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).
People who wear glasses are screwed but not as screwed as people who rely on medication.
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.
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.
https://www.engineeringforchange.org/solutions/product/adspecs/
Hopefully if enough of these get distributed it won’t be so much of a problem except for people with astigmatism.
https://www.epo.org/en/news-events/european-inventor-award/meet-the-finalists/joshua-silver
Joshua Silver, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford, first had the idea to manufacture adjustable lenses for the poor, removing the need for expensive equipment and professionals, in May 1985 after he had created a variable focus lens out of curiosity.
His invention allows wearers to adjust the glasses to their personal prescription without the assistance of a healthcare professional. They simply look at a reading chart and adjust the glasses until they can see the letters clearly.
The glasses use durable but flexible plastic lenses, which have fluid sacs filled with silicone oil between them. These glasses can easily be adjusted by the wearer by simply adding or removing some of the oil in the sacs.
The invention is not without its limitations, however. Currently, the principle only functions successfully with circular lenses, limiting the design opportunities. Additionally, the principle can only alter the magnification of objects, so the glasses cannot treat those with astigmatism. What these spectacles lack in aesthetics, however, they make up for in spades with utility and work on non-round lenses is already underway.
His stated goal was to make the overall cost of a pair of glasses as low as $19.
Holy shit this is amazing. I love inventions like this. This just oddly gives me a lot of joy. No need to waste hours on stupid eye exams, just adjust it whenever my eyesight deteriorates.
Awesome! But this probably takes forever to actually become a product that one can buy.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/dec/22/diy-adjustable-glasses-josh-silver
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2011/may/22/joshua-silver-glasses-self-adjusting
Original article I posted didn’t give a date, but the earliest articles about these glasses are from 2008-2011, so they’ve certainly been around for almost 20 years now.
I think they were really aimed at rural communities in poor countries, several of the articles I’ve read reference about 300,000 pairs being distributed.
You probably wouldnt want to buy it. They aren’t exactly a good fashion statement.
i think they look pretty cool. kinda steampunky
Well this is awesome but for me it wouldn’t work. B/C I’ve got an astigmatism.
Same, I have astigmatism and near-sightedness, a brutal combination.
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:
Been using this trick to read my alarm clock since I was ten!
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.
Your screwedness depends on how bad your eyesight is. Can you see well enough to tell a weed apart from the crop you’re growing when looking at arms length? Then that’s all the eyesight you need to be useful to a community
Pretty much this. Even if your eyes are bad-bad, generally you can find a task you can do, even if it’s “go spread fertilizer on the crop beds over here” or “hold this metal down at this end while I hammer the other end into shape.” People with bad eyesight have historically survived in conditions nearly identical to what a commune of survivors would be facing if the T-virus decided to escape tomorrow or whatever, it’s not magic. Depending on the community you wind up with, you will have SOMETHING that you can do to meaningfully contribute even without eyeglasses.
I believe that our eyesight is worse than it’s been historically. Sunlight shows eye growth and we get less of it today than 1000 years ago.
It didn’t really change the point we can be mostly somewhat valuable, but there may be more if it’s with worse eyesight today.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Just saw a YouTube documentary that reminded me of this comment—it describes how Galileo made his lenses by hand from window glass using an artillery ball as a grinder.
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!
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.
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.
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
If people survive the “apocalypse” then glasses will survive too. You just likely won’t be lucky enough to get lenses that are a perfect match for your prescription.
6 out of 7 houses on my street have at least one person with vision problems. Between the six of the houses we probably conservatively have 50 pairs of lenses if you count all the old pairs people tend to hang on to. My house has at least 10 just by itself.
Do we have surviving scientists and engineers, or books? Then everything is easy-ish: Progress took time because we didn’t know anything, everything was trial and error. Now we know the correct forms of physical laws or their usable approximations so rebuilding is just a matter of time (generations maybe).
If somehow the collective wisdom is lost, back to the stone ages with you.
edit: High school education brings you to the 1920s tech (era of elements and alloys, just before composites) so maybe if we have any surviving adults, you can have glasses?
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…
get an extra pair, throw it in the safe where you keep your beans and water
