Sn1p3r187
Carolinian Shaolin Monk
At least in the sense of getting civilization back to or at least close to pre-war levels?
Do you think the world eventually recovered from the Great War?
- Thread starter Sn1p3r187
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Practicat
Where'd That 6th Toe Come From?
It will, unless Bethesda decides the Zetayy Lmaos get their revenge.
Though being serious, I highly doubt they will involve aliens ever again in their Fallout games.
Though being serious, I highly doubt they will involve aliens ever again in their Fallout games.
GlutinousRice
Ne travaillez jamais
I don't think that society would recover beyond pre-industrial. They might have some level of industrial capacity, but with almost no source of fossil energy, going back to pre-war is impossible.
The-Artist-64
"Set Phasers to Fun."
I find the idea to be a little bit ridiculous. I doubt it. I even find myself in disbelief when I hear that about the size of the NCR's army. It's just a little hard to believe that they have hundreds of thousands of soldiers fighting every year after the world's population was brought down to the low millions after the war. With the rate of death in the wasteland, you'd think that humanity is extinct by now.
That being said, I don't think that we would have a complete wasteland 200 years after the war. Maybe the Capital Wasteland is stuck in some sort of time loop where it's always seven years after the apocalypse.
That being said, I don't think that we would have a complete wasteland 200 years after the war. Maybe the Capital Wasteland is stuck in some sort of time loop where it's always seven years after the apocalypse.
Lanfear
Mildly Dipped
I see no reason why it wouldn't. It's not like every bit of pre-war technology and knowhow was erased the instant the bombs fell. There's operational power plants and shit all over the place and multiple groups dedicated to archiving pre-war knowledge.
mnmn1234
The House Always Wins
Moria Brown said:
No. the world can never come back to what it was, the closes you have is the NCR, even then they are nothing like the old world. Humanity has no hope left on earth, the only chance for humanity to come to point that could be consider the old world will be different planet, that was not nuked to hell and back. On earth man is fucked. only in the never ending expanse of space will man find salvation.
Lanfear
Mildly Dipped
Even a nuked-to-shit planet earth is tonnes better than trying to make a planet without so much as a breathable atmosphere livable. It's not like the planet can't recover from a bunch of nuclear bomb detonations. It's recovered from much worse in prehistory.
mnmn1234
The House Always Wins
the great war was FAR worse than any mass extinction, before you still had land that could be lived on, now, however? radiation everywhere, with few animals left alive. That is also why you sent ships before hand to search for someplace with a breathable atmosphere, or atleast one that could be terraformed easily. Hell, if the pre-war could build matter manipulators then at least some sort of terraforming should be possible. especially if you were to bring a GECK
Ninja
Who?
That needs to be their official name.
Lanfear
Mildly Dipped
You want to check out just how much energy a large meteor impact could impart onto the planet. No man made weapon to date could even come close to such destructive power. No technology could make terraforming an entire planet less of an energy investment than fixing up the livable planet we have already, either.
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GlutinousRice
Ne travaillez jamais
Life could certainly still exist, and it is shown in game. But how it is portrayed indicate that returning to an industrial society to the level of development of pre-war America is impossible.
The earth isn't completely sterile from radiation, but it isn't fertile enough for intensive agriculture, as a lot of place is still barren and trees had an hard time to grow and look sickly. They may even be improper for a lot of timber work. And I don't think that farming, or livestock would be enough to support a large population of workers. They lack a lot of modern fertilizer, pesticide and farming tool that existed only thanks to an advance chemical industry.
And a problem more important than wasteland that is difficult to produce food, or other natural renewable resource, is there are barely any coal, fuel, gas left on Earth, or at least easily available to produce large amount of energy necessary for a large scale industrial project. Otherwise, the Great War would have never happened. Sure the NCR secured a solar power plant, there is a nuclear power plant near Vault City and Broken Hill (if I remember correctly), and started to electrify his country. But could they produce enough energy? Making new solar panel also require important resources that may not be readily available with no modern machine that run of fuel. And as for nuclear power, what could they do if they run out of uranium? It's simple as that : no cheap abundant energy, no industrial revolution, no industrial capacity, no pre-war society.
And last I want to make, is the people and how they have been affected by the radiation. It's almost certain that radiation affected negatively the ability to reproduce healthy individual. Sterility, malformation, poor health, infantile death that are probably higher than it ever was before especially since they lack modern medicine. With health, reproductive problem, and limited food production, the human population would be always low. Not only you will have a lower workforce, but also a lower intellectual force, especially if you suppose that most of the people will be focused in work directly related to survival, there won't be a lot of person who would have the leisure to think, discover, rediscover and invent stuff. And small community has an harder time to keep their knowledge and pass it to the next generation, as there is only limited amount of data you can remember, and a limited amount of people, and knowledge is infinite. Not to mention that a lot of modern discovery and invention we made were dependent and made possible by an industry that created high-tech machine.
Pre-war consumer scientific society is impossible. At most they can go back to 17th Century, pre-industrial society. I repeat, pre-war society is absolutely impossible.
Lanfear
Mildly Dipped
Dunno what you're basing this on; by all in-game accounts there's plenty of intensive agriculture and livestock cultivation going on in the NCR.
There doesn't need to be another industrial revolution. The advances made during the industrial revolution aren't suddenly gone. People in Fallout aren't starting over from scratch. And they don't need immediate access to the amounts of resources pre-war society required to function, because a massive chunk of the population is gone.
They don't lack modern medicine. Autodocs and modern surgical methods are still readily available, medicine is still taught in developed areas like Vault City/NCR, etc. Fallout doesn't take place in the second stone age. Also, mutations caused by radioactive exposure aren't as straightforward as you may think and don't necessarily present a permanent problem as far as birth rate is concerned - check out somatic mutation vs germ line mutation for more info if you're interested.
Again - people in the Fallout universe are already way beyond 17th century pre-industrial society. And we don't even know what conditions are like in the most developed areas of the post-war world, honestly, because the games always take place on the frontier, where the most interesting stories occur; life in the heart of NCR might not be so far removed as you imagine from pre-war society even by the time of FNV. The small chunk of NCR we saw in Fallout 2 looked almost like a suburb.
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Izak
I Shot The ALBATROSS
It seems like post-apocalyptic life is already comparable to Medieval Europe from just looking at the Mid-West; the Roman Empire's about ready to collapse, the theocratic technology based military empire's being all isolationist and, a farcical republic rife with corruption and imperialism is ruthlessly expanding, even going so far as to ignore the various treatise they wrote limiting their expansion. Add to that Bethesda's East Coast and you have a shit-tonne of barbarians ready to knock on any enterprising empires door and just tear shit up.
All things considered that isn't bad progress for 200 years time, it took us longer to get to that state in real life Europe. So sure civilisation will probably recover at some point, but North America will probably be cut up by hundreds of empires by the time it does.
All things considered that isn't bad progress for 200 years time, it took us longer to get to that state in real life Europe. So sure civilisation will probably recover at some point, but North America will probably be cut up by hundreds of empires by the time it does.
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Dr Fallout
Centurion
It won't be able to go back to pre-war levels, but it can surpass it if they use their technology wisely and aim to start spreading plant life among the earth. Remember, Germany was able to keep it's military machine going with no oil, coal or any other common fossil fuel at the end of WW2. You have to admit, if they can power massive forces of tanks with alternatives, I think it's possible.
Radiation isn't going to be that bad 200 years after the war. Levels drop off pretty quickly. Here's a picture of Hiroshima in 1960, 15 years after the bomb (which was a relatively small and dirty bomb by today's standards)
200 years after a nuclear war, levels will probably be slightly elevated due to longer-lived fission products, but not at levels that will actually have a massive effect. We're talking probably a marginally higher incidence of cancer, not widespread radiation poisoning.
Energy won't really be a problem either. We could quite easily power the world with solar and wind, the reason we don't is because fossil fuels are cheaper, especially once you factor in the fact that you can't control the sun and wind, and need backup storage for calm or cloudy days. If all the oil disappeared tomorrow, energy prices would spike sharply (we're talking maybe a 50% increase, not 10 or 20x), we'd probably have a massive economic crisis as everything would cost more to make, but it wouldn't be civilisation-ending.
Going to another planet wouldn't make any sense. In our solar system, Mars is maybe the closest thing to earth we have. It is near-vacuum, high radiation, and it doesn't have any oil either. If you're on Mars, you're pretty much going to be living in a vault. At least on earth you can go out the front door!
200 years after a nuclear war, levels will probably be slightly elevated due to longer-lived fission products, but not at levels that will actually have a massive effect. We're talking probably a marginally higher incidence of cancer, not widespread radiation poisoning.
Energy won't really be a problem either. We could quite easily power the world with solar and wind, the reason we don't is because fossil fuels are cheaper, especially once you factor in the fact that you can't control the sun and wind, and need backup storage for calm or cloudy days. If all the oil disappeared tomorrow, energy prices would spike sharply (we're talking maybe a 50% increase, not 10 or 20x), we'd probably have a massive economic crisis as everything would cost more to make, but it wouldn't be civilisation-ending.
Going to another planet wouldn't make any sense. In our solar system, Mars is maybe the closest thing to earth we have. It is near-vacuum, high radiation, and it doesn't have any oil either. If you're on Mars, you're pretty much going to be living in a vault. At least on earth you can go out the front door!
Lanfear
Mildly Dipped
Emphasis mine; people are often for some reason quick to assume that the only possible source of dangerous radiation is a man-made nuclear detonation - this is far from true.
Also we could quite easily (and relatively cheaply) source energy on a large scale using present day fission technologies, but this isn't a widely favoured solution in the real world for various other reasons.
Sn1p3r187
Carolinian Shaolin Monk
Here's Neo Tokyo 31 years after the nuclear World War III in 1988. At least in Akira's canon. The world apparently recovered pretty quickly from its nuclear war.Radiation isn't going to be that bad 200 years after the war. Levels drop off pretty quickly. Here's a picture of Hiroshima in 1960, 15 years after the bomb (which was a relatively small and dirty bomb by today's standards)
200 years after a nuclear war, levels will probably be slightly elevated due to longer-lived fission products, but not at levels that will actually have a massive effect. We're talking probably a marginally higher incidence of cancer, not widespread radiation poisoning.
Energy won't really be a problem either. We could quite easily power the world with solar and wind, the reason we don't is because fossil fuels are cheaper, especially once you factor in the fact that you can't control the sun and wind, and need backup storage for calm or cloudy days. If all the oil disappeared tomorrow, energy prices would spike sharply (we're talking maybe a 50% increase, not 10 or 20x), we'd probably have a massive economic crisis as everything would cost more to make, but it wouldn't be civilisation-ending.
Going to another planet wouldn't make any sense. In our solar system, Mars is maybe the closest thing to earth we have. It is near-vacuum, high radiation, and it doesn't have any oil either. If you're on Mars, you're pretty much going to be living in a vault. At least on earth you can go out the front door!
Attachments
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
It should, it would be ridiculous if they didn't. Altho it wouldn't go back to Pre War normal, the experience has already altered everyone, but if they just stay in Mad max land it would get really tedious and repetitive.
mnmn1234
The House Always Wins
Yes, there is a lot of agriculture within the NCR, however in only a few decades they are going to have a famine;
Thomas Hildern said:
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
A famine? Only if they don't have the OSI, which they have, or if the Mojave Occupations continues without a Dam victory. it's not like the NCR is just stting un untended crops, they have a whole scientifics team.