Many a year ago I read the 1949 novel “The Earth Abides” by George Stewart. In it, a plague sweeps across the planet, very nearly making humanity extinct… the total population of the San Francisco region, for instance, is reduced to on the order of a dozen or so. These few survivors are faced with entertaining decisions such as “do we outright murder this new guy who came stumbling into camp… he seems decent enough, but it looks like he has syphilis, and maybe we’d be better off if we simply brained him and shoved him into a hole.”
After ten or twenty years, the survivors and their children are curious about survivors elsewhere. Given that they don’t have near enough of a genetic base to build a viable population, it’s a valid concern. So the decision is made to restore a jeep to running condition and send a few of the young uns out into the world to see what they can find. Unsurprisingly, getting a jeep into running condition decades after it last ran is not a straightforward proposition. one of the big issues is that the tires have all dried out, turned brittle, broke and rotted. Eventually they do find some that were stored well, and off they go.
That part did get me thinking. If all you had were tires that were decades old and you *had* to get them running… would it be chemically possible to restore the rubber? Would some form of heat treating (boiling them in water, boiling them in oil, boiling them in some solvent or hydrocarbon, putting them in an oven) restore dried-out old rubber? Or does the arrow of time on rubber only run one way?
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PS: if you haven’t read “Earth Abides,” you really should. It’s technically science fiction, what with a remarkably vicious plague that the main character – who is basically Just Some Guy, not an in-the-know scientist or some such – guesses might’ve been a bioweapon. But nothing about it really seemed sci-fi. It seemed frighteningly realistic, and there are some really poignant scenes (I’m especially thinking of two times the main character crosses the Golden Gate Bridge, decades apart… passing the same car stopped mid span, drivers door open, both times). The main character tries to make sure that the next generation will grow up civilized, and puts great hope and faith in one son who is especially promising. And… it ain’t Hollywood.
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Oooh! Somebody buy THAT one!!