MovieChat Forums > Downstream (2010) Discussion > No oil =/= Mad Max Future

No oil =/= Mad Max Future


People would build farming communities and would attempt to protect each other from zombie biker gangs. If you want an idea of what human society would be like without oil, all you need to do is look back 200 years prior to get an idea. Yes there would be no oil to run the machines and 5 billion people would die, but human society would still be sustainable. The world proposed by this movie doesn't stand up to logical scrutiny.

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I think you are wrong.

While the long-term solution would be an agricultural society, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that a few years after the complete collapse of the modern society there would be plenty of raider gangs who stole as much as they could when the chaos broke. They would be the ones to have most guns and they would keep on raiding other people even after cities were robbed clean and abandoned in the lack of food.

There is, however, a flaw in this Mad Max type universe. How can large communities of people live in the desert with no obvious supply of food or water?You don't see any farms in these movies and they certainly wouldn't have vehicles for transporting supplies from elsewhere.

Btw, if you can, check out the TV series Jeremiah. It has a rather realistic view of a post-apocalyptic society with traces of modern civilization still left but with people living on fertile land, some eating from old leftover tin cans, others fishing or farming. Some people with power (weapons) form cities around them and cities become places of trade "one thing for another" as they can offer protection against robbers.

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Is it going to be preachy and right wing like Jericho?

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Huh, Jeremiah is nothing like Jericho at all. Quite the opposite.

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I doubt all this crap would happen. We would switch over to coal,ethanol,etc pretty fast when we come towards a peak.





Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

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we're already switching over a fair amount of things to different fuels, such as solar, wind, nuclear etc. society nowadays is a lot more energy conscious than we were 30 years ago, i'm hoping that by the time we hit peak oil that it won't be too much of a problem.

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It might not be oil, but something different. There are too many people already living on earth and somewhen there will be a crash in one or another way when the population overshoots the carrying capacity of earth. There are limits of resources: food, water, minerals. The St Matthew Island example (1910)comes to my mind. Did you know that just 2% of the water on earth is drinkable? And how much do we waste of it? it might be a disease, it might be the depletion of natural resources which leads to the final crash. But there will be one. The question is not if, but when. There is not just one problem, but many. Mother earth's already shaking herself to get rid of the parasites called the human race.

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I would definitely go with ethanol... it requires only organic compounds and yiest to process. For the tougher to crack cellulose you need formic acid which can be produced from methanol, a common distillation byproduct, or a bacterium found in a cows rumen. The distillation process requires heat which can be collected with any black object from the sun (you don´t want to use your freshly produced ethanol to run the distillery) and something cool to condensate the water that evaporates with the ethanol... i guess you get the picture. Most importantly, almost any engineer can refit any kind of engine to run on ethanol. It´s what good old henry made his cars to run on in the first place - then came prohibition until he refitted them to run on petrol. Hadn´t Thomas invented the lightbulb, we would still be burning oil to illuminate our streets...

don´t tolerate intolerance!

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"People would build farming communities and would attempt to protect each other from zombie biker gangs"

maybe where you live, i cant imagine many people where i am chipping in to help build a comunity, maybe some, but most i imagine turning into cannibals and stuff lol

"If you want an idea of what human society would be like without oil, all you need to do is look back 200 years prior to get an idea."

the thing is people are used to and enjoy different things now, 200 years ago it was commen sense what was edible and how to cook stuff without gas, grow crops etc etc

people dont have a clue these days, i dont think i know anyone that would know anything about growing crops, when to sow etc etc
people would rely on looting left overs and raiding the very few minority that did try to settle and make communities

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