this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
668 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
69298 readers
4787 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The average laptop is 65W. So the 40 amp solar battery station I built with a 100w panel could run a laptop 7 hours a day without any issues at all. Plenty of time to get actionable information out of it.
Sure, solar works. And batteries work - for about 3000 charge-discharge cycles.
That's... a lot of cycles. That's almost a decade. Plenty of time to build an electric generator from scratch by traveling on foot to a copper mine and smelting the wire yourself. Unless you manage to pull an alternator from a car that can't find gasoline and save yourself the trip. From that you could make a gravity battery or any number of other options.
Point being, after 3000 cycles, it's toast and there's no fresh bread available.
Yes, you could construct something, but I think you'd be pretty amazed at how maintenance intensive a 1kWh gravity battery is.
Point is that 3000 cycles is more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn't rebuild.
If you're living somewhere with enough easy food, water and shelter that you're not spending all your time just handling that. Making groceries takes a lot of time and effort.
The average hunter gatherer only worked for about 3-6 hours a day. They had more free time than we do.
The average hunter gatherer had food forests planted by their ancestors, wild herds of meat for the taking and a lifetime of knowledge transfer and physical training in living that lifestyle.
You may be adaptable and intelligent and have wikipedia by your side to tell you what to do, but Wikipedia is written by people living in today's society, not that reality. 90% of today's people will suffer horribly getting in the physical and mental condition required to do a hunter-gatherer daily routine in 6 hours or less.
But not you, you're awesome and you get it done in 3, so that leaves you time to go mine copper ore, smelt it into wire and other such things - in reality, no, for the duration of your remaining life scavenging the wreckage will be more productive than DIY from the earth, but scavenging requires a lot of travel and even e-cars won't be getting around very well.
90% of people would die within the first three months because they don't know how to cook and we have a three day supply rule in stores relying on just-in-time delivery.
If you make it past the first 90 you probably have seeds in the ground to get you to the next 90. We don't just inherit the environment, we shape it. We can start growing our own food within weeks, not reliant on ancestors
But let's get back to the topic. 3000 charge cycles, your number, is a lot. All that time can be used to make hard copies of essential information. You can learn how to salvage wire and build new energy sources. An average 2100²ft empty house has almost 200 pounds of copper wire in the walls. 3000 cycles to learn.
But thanks for telling me who I am and what skills I already have.