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Civilization has collapsed.
The only rational way forward is to cover your dune buggy with spikes,
craft some leather S&M armor, and resort to cannibalism.
Mohawks are optional.
A pretty common theme in science fiction, and just in general discussion of the future,
is that some sort of doomsday will occur that will leave only shattered remnants of civilization
behind. Often shattered not just physically but spiritually too, typically that remnant
left behind is portrayed as crazy cannibal barbarians. Even the nominal heroes of such
stories tend to be nihilistic and more than a trifle villainous in portrayal.
There’s some logic in that notion too, we get the word apocalypse from the Greek word
for Revelation, the last book of the New Testament that has the various survivors on Earth being
those left behind after all the good folks got a ticket to paradise. And a lot of stories
set in such scenarios will have similar notions in play, something has made a lot of folks
crazy or evil and that’s part of why civilization isn’t rebuilding itself to rise from the
ashes like a Phoenix. This too has some plausibility, since technological
civilizations are hard to trash by simple disasters, so something generally has to be
making them act weird in the first place. Otherwise the disaster, natural or artificial,
is either going to kill everyone off or be something we recover from after a while.
Of course “a while” is a pretty relative term, we can dismiss it as irrelevant when
talking about things like Galactic Colonization and the Fermi Paradox because several centuries
just doesn’t mean anything on those timelines, but this episode is in our Rogue Civilization
series and our prior two examples, Space Prison Colonies and Techno-Primitivism were both
cases where they seemed like temporary states of civilization. Cultures are constantly changing,
so it seems wrong to bypass ones that would tend to be fairly temporary, just lasting
a handful of generations, since again most cultures don’t even last that long.
We could contrive some particular doomsday scenario that made a post-apocalyptic civilization
linger in a diminished state a very long time, but while I was considering more plausible
options for that, it got me wondering about what would survive afterwards. For instance,
we tend to picture tribes of leatherclad mutants with mohawks riding around on dunebuggies
in a wasteland, something that got so cliché in fictional post-apocalypses that a lot of
shows satirize it like Rick and Morty, but it raises the question about where they get
the gasoline for those engines. Gasoline does not actually store well. Even
if water and oxygen don’t seap in, that gas itself will separate into light volatiles
and a sludge of heavier viscous compounds. You’d have problems getting it work in an
engine a year later even if it had been stored properly, which is unlikely to be the case
in most doomsday scenarios, and even very good storage and a fuel stabilizer might only
get you 2 or 3 years. Gasoline’s not terribly hard to make but a cracking tower isn’t
something you’d expect your typical tribe of mutants to have and you can’t just go
find an abandoned one and dump in some crude oil or spoiled fuel and fire it up. Well you
might be able to but ‘firing it up’ is probably exactly what would happen.
So if you’ve got folks with functioning engines decades after Doomsday it implies
they’ve got folks who are decent chemists and engineers, or at least repairmen, and
who have time to practice their trade, so your savage tribe of mutants won’t be staying
primitive much longer. Otherwise, if they want those high-horsepower dunebuggies, they
need to be pulled by actual horses. Which kind of ruins the flavor.
The Mohawks are fine at least, hair gel and cutting technology doesn’t need to be very
advanced to do that one. The leather is probably fine too except one wouldn’t really expect
lots of cows or deer to be around the typical irradiated wasteland. Of course it’s often
implied to be made from other people, though rats seem more likely and economically plausible.
Cannibalism, literal or figurative, is not a winning pathway, especially for humans who
need decades to grow up, the math just doesn’t work out. Cannibalism will certainly happen
in desperate times, but given that humans need decades to reach full size, a food industry
based on it would be impractical. Of course they have to get clothes from somewhere
and textile factories wouldn’t seem to be common so fur and hide would make sense. But
there would be a ton of clothing left over from the end of the world. Properly stored
most fabrics do hold up for generations, but they’d be getting worn-out from being worn
out in the wasteland and leftovers lying around ruined warehouses, basements, and attics would
tend to get moldy and picked apart. The most enduring would presumably be polyester, so
amusingly the mutant savages are more likely to look like they’d escaped from a disco
than a biker bar. You’re probably thinking leather is better
for absorbing strikes, as is chainmail, but keep in mind there are millions of kevlar
vests in the US alone, and while the ballistic plates would all break, Kevlar lasts and can
be patched, and you could stick a piece of sheet metal in one as a decent replacement
for the ceramic plate, which is for bullets not knives anyway. Coming up with rubber for
boot soles would be unlikely though, so they’d probably have to go back to wood and hobnails,
though maybe they could use sheets of plastic or metal and hobnails.
As to those various ruined houses, even absent any new production, when the planet’s been
reduced to scattered millions instead of billions, you’ve got spare parts and replacements
all over the place, slowly rusting down in many cases. A prolonged scavenger-punk era
wouldn’t be likely, at least where durable consumables are concerned, since they’d
know where every building was and would either have quickly ransacked all their supplies,
or, if they are few in number, have stopped only because they had acquired more than they
could use before spoilage. People will be getting pretty systematic about
it. Someone will think to grab or make maps and document each building looted and to use
things like fiber optic snake cameras for scoping out collapsed structures. If not,
it’s because there are very few people, in which case they will have more than enough
supplies by ransacking the local grocery store and warehouses, leaving them tons of time
to prepare for when their supplies go bad, rather than get used up. The scavenger aspect
of fighting over supplies only applies when there’s high demand but limited quantities,
not when there’s a huge supply with a half-life. The more enduring stuff is going to be things
like stainless steel cookware and utensils, as well as granite countertops, so the mutants
probably won’t be cooking over an oil barrel with rusty pots, rather, they are going to
have very ornate and top-notch kitchens to prepare their rat-based cuisine in.
Things like knives are going to be around half of forever anyway and there’s no shortage
of metal to work with either. Of course we tend to assume all those electric appliances
in the kitchens would be worthless but while gas powered vehicle engines would be a pain
to fuel after the first couple of years, a stationary electric generator is actually
really easy to build and maintain. Especially if efficiency and mobility isn’t too big
a deal, as you can use rather crude parts. So you’d actually expect them only to stop
having electricity when all the things that used it eventually broke down, and that will
take centuries, since a lot of appliances are incredibly useful and rugged, especially
if not used a lot, like sewing machines, LED light bulbs, food processors, clocks and so
on. In the same vein, batteries won’t last long
but battery powered things can, and batteries are fairly simple to make and can be built
out of lots of stuff that’s lying around like copper pennies or easily made even by
copper age civilizations. A good lead acid battery takes a bit more work but not a lot.
Size and weight are a different matter when it comes to batteries and those post-apocalyptic
muscle-bound freaks we see in the movies probably got that way lugging around insanely heavy
batteries for their portable equipment. We also always assume such folks would go
back to a barter culture, when not stealing anyway, but while paper money wouldn’t last
long all those trillions of coins lying around the planet would make a handy medium of exchange,
being rather durable and hard to forge, so I’d not be surprised if they just kept on
using the local coinage, albeit massively deflated in value so a penny or nickel was
valuable enough again to make it worth carrying; not for its intrinsic metal value, but just
because it’s already viewed as money, and again, is tricky to make forgeries of without
the right equipment. Gunpowder is easy enough to make, as are bullets.
Guns themselves are pretty durable and most of the less durable parts can be jury-rigged,
even a lot of the more fragile bits like the springs in your typical magazine or magazine
catch button. Those do regularly appear in post-apocalyptic settings. What’s missing
is that most would probably have working flashlights and scopes attached to them too, and their
wielders are liking to have perfectly modern body armor to go with them, not just dirty
leather or rusty knives. They probably wouldn’t be terribly dirty
either. They’re unlikely to just magically forget that many ailments are attached to
not keeping clean. Soap is easy to make, and contrary to popular belief, our pre-industrial
ancestors never had an aversion to bathing. When they didn’t do it a lot, it was because
they just lacked the facilities and fuel to make it convenient, and our post-apocalyptic
civilizations will remember hygiene’s importance to disease control and be even more likely
to emphasize it. A collapsed civilization isn’t one that
just goes back in time like someone flipped the calendar back. A ton of technologies are
really easy to do once you think them up and often folks incorrectly assume that if something
was invented in, say, the late 19th century, that it must require all the technology and
industrial resources of that period to make or maintain them.
The standard Gem Paperclip is from that era, but anybody with a length of wire can obviously
make them. You don’t picture the mutant tribes brushing their teeth either, but a
toothbrush is an easy enough device and they won’t have forgotten the value of that or
what causes wounds to get infected or a host of other things it took us a long time to
learn but are easy enough to know. They might run out of canned foods in a decade or so,
as all get scavenged or go bad, but they won’t forget how and why we can food.
Similarly, there’s many other ways to make a refrigerator, freezer, or air conditioner
than our typical modern models, like the Einstein fridge that has no moving parts and just needs
piping, fire, and some refrigerant to work, even ammonia or alcohol does the trick. But
even the normal designs could be maintained, repaired, and cannibalized for a very long
time and anyone working on them is going to develop an understanding of them quickly enough.
So the mutant tribes would have freezers for storing their food too, and we would doubt
that only because we think of them as hunter-gatherer equivalents and such folks walked everywhere
they went and so would need to carry stuff too. But they wouldn’t be, because they
wouldn’t be hunter gatherers. They might have to walk, or use bicycles or horses, as
again gasoline doesn’t store well so they’d have to produce it, though they could and
there’s lots of alternate fuels to use including alcohol. But they don’t need to move where
they live. Our ancestors did because their food did, the herds migrated so they migrated
with them, until they domesticated them and got good at pasture management, those critters
are still domesticated and won’t just revert because the end of the world happened.
They’d have tons of building materials lying around to pick from–many stone, brick, or
concrete ones that would work well, and if their village looks like a junkyard it’s
probably just because those would be so valuable for spare parts they might live there to maintain
possession of it. But they don’t have to move, because they
can still grow food. There’s the notion that they live in a barren wasteland so they
have to hunt or gather, but if animals and plants can live there to supply food that
means they can grow food there too. They’d have an effectively infinite supply of glass
to make greenhouses out of too if water or contaminated soil was problematic. Fundamentally,
though, agriculture is more efficient than hunting and gathering, no matter how wrecked
the local environment is, unless it’s so wrecked you couldn’t hunt or gather anyway
because everything was dead, in which case you’d follow soon thereafter.
This though highlights why we’d tend to regard such civilizations as rather temporary.
Over and over again we see why they’d still prize knowledge and how even in the most brutal
and savage setups they’d still benefit by preserving and utilizing it. And those were
just examples off the top of my head, I’m sure you can think of many more and I’d
encourage you to put down your thoughts on the matter down in the comments below or our
facebook or reddit groups. Just from what we’ve seen today though,
they’re likely to have a lot more luxuries and modern conveniences and advantages than
we normally assume and likely to have a lot of highly skilled technicians hanging around,
even if they are sporting Mohawks and dressed up in rat-leather, or polyester and Kevlar,
and such skills are likely to be valued and lead inevitably to restoring technology and
infrastructure. That is much easier if you still remember that basic science and still
have books and diagrams and broken down examples of such devices to build off of.
Personally, I don’t think we’ll ever have a post-apocalyptic civilization. Either a
catastrophe would make us extinct or we’d recover fairly quickly, but if we do end up
with one, I suspect it wouldn’t be nearly as grim as we tend to think and would restore
itself after only a few generations at most. I was mentioning how we’d expect electricity
and appliances to remain in use even after a total collapse of civilization, and I suspect
we’d see the internet, or local equivalents, pop back up pretty quick. Of course that’s
assuming it wasn’t the internet that brought on the Apocalypse. The internet is like most
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subscription. So next week we’ll be finishing April out
with a look at Matrioshka Shellworlds, truly immense artificial planets that allow vastly
more living area than Earth does, and which Earth might one day become. Next Sunday, we
will also have our Monthly Livestream Q&A, at 4pm Eastern Time.
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Until next time, thanks for watching, and we’ll see you Thursday!