that was also a commentary on consumerism. Yeah, it's a movie, uh 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 it's it's the nineteen fifties style of you can do it, but meanwhile, like everything's on fire and everyone's terrible. Yeah. Also, another way that it 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. 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 Zardas is, because unless they are you know a fan of B 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 interesting. 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 signed a bigan 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 advances from ancient times. Yeah. 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 artas 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 uh. 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 guerrilla suit with a 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 wouldn'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, and 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 stuff. 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 X 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, I 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 problems, 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 was tech in the Post Apocalyptic World Part two. Big thanks to Joe McCormick once again for joining us on that episode. He's still doing incredible work over at stuff to blow your mind. He's a great guy. Hope him he's doing really well. I'll try and get him on the show again because it's been a while since he's been on tech Stuff. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to get in touch with me is to use Twitter and the handle so that you're not just you know, tweeting out into the void is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.