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).
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.
Me too. Hey, ignoring the issue at hand, get weighted toric contact lenses. Just do it one time to try.
When I did, I realized what trash normal lenses are. Getting the lens and astigmatism corrected on the eye results in some pretty dramatically sharp view. It’s crazy, I started observing the stitching on carpets and the hair in the shower. I had never cared for either thing because I just can’t see it normally.
Yeah, my problem is the second you blink they shift away from perfect vision into garbage. It might be because I smoke cannabis. shrug meh, my stupid eyes…
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.
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.
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.
We’re fucked. Our genes told us.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
💀
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.
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.
Not that useful in scenarios except for 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:
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.
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!
Been using this trick to read my alarm clock since I was ten!
Eye glasses started showing up around 1300 AD. Implies the basic tech / processes required to make them is relatively simple, given that they’ve been around in some form ever since the middle ages. Granted, they wouldn’t be as sophisticated as they are today, and many people with very niche issues would suffer.
Anything more modern, requiring microchips or heavily integrated international supply chains would go poof. Personally, I’d worry about dental and medical stuff we diagnose with x-rays. Like it’s not too uncommon for people to have a root canal these days… but it didn’t become a more ‘common’ thing until around the 1800-1900 period. Hell, getting your wisdom teeth pulled in a post-event world would likely suck some serious ass.
The way glasses worked in the beginning though was that you’d make a bunch of lenses and people would try a lot of them until they found one (or two) that let them see a little better.
It wasn’t anything like what you’d expect nowadays.That’s how it would work in a post apocalypse too. People who wear glasses right now are typically on vision plans that allow for a new pair every year. I have like 5 old pairs, 4 of which no longer are really strong enough.
So depending on how far down the road post apocalypse you either randomly go through houses until you find a pair good enough, or if enough time has passed there will almost certainly be people specializing in selling glasses and medical things.
Now if you are far sighted all you have to do is walk into any abandoned CVS and go look through the huge rack of cheater lenses they have.
If there’s that type of event, we (the survivors, that is. 95% of us will die) are going back, way back. When the elevator falls from the 21st century down to the 20th and 19th, the cable snaps and we’re going back to the ground.
See, even a hundred years ago, items like a light bulb or electric motor already depended on a very large supply chain and many people working together that never meet in real life.
How do you make glass? Do you even know what glass is, how many types there are, how to make it different thicknesses or shapes? And even if you can, can you make more for everyone else?
What are you doing in the meantime that you don’t have glass? How are you feeding yourself? With what?
Even if you think glass is “simple”, how would you get the materials and tools? The people who used to do that, where are they? What knowledge have they lost? Where is that material today?
In other words, you’re back to your bare hands and wits and whatever is in walking distance from you, right now.
Think you’ll survive long enough to worry about glasses?
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.
But the first generation of survivors is gonna live like hell without glasses.
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.
Your screwedness depends 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.
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.
