Watch an episode or two of Life After People. Doesn't really matter which ones, they all give a general idea of what would happen to the structures we've left behind.
Post Apocalyptic Man Made Ruins and Weapons
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Are they still mortal? Can they be killed (arrows/poisons/traps)? Can they get sick (biological warfare; even something simple like dysentery can cripple an army)? Do they grow food on farms (torch the farms/poison the soil)? Is future water contaminated, requiring filtration (knock this out, or poison/contaminate)? What kind of society have they built (human societies often have weaknesses to exploit, due to humans simply being humans; are mutants somehow psychologically superior? What kind of villages/cities do they build, and are there holes in security?)? Are humans kept as slaves (the enemy's inside the gates, so to speak) or run out as pests (mutants may not understand how humans think and organize, and/or consider them just another animal, a potentially deadly mistake)? And are all mutants automatically evil, or can some be persuaded to assist humans?
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First, the Library of Congress and other groups have already built extensive collections of books accessible with very basic technology, like vinyl records.
Second, a comet would not wipe out all life on earth instantly, nor completely destroy all societies instantly. Groups would survive long enough to make so-called "knowledge arks" and other such things. Theoretically, some of them might actually be sealed properly and survive 3000 years. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely any surviving humans would understand the languages preserved; if they did find a cache of books in some form they could access, it would be gibberish to them. Just look at English compared to Old English and extrapolate that a few thousand years hence.
Third, guns and ammunition could survive, intact, for 3000 years. Do do so, they would have to be hermetically sealed. Some groups, particularly the more paranoid ones, keep stashes of hermetically sealed weapons in underground bunkers. Theoretically, one or more may survive and be discovered 3000 years hence.
But in an "end of the world" scenario, the paranoid people are going to dig into these very bunkers, likely breaking the hermetic seals to use their carefully stored weapons, thus preventing the guns from lasting anywhere near that long. You'd have to find a bunker from a sufficiently paranoid person/group/government that couldn't access it; that likely means somewhere close enough to the initial blast radius that nobody could get to it or possibly remember where it was.
IF such a cache of weapons was found, producing more would be out of the question, and making more ammunition equally impossible. As others mentioned, merely figuring out how to use them would be an impressive feat, much less getting into the sealed containers.
Older firearms would be easier to maintain, but still outside the realm of cavemen.
However, that is assuming the comet/meteor/whatever hit today. As the author, you could say it hit in the middle of a cold war between the US and China, or something like that. Invent an alternate history world where enough people were paranoid and had bunkers/vaults, possibly with simple-to-read instruction manuals full of pictures. Or let it hit in the future when rail or Gauss guns are common; these designs use fewer moving parts and could survive longer (if sealed away). Their ammunition is also simpler, not relying on gunpowder at all. You'd need a power source, but it's your world. Just say photovoltaic power cells advanced and are incorporated into a military survival rifle. Now your cavemen can find a weapon with simple ammunition and maintenance requirements and a nearly infinite power source. A future energy weapon further reduces moving parts and eliminates ammo altogether.
Massive numbers work well. You could also say a random event helped the humans out; maybe the mutants get into a civil war with themselves. Or a weird plague breaks out that only affects mutants. Maybe the mutants require more food to survive and humans are the slaves delivering the food. Or mutants can't swim. Play around with what makes sense in your world. Heck, maybe the humans just get a really awesome general, possibly because some oral version of the Art of War was passed down for three thousand years among a particularly zealous clan. We still have religions dating back that far; whose to say it can't happen?
Count me as skeptical that many (perhaps any) groups are going to be doing this.
I think chances are better that someone might do it before the strike, than after. Afterwards, if it's bad enough to bring down modern civilization, then I think people will be too busy simply trying to survive, which includes seeking food, shelter, medical care, and fending off zombie hordes who want to take yours.
I agree that some kind of weakness needs to be exploited because it seems you stacked the deck on the mutant side.
Is the leader the only one with this power? Could a mutant sympathetic to the cavemen help them out? (Think Planet of the Apes)
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It could be they saw the strike coming and prepared. It also depends on the individuals involved. Most people would definitely do what you suggest, but if someone has no expectation of living (due to age, required medical treatment, whatever), they may well seek something else to do in their last days. Particularly if they were a researcher/librarian/someone else who values knowledge and its preservation. It only takes one such person properly sealing away the right stuff to make a difference, if it survives.
As an example, look at the fictional Mass Effect 3 character Liara T'soni. She spends most of her time trying to survive or defeat an invasion from impossibly-powerful sentient robots, but still makes time to create her own version of a knowledge ark. While her situation is different than that of humans on earth after an asteroid strike, the point remains that those with the time (perhaps because a family member is providing the basic needs of food, shelter, etc) may well chose to use it to preserve knowledge. Even more important, it is plausible enough for audiences, regardless of how many would really do so after a catastrophe. And plausibility is often enough for writing fiction.
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A few things:
1. Knowledge can persist. Even after three thousand years, it's possible that humans would still understand pre-disaster languages. They might not be in common use, but we still understand Ancient Greek, for instance. (It's very easy for those in a culture with widespread literacy to underestimate the power of oral traditions in transmitting information.) It's also possible that humans would remember guns, even if they can't manufacture them anymore. How far they've fallen, and why, is up to you; just make sure it makes sense.
2. However, knowledge does not automatically infer power. Just because a stone-age tribe remembers how revolvers (for instance) work, doesn't mean it has the manufacturing ability to create one. (Or to create the bullets, powder and fulminate of mercury, which is more difficult.)
3. Don't overlook stripping when considering how long buildings will last. One of the difficulties for archeologists looking for old structures isn't war or cataclysm - it is local inhabitants breaking those structures down for building materials of their own. (Anyone who discovers a way to re-work 20th Century materials with neolithic tools could become immensely powerful.)
4. A comet's initial impact would be cataclysmic, but it probably wouldn't wipe out civilization in a day; instead, it might inflict so much cultural and economic damage that civilization declined over a generation, unable to recover. In this scenario, libraries, museums, and other clever forms of knowledge storage become possible.
5. Still-functional energy weapons are kind of a laugh. If you think gunpowder decays over time, try and remember the last time a battery you owned held a charge for more than a year.
1. Knowledge can persist. Even after three thousand years, it's possible that humans would still understand pre-disaster languages. They might not be in common use, but we still understand Ancient Greek, for instance. (It's very easy for those in a culture with widespread literacy to underestimate the power of oral traditions in transmitting information.) It's also possible that humans would remember guns, even if they can't manufacture them anymore. How far they've fallen, and why, is up to you; just make sure it makes sense.
2. However, knowledge does not automatically infer power. Just because a stone-age tribe remembers how revolvers (for instance) work, doesn't mean it has the manufacturing ability to create one. (Or to create the bullets, powder and fulminate of mercury, which is more difficult.)
3. Don't overlook stripping when considering how long buildings will last. One of the difficulties for archeologists looking for old structures isn't war or cataclysm - it is local inhabitants breaking those structures down for building materials of their own. (Anyone who discovers a way to re-work 20th Century materials with neolithic tools could become immensely powerful.)
4. A comet's initial impact would be cataclysmic, but it probably wouldn't wipe out civilization in a day; instead, it might inflict so much cultural and economic damage that civilization declined over a generation, unable to recover. In this scenario, libraries, museums, and other clever forms of knowledge storage become possible.
5. Still-functional energy weapons are kind of a laugh. If you think gunpowder decays over time, try and remember the last time a battery you owned held a charge for more than a year.
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#3 is a very good point, one I'm not sure anyone else has mentioned.
#5 is situational. Cheap batteries based on chemical reactions, such as alkaline (like AA) would never last. Expensive batteries, like lithium, are likewise toast. Lead-acid batteries, as in cars, would last a little longer, but not anywhere close to 3000 years.
But this is assuming a battery at all, or using current technology. Since we don't have hand-held energy weapons in real use, we have to assume any story with them must have technological developments beyond our current levels. The US military is working on backpack-sized nuclear generators (using uranium gathered from seawater as a fuel source); it isn't inconceivable that within a few decades, an energy weapon could be run on a similar generator, removing the need for a battery. Stored uranium may not last 3000 years, but my point is less in a particular technology and more the idea that huge advances in energy generation are currently in prototype stages.
It is certainly possible that one of the many new battery types in development may provide the longevity to last (unused) for that long, or that one of the new generator types will prove durable enough to stick around. It is all speculation, to be sure, but hey. Energy weapons are still science fiction, and sci fi is all about speculation.
Agreed. I was juat responding to the sentence that began with, "Groups would survive long enough to..." People doing it after the strike seems unlikely to me.
If the crash is a hard one, the knowledge most useful to the survivors would likely be practical, not theoretical. How to make high-carbon steel, not how the universe formed. Etc.
Perhaps there would be a series of "arks", each covering some level of technical know-how? Would suck to be missing "volumes 1 .. 3" and not understand (or be capable of leaping to what's in) volume 4 though.
(And I know that 3,000 years is a long time to rediscover and reboot. But I'm not sanguine about if we crashed hard now, that it'd be possible to reboot a civilization with the same level of technology we have now. The easy fossil fuels have been harvested, for example. There'd be no glut of cheap power for the future Industrial Revolution.)
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It's not the temperature swings (+122F to -10F where I lived -- compare to Montana's range of +117F to -72F), it's the ground. Anything lying on the ground in the SoCal desert (where I lived for 28 years) deteriorates so fast it isn't funny. The dirt is extremely alkali and loaded with metallic salts (mostly calcium salts), and, well, consider what happens to metal when exposed to lye and salt and even occasional water. Remember the metal part of a car is not sitting on the ground...
Not to mention the ground termites eat anything that was ever a plant (I once had them get into a bag of flour!), and will start doing so within mere days of exposure. The high desert is absolutely loaded with termites. (And what they won't eat, the black beetles will.)
The only thing that doesn't vanish is concrete and stone, and even that's not immune if you're in a sandstorm area (around Palm Springs, that means flying pea gravel -- etched the crap outta my windshield in a matter of minutes).
These high desert ruins, built in about 1916 mostly from stone and cement, still had some surviving walls (enough to look like buildings) when I first saw them in 1982, but as of now are down to just the chimneys and a few scraps of walls, and the deterioration is accelerating.
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Evan Henry beat me to it, but I agree -- you need to do some popcorn-based research on Ewoks!
That's a good point, though in our time, it's a matter of the advanced culture not wanting to wipe out the primitive culture, or start an even bigger war, Russia could have annihilated Afghanistan in a day, just as the US could have wiped North Vietnam off the map in a day.
The more primitive forces didn't beat the advanced technology in either case. Only the threat of equally advanced technology being used caused the defeats.
If manpower is even close to equal, I'll bet on the advanced weapons every time.
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Unfortunately, Russia has never really been humanitarian, and the US gave that up long ago.
It would still happen. Visionaries of the Renaissance used more mundane forms of power like water wheels and donkey mills for their experiments. Given enough time in isolation, humanity would eventually give birth to a culture where such visionaries could flourish again, and they would eventually improve their energy sources to more modern wind turbines and other renewable sources. It would take thousands of years (or more) instead of a few hundred, but we humans are a curious lot.
...unless all accessible sources of iron and other metals disappeared. That would make it nearly impossible to develop the metallurgical skills necessary for improved power generation. Most metals oxidize, and we've mined a lot of the easy to reach stuff... that would be far more crippling.
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We may have mined it, but that also means vast quantities are to be had in every junkyard (source of refined iron and aluminum) and deteriorated modern buildings (source of copper wiring) and so on. I'd guess 90% of all the metals ever mined would be close enough to the surface (judging by the degree to which ancient sites get buried) and more important, already refined or at least concentrated. Processing a rusty car shouldn't be any more difficult than refining bog iron.
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Which raises an interesting question. How much of that would rust away to nothing, given 3000 years? Is a few feet of dirt sufficient protection?
The Zulu were defeated by the British during the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879.
The Maori people now live in the present day nation of New Zealand.
Russia vs Afganistan is much more complicated than the scope of this thread.
"Primitive" people can win battles but rarely win wars, that is a hollywood fantasy.
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In a warmer climate than Chernoble, Varosha is a completely abandoned city that is located within a demilitarization zone on Cyprus. Abandoned since 1974. Not long in your time scale but a great laboratory of abandonment studies.
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We could just be right back to where we started, y'know.
The industrial revolution only took about 200 years, maybe throw some Enlightenment and within 500 years we went from scratching in the dirt to iPhones. So there's THAT. The fall of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages were a big step backwards.
The industrial revolution only took about 200 years, maybe throw some Enlightenment and within 500 years we went from scratching in the dirt to iPhones. So there's THAT. The fall of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages were a big step backwards.
The ape mutants wore heavy bronze armor and only use their fists are weapons. And their leader is the only one who has magical powers. Maybe there could be a technology that kept the weapons maintained for years in a bunker. And they are simple to use.
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You'd have to come up with some seriously good rationale for how something so fortuitous could occur. As stated, I would never buy into an idea like that (regarding the bunker.) It's both too outlandish to easily believe and too obviously a convenience for the author.
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Spears. They can be made easily, have longer reach than fists, are easy to train with, and are quite deadly. In Ancient Greece, spears were the weapon of choice, particularly for the lightly-armored skirmishers (peltast).
Or distance weapons, like javelins, bows, darts, etc. See psiloi. I link to ancient Greek examples because they used bronze armor, therefore their weapons were adequate for using against it. Though many other civilizations also used bronze armor, including the Romans (at least to some degree). Distance weapons also afford mobility, are also easy to get, and also work well against fists.
Preferably, use spears and distance weapons together. Stakes set into the ground perform well against charging heavy infantry (or leaping mutants, depending on their capabilities). Distance attacks afford them the chance to stay within their protective stakes. Once enemies have closed the distance, the lightly-armored humans can retreat or use spears as appropriate. Assuming the humans are smaller, they may be better able to maneuver in a field of sharpened stakes.
Use of terrain is also critical. Attacking from atop a cliff, for example, when your opponent is only using fists. Withdrawing into a swamp where a (theoretically) heavier mutant in bronze armor can't go without drowning. Fighting in extreme cold or extreme heat, where metal armor can be a hindrance.
Bronze age is not so far advanced as to be impossible, particularly if the humans significantly outnumber mutants. Obsidian spears and arrows are quite deadly against any unarmored skin and bronze armor traditionally had many weak points (joints, unprotected calves, etc). You just need decent training and a general who knows how to lead men and fight mutants.
How you deal with the mutant leader is another matter, depending on the nature of his magical abilities.
Well, if the ape leader's power is rock, what you need is for your humans to stumble across a paper factory...
Seriously, right now it sounds like the mutants' tactics are limited to "smash things with our fists" and "if that fails, have our leader hurl a rock." That'll work in skirmishes, but against long-range weapons? Traps? Poisons? Napalm? Maybe study some military history; lighter, faster troops often trumped heavy-armored brutes. Get your heavily-armored mutants into a swamp or a streambed, and they'll be at a huge disadvantage. (I have to agree that "just finding the magic weapon stash to smash the bad guys" sounds awfully convenient. Maybe find some records that lead to the rediscovery of ironworks, or gunpowder, so the humans have to work a little for their victory. Or maybe they find some of our radioactive waste and figure out that it can poison their enemies... at the cost of whoever delivers the deadly payload.)
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If they're so primitive that their only weapons are fists -- who the heck is making this bronze armor, and why don't they have at least bronze weapons?
Weapons tend to predate armor, since armor develops to protect against existing weapons.