Can I use my Electrum seed without Electrum?
As Electrum is open-source software, we can probably safely assume it will never go away. That is, even if the devs were to take it off of github etc, there are likely thousands of copies of the source code distributed on the nets. But let's say all the electrum servers were taken down and for whatever reason you couldn't run a python interpretter (not very likely). Again because Electrum is open-source, the algorithm for transforming a seed into a private key and the derived private keys is known. So in theory, you could just do the math and generate your private keys manually from your seed. Practically, if you can get hold of a python interpretter, you can restore an Electrum database and dump all of your private keys without ever connecting to the internet. From there, sweep the balances into any wallet such as Bitcoin-QT.