I feel like I have a deep reliance on society and technology, because I can’t fucking see without glasses and I’m too scared to do Lasik lol (also expensive).
Not that useful in scenarios besides reading: if you curl your hands in front of your eye and leave a very tiny opening you can create a pinhole that’ll make a tiny bit of your view in focus
Photo from Minute Physics demonstrating what you need to do for that:
You could make “glasses” out of wood or bone with thin slits using the same idea
Just like the Inuit snow goggles
I do much the same, make a tube out of my hands like I’m using a monocular. Works!
Neat! I have really strong vision, but know how to force them out of focus. It’s weird not being able to blur my vision when I’m doing this.
Been using this trick to read my alarm clock since I was ten!
We’re fucked. Our genes told us.
You’ll have to hit up the local glasses stores. Luckily there’s plenty of em.
You’ll be okay, OP. It will be extra shitty though. Imagine running from a horde of cannibalistic raiders and you drop your glasses…
Jokes on them, I didn’t take good care of myself and am under constant stress. My meat is probably foul AF.
If you have or can scavenge a laser pointer, just go hog wild shining it all around in your eyes. You have nothing to lose trying it at that point and maybe you get lucky and give yourself DIY lasik.
Pretty sure LASIK involves cutting open your cornea and affecting the aqueous fluid to correct the refraction. They don’t just shoot lasers into your eyes to make you see good
Agree to disagree.
💀
That’s not how LASIK works.
I was going to say that I’d trust my luck more with a post-apocalypse optician than post apocalypse lasik and I think you make my point quite well.
People who wear glasses are screwed but not as screwed as people who rely on medication.
My partner and I have discussed our wildly different willingness to try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world plenty of times over the years. He would work to survive and would probably thrive more than the average survivor. Me? I’ve always said I’ll likely head to the cough syrup section of the pharmacy.
This conversation came up earlier today, in fact. Well, I was recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I’m still sorting out the right medication to get it under control and am dealing with a lot of pain, but way less than before starting treatment. I told him with this diagnosis, if society ever collapses in a way that causes me to be unable to get my medication? I’m out.
I’m on the same page. I’ve spent most of my adult life testing the limits of my skills, wit, and badassery. My conclusion from that is that I am not a badass and have no interest in trying to survive societal collapse.
I want to see a movie like The Road but it’s kids dragging their parent in an iron lung down the road.
But I’ll thrive with my untreated ADHD (unlikely)!
I dunno, reading through common ADHD traits sometimes sounds like a description of the perfect post-apoc survivor lol
I always imagined that ADHD was just our minds tuned to being hunter-gatherer survivors, and thus not suited for a sedentary office environment.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s an adaptive trait, just one that isn’t useful anymore. It wouldn’t be good for everyone to have ever, but it probably was useful for some people to have. Just like most people are more awake during the day, you’d want some people awake at night to keep everyone safe, so we have “night owls” who are maladjusted to the typical work hours we have today.
I have trained my children from a young age that, in case of zombie outbreak or alien invasion, I am to be left behind. I require far too many medications to function in a post-apocalyptic setting.
What oddly specific training. Is there a training regimen for a “Evangelion everyone got turned into Tang” situation too? What about the “Just got spider powers and a Canon event may be coming”?
They were young and zombie movies were everywhere. In the way of all children, the questions were non-stop. This was also the time I was bedridden, so I convinced them that zombies only went after healthy people.
The whole thing about Instrumentality is forsaking your physical body. Now, once you return to reality and realise your whole city is flooded like in the final scene, that’s when things start to go wrong.
I too am certain to die so my plan is to heroically sacrifice myself. Full on “I got this” while my friends are pulled away screaming “nooooooooooooooooooo!”
I wanted to train my kids to do this, but my spouse rolled their eyes and asked, “Why would we willingly give up a weapon for you to have a last stand?”
Yep! I plan to lead the zombies off while playing a banging tune on my phone.
Mountain Goats are always a good choice.
You can make a rough magnifying lens by trial and error using glass and a hand grinder—not the same as prescription lenses, but for many it would be better than nothing.
Any glass? Any grinder? Can I find a broken window and start sanding it with sandpaper, as an extreme example?
i feel like there’s some sort of childhood song about the dangers of silicosis we were supposed to learn but praise mandela didn’t
Silicosis sounds so silly!
Some glass is many sheets glued together, that could be trickier to work with
Thick glass that’s not tempered will be the easiest to work with
Pretty much any piece of glass and a series of sandpapers going from low to high grit will eventually work if you know what you’re doing
That’s pretty crazy.
Yes, it’s not magic, it’s just the shape of the glass that makes the focus point of images be slightly closer or further apart.
Can I find a broken window and start sanding it with sandpaper, as an extreme example?
Yes, provided you have a way to polish it back to transparent again, after changing the shape.
Ohhhh, cool. I knew it was glass, but I guess I did kind of think there was some magic going on in there somewhere. Way simpler than I realized.
We could rely on scavenging what’s already been made. Even if it isn’t your exact prescription, a little might be better then nothing.
Maybe contact lenses are apocalypse proof
Always keep a year supply of dailies on hand
yeah but how much solution you got for stretching those dailies out
It’s just salt water.
sterile salt water and those are your eyes you’re poking
For myopia, only an issue for a couple of generations. If we’re living off the land again, myopia will stop being a thing as in the past.
Aristotle was writing about myopia over 2000 years ago…
Still owes me 20 bucks, just sayin
Rather short sighted of him to let interest build up over thousands of years!
I see what you did there.
True but the rates of myopia were minuscule compared to today. Bad phrasing: not a thing insofar as it barely affected anyone.
Alternative theory. It impacted a similar proportion of the population, but people in general were vastly less likely to be in situations where it impacted their life in an overly negative way
But the first generation of survivors is gonna live like hell without glasses.
if we can make glass we can make simple lenses. I just don’t know the limits as I’m neither an eye, lens, nor materials scientist.
One would think that if most of society is toast there will be a shitload of left over glasses that could be collected and then distributed to those in need.
I have never put on a pair that was even close to my prescription. In fact, this post made me realize I’ve been wearing my old glasses all day and that’s why I have a headache.
There are always exceptions to the rule. There are people that have super special prescriptions and then there are other people that just have the standard stuff due to age, etc.
Based on that, the majority of people would have a pair that match them. Anyone else with special glasses would be shit out of luck because as the title says it’s the end of the world and only a few peops left.
Let’s not be ruled by exceptions to the rule. It is only a tiny amount.
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Glasses aren’t all the same, you know. What if you have a really crazy prescription?
Out of all the people with glasses in the world, there’s somebody who’s almost guaranteed to have the same eyes.
Your mission is to find that person, and steal their glasses.
I know of a YouTuber called the blind homesteader. He has family and friends help him. They have quite the homestead and he often helps the community around his homestead too.
Our modern life involves a lot of reading and writing and sometimes very technical work. But the work of surviving on planet earth is a little less vision intensive: farming, cooking, childcare, handcrafts. Depending on how bad your vision is you might even be slow and shitty at these, but people can adapt to a lot and figure out how to perform tasks they’ve done before, even with poor vision. Look at the blind: they can be functional. Yes there are things like hunting which you could. not. do. with poor vision but that’s why we live in tribes. Someone younger with better eyes will do that while you shell nuts all day.
Yes there are things like hunting which you could. not. do. with poor vision
Matt Murdock took that personally.
Casey doesn’t have bad dreams because she’s just a piece of plastic.
It took centuries to get to disposable contact lenses while trying to figure out the physics, both in optics and in manufacturing any sort of spectacles, at the same time.
Will the survivors of the apocalypse be able to pick up where we left off or will they essentially start from scratch? That depends on the apocalypse and on the survivors. Do documents and knowledge survive, perhaps in a stash or in digital form? Do the survivors include an optician or a material engineer? Chances look good if that’s the case. If no, life will get a lot harder for many people.
Restarting production chains and manufacturing facilities is going to be the biggest bottle neck.
If we imagine something like climate change wiping out 99% of the population, there just aren’t enough people to do all that. It’s going to be all hands on deck just to produce enough food for everyone. It will take a few centuries of rebuilding to get to that point.
for less people you need less manufacturing capacity
That is also true, but low output production doesn’t get the benefits of economies of scale. That means that the number of people we need per amount of stuff produced will be higher if we do things small scale. If we have a city of a million people, you can totally arrange various things in a more centralized way, which brings the benefits of large scale production.
Ever wondered why waste water purification or energy production tends to favor large scale facilities? Same applies to farming wheat, grinding it to flour and baking bread.
If you have only small towns, everyone will just focus on making the basic necessities happen. Who has the time to design new electric motors, when you need to spend your time milking your sheep and harvesting berries for next winter.
I assumed surviving doctors would do for people what they did for sawyer in lost.
Use what you can find to get as close as you can per eye.
Other than that, sucks to suck, And I say that as somebody who is both near sighted and far sighted.
