Rebuilding America: Industry Priorities

[Targan]

Originally Posted by kalos72

But if you think about it, the survivors have been going at this new world for 2-3 years now. Anyone who's around say in Texas in late 2000 early 2001 will have the basic necessary skills to survive. Food water, shelter style at least.

This topic is what happens moving past that really.

At some point, some strongman whose community has enough food and water for their needs is going to say "Damn it would be nice to get some power for that machine shop in town. I wonder if we can get us some coal..."

Any community that has made it into the timeline of the US based modules is past the basic need to eat and drink water. No?

Yes and no. Can't fault your logic, but you're talking about individuals or small groups. This discussion is about much larger groups. It's like the difference between hunter-gatherer societies and agrarian societies. Once you have larger numbers of people living in larger, fixed communities everything changes. Just for starters, that's when you get specialisation. Same with climbing back up from the apocalypse. Instead of each family spending most of their time just surviving, now you've got people assigned to specific jobs. That means they need someone else to be doing the leg work to feed them and water them while they do something else.

I suspect this is what Raellus is talking about. Feeding one family and finding enough water to get by is a completely different situation to supplying drinking water and irrigation water and sanitation and decent quality food to entire communities. That's a seriously big task, and it will make or break larger settlements and groups of settlements. So yes, as you say eventually they're going to start thinking about power for the machine shop, but reliable, safe water and food supplies will always be the most important things.

[Bullet Magnet]

Now I'm thnking, it might not be a bad idea to work out what might be the priorities on like a timetable basis. By that I mean listing out what people would most likely prioritize at various stages after the "event".

Like in that first year after, as people have already said, food, clean water, and defense would be the primary things on people's minds.

Then, moving on, we can get to the two to three years after, as kalos brought up. Then, maybe 5 years, going up to ten years after, by which time the war should be over and the government would be trying to reassert authority.

As always, just a thought I had, after reading the newest posts tonight.