Also, good luck with those apocalyptic predictions Firefly – the collapse of civilization has been imminent for several thousands of years.

There was heaps of trucks and buses back then, right?

When the little ones come of age, they are sent into the woods to fight cops and make ponchos out of truck upholstery.  This strengthens their spirit.  When they return they are considered adults and are privileged to sit at the council fire.  Also they do not have to pedal the bike-generator anymore.

Think less Wavy Gravy, and more Ho Chi Minh. Invaders make good fertilizer.

Man, i’m going to miss the internet when society collapses.

But then, chances are high you won’t have to worry because you will be dead right away.

Do I want to go back to that? Ummm…no… f*&# that shite.

That’s why I am a very happy, city-dwelling web developer.

“Primitivism” is not better, funner, or in any way happy making if you have to do it.

1. Because of the productivity improvements of industrial society, any system less productive(whatever its other advantages and/or necessities may be) has at least a couple of billion spare people to get rid of.

2. Because people presently exist on a rough continuum from ‘plutocrat’ to ‘imminent risk of starvation’, even modest supply movements have effects almost immediately, though typically among the world’s weak first.

The idea that the world will suddenly universally forget how to make nitrogen based fertilizers is laughable, as is every factory, railroad, ship, highway, transport truck, and mine being bombed/zombie’d/plagued/alien’d at once. But if that happened, we’d rebuild them and in a damned big hurry too.

The Fertilizer Crisis, like the Oil Crisis and the Global Warming Crisis, is one of these things that doesn’t happen instantaneously. The resource crisis of your choice that leads to a restriction of transport will take time, it will be a slow grinding failure, not “boom”.

Barring comet strike/zombies/etc., and even then odds are better it’s a regional problem and the region would get humanitarian aid from outside.

And then you walk out of the war zone with the rest of the refugees.

“Global war” is a fantasy invented in the 50s when people still thought WWI and WWII meant that we’d have Great Wars every decade or two until we immolated ourselves.

So, call that .9L per kilogram, and a potato is ~ 15% starch, your hundred pounds of potatoes gives you 6.8 kg of starch or 6.1L of ethanol.

Vodka is usually sold at 40% ABV, so call it 15L.

Now, you’ll probably want to whack at least half off that number for sub-optimal tools and process, and any disruptions of your distillation procedure by wandering radscorpions.