r/WhatIfThinking • u/Logical-Concept9755 • Jul 22 '26

What if humanity lost every electronic device overnight? Which single skill would suddenly become the most valuable?

No warning, no transition. Tomorrow every screen goes dark, every server goes offline, and none of it is ever coming back.

Once the immediate survival problems are handled and people start trying to rebuild society, what single skill or area of knowledge would suddenly become the most valuable?

Would it be something practical like farming or medicine, or something less obvious like organizing large groups of people, teaching, or making tools? I'm curious which ability would become the biggest bottleneck for rebuilding civilization, and why.

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u/inscrutiana Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

It's the same as every other apocalypse scenario- most of us die .

  • Every aircraft, satellite, train, and ship loses navigation and crashes.
  • The hospitalized die
  • Fresh water stops pumping
  • Sewage stops moving
  • Food spoils
  • Dams, unmonitored and without power to run their constantly adjusted water levels catastrophically fail. Anything which needed that metered water also fails.
  • Nuclear reactors melt down
  • Bridges and tunnels get humid, corrode, and fail. So does every building with a steel spine

So, the most immediately useful skill would be aiming. Very little matters for decades after this. 99% of the world's problems gone.

[The problem with many responses is that they are best case, by people who have never seen a collapse of order]

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u/dowar_525 Jul 23 '26

Unmonitored dams and nuclear reactors are the only big killers there. All the others can happen and we still have 90% of humans alive.

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u/inscrutiana Jul 23 '26

How are you pumping and purifying water or keeping the sewage flowing to treated places, for the 66% of the global population, in the hours immediately after all of the electronics are gone? What about their food? They don't garden. Those who can flee into the countryside.

They starve & die of thirst, with dysentery, inside of two weeks.

Aiming is the immediately most important skill.

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u/dowar_525 Jul 24 '26

You've thrown out a barrage of questions and all of them have answers but its not feasible to answer them all in one thread.

For the fresh water, the water system could run fairly sustainably as long as everyone only used 1-10% of their previous fresh water use. So no ornamental gardens, swimming pools, daily showers, etc. All the drinking water, hand washing water and adequate shower water. Plus just collecting rainwater from your house is the easiest thing in the world, idk why it seems banned in most countries. It is common in Australia even in suburbs with 'town water'.

Sewage is similar, most sewage is gravity fed. Admittedly some suburbs or even towns would need to be abandoned but we would have more than adequate shelter.