Most realistic post-apocalyptic scenarios?

[Xelloss]

In your opinion, what is the most realistic post-apocalyptic scenario/story you have ever come across? It can either be from any media (video game, book, movie, etc.) and a short explanation why you think a real life post-apocalyptic world would be that way.

I like the scenario outlined in "A Canticle for Leibowitz", which takes place long after a nuclear war and as a result technology had regressed to a level similar to that of the Middle Ages (which is what I would expect if indeed such a disaster did occur. Everything is dependent on electricity, and if the power grid goes out, much of our technology is worse than useless..)

What do you think?

[Jub]

What scale of apocalypse are you picturing that would take us back to middle ages tech? It's hard to say if that's realistic or not without knowing what scale of destruction you envision, and even in crazy scenarios I see us settling at industrial age tech while we rebuild. I think that we wouldn't backslide as much as you think just because we know what it took to get there before and our knowledge won't be lost. Even computerized knowledge can be run off of a generator for a very long time with even the energy reserves of a single gas station.

[JMHthe3rd]

The film, Threads. It involves on the effects of a nuclear war, focusing on live around Sheffield, England. In documentary style, it covers the initial strike up to around ten years after, when England's population drops to medieval levels (4 to 11 million). Very, very grim, and I can't find anything unrealistic about it.

You can watch it here:

[amigocabal]

The TV show Jeremiah was pretty realistic. The writers truly thought through the implications of that scenario.

[Admiral Valdemar]

The film, Threads. It involves on the effects of a nuclear war, focusing on live around Sheffield, England. In documentary style, it covers the initial strike up to around ten years after, when England's population drops to medieval levels (4 to 11 million). Very, very grim, and I can't find anything unrealistic about it.

You can watch it here:

Still never did find out where our Jimmy went to in that.

[Ziggy Stardust]

While the scenario itself isn't realistic (though it is an improvement over the more generic "zombie" plot-lines), one thing that very much impressed me about The Last of Us was how well it handled the characters. It does a very good job of portraying people that actually feel like they have spent 20 years in the ashes of civilization (too often post-apocalyptic stories go a more cartoonish Mad Max route or something). Just the way they handle the characters, their interactions, and development is extraordinarily realistic, even if the background setting is a lot more sci-fi/video gamey. (Apparently a lot of it was inspired by/based on Cormac McCarthy's "The Road.")

[Adam Reynolds]

While not really a direct example in that it involves time travel instead of an actual apocalypse, the 1632 series explores largely the same issues fairly well overall. It features a modern(2000) American town transplanted to the year 1632 in Europe with no infrastructure to support their way of modern life.

[Ahriman238]

I love the hell out of 1630s books, but two things they aren't are "realistic" and "apocalypse."

I suppose stories dealing with disease, nuclear armageddon and SOME climate change stories.

The Day After. On the Beach. Alas Babylon. A Canticle for Leibowitz.

[Ford Prefect]

The Road.

[Jedipilot24]

I love the hell out of 1630s books, but two things they aren't are "realistic" and "apocalypse."

I suppose stories dealing with disease, nuclear armageddon and SOME climate change stories.

The Day After. On the Beach. Alas Babylon. A Canticle for Leibowitz.

The Day After Tomorrow is most definitely NOT realistic. Climate change happens gradually in 1500 year cycles and our own contribution to it is marginal.
A movie that is realistic about Climate Change is Supervolcano. It's about what's going to happen when Yellowstone finally erupts again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano_(film)

[Batman]

He didn't say The Day After Tommorow", he said "The Day After".
One is a disaster movie about indeed ludicrously fast and widespread drops in temperature. The other is a movie about the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear exchange, and while I don't feel qualified to comment on what that aftermath would realistically have looked like at the time, it sure as hell was what everybody felt it would at the time.

[madd0ct0r]

shadow of the gloom world.

I loved this as an impressionable 11 year old. No slavering mutants, just survivors living in caves, farming lichen and dreaming of a hot ball of light in the sky.

[Patroklos]

While the story itself wasn't that realistic once you got about halfway through it, the history behind the setting and the initial chaperters of "The Postman" seemed pretty realistic as far as communities isolating themselves into psuedo city states.

[SMJB]

I've actually been trying to create a realistic "civilization collapses" scenario. The problem is, if you have anything like enough survivors to form a breeding population and the experts weren't somehow deliberately targeted by the catastrophe, there's going to be enough people who knows how shit works to rebuild. It may not be a quick process, but we're talking "years" or "decades", not "centuries" or "millennia".

[madd0ct0r]

maybe not - we've exhausted most of the readily available energy sources - surface coal, oil ect.

Redoing the industrial revolution would be much harder this time.

[Mr. G]

I don't think so. The industrial revolution was a historical process characterized by the increase in the rate of entrepreneurial innovations caused by institutional and ideological change in Northwestern Europe. People are creative and either will find out other sources of energy or find better ways of utilizing existing energy sources. What matters anyway is the process of creative destruction and that can happen given a large population of humans in pretty much any environment.

[Mr. G]

In your opinion, what is the most realistic post-apocalyptic scenario/story you have ever come across? It can either be from any media (video game, book, movie, etc.) and a short explanation why you think a real life post-apocalyptic world would be that way.

I don't think it's extremely realistic but that's because I haven't read/watched/played many post-apocalyptic books/films/games, but the most realistic post-apocalyptic fictional world was probably Miyazaki's Nausicaa (the manga not the film), especially in terms of internal logic though it has many fantasy elements (such as flying ships) mixed in a very realistic post-apocalyptic world.

[madd0ct0r]

I don't think so. The industrial revolution was a historical process characterized by the increase in the rate of entrepreneurial innovations caused by institutional and ideological change in Northwestern Europe. People are creative and either will find out other sources of energy or find better ways of utilizing existing energy sources. What matters anyway is the process of creative destruction and that can happen given a large population of humans in pretty much any environment.

Laws of physics > 'ideological change'

Before coal we used charcoal, but that used so much wood the UK was largely deforested. What resources are left depends on the form the apocalypse takes. Do you really see wooden sail ships being used to mine methane hydrates?
Do you really see ox powered pumps allows deep coal seam mining?

Maybe with enough radiaoactive slag available we could pipe water through it and run stirling engines, and with enough manpower you could certainly get hydro schemes built and running. Solar's probably out, but wind - hell look at what the dutch achieved with that.

There are options, but it's not decades to rebound. It'd be much longer, and relies on enough people surviving in groups and keeping the knowledge going. Ever built a steam engine before?

[Admiral Valdemar]

Yeah, there is a scenario where civilisation basically gets limited to pre-industrial levels once all fossil fuel deposits are suitably depleted. That is, all the economical stuff is gone and something happens to kill off any excess energy production we have. It'd be like trying to make a rocket to get to the moon, but all you had was coal wood for fuel and not enough to even make decent metals with.

[Mr. G]

Laws of physics > 'ideological change'

Before coal we used charcoal, but that used so much wood the UK was largely deforested. What resources are left depends on the form the apocalypse takes. Do you really see wooden sail ships being used to mine methane hydrates?
Do you really see ox powered pumps allows deep coal seam mining?

Maybe with enough radiaoactive slag available we could pipe water through it and run stirling engines, and with enough manpower you could certainly get hydro schemes built and running. Solar's probably out, but wind - hell look at what the dutch achieved with that.

There are options, but it's not decades to rebound. It'd be much longer, and relies on enough people surviving in groups and keeping the knowledge going. Ever built a steam engine before?

Changing the set of available natural resources doesn't prevent a dynamic process of creative destruction from taking place. I don't know how to build an industrial society from the ground up without easily available coal sources (and nobody does) but that's exactly the point: allowing entrepreneurial creativity to act is what allows societies to take advantage of the available resources in way that we cannot even imagine at the present. If you remove a few natural resources from the equation the economic system will develop new ways of utilizing existing resources and, in the case of energy, more efficient ways of utilizing existing per capita supply of energy besides also developing new sources.

You, for instance, is trying to rebuild our present civilization under different circumstances, you use the model applyed in the UK in the 19th century, which emerged in those historical circumstances, and try to apply it to different circumstances and it obviously doesn't work. But that doesn't imply that every model doesn't work. The UK used coal because charcoal became more expensive as the small country became deforested, the much larger US used charcoal for much longer thanks to the vast wooded areas in the country, in Brazil, wood was the dominant energy source until the 1970's (when it was overtaken by oil). Brazil is a country that industrialized without ever using coal as a main energy source due to the lack of coal deposits and the availability of other sources of energy.

There is also huge disparities in the efficiency of utilization of energy between countries: Russia uses several times more energy per dollar of GDP than UK does (actually 5 times more). So it's possible, for instance, to increase per-capita GDP several times without actually increasing the total utilization of energy.

Things are much more complex than you care to imagine with your simplistic model of "available coal reserves = industrial revolution, not-available = no industrial revolution". Human civilizations are extremely complex systems, in fact, they may be the most complex systems in the universe given that they are formed by millions or billions of interacting human minds, which are already extremely complex on an individual level. To reduce the historical phenomena called "industrial revolution" to simple energy extraction is extremely ignorant. First, humans have been using various sorts of energy sources for thousands of years before the industrial revolution, though, over the past 250 years the world has increased the elements in the set of available energy sources by as a large number as in all previous history, the outcome of a much faster process of innovation caused by 'ideological change'.

[amigocabal]

Laws of physics > 'ideological change'

Before coal we used charcoal, but that used so much wood the UK was largely deforested. What resources are left depends on the form the apocalypse takes. Do you really see wooden sail ships being used to mine methane hydrates?
Do you really see ox powered pumps allows deep coal seam mining?

Maybe with enough radiaoactive slag available we could pipe water through it and run stirling engines, and with enough manpower you could certainly get hydro schemes built and running. Solar's probably out, but wind - hell look at what the dutch achieved with that.

There are options, but it's not decades to rebound. It'd be much longer, and relies on enough people surviving in groups and keeping the knowledge going. Ever built a steam engine before?

Changing the set of available natural resources doesn't prevent a dynamic process of creative destruction from taking place. I don't know how to build an industrial society from the ground up without easily available coal sources (and nobody does) but that's exactly the point: allowing entrepreneurial creativity to act is what allows societies to take advantage of the available resources in way that we cannot even imagine at the present. If you remove a few natural resources from the equation the economic system will develop new ways of utilizing existing resources and, in the case of energy, more efficient ways of utilizing existing per capita supply of energy besides also developing new sources.

You, for instance, is trying to rebuild our present civilization under different circumstances, you use the model applyed in the UK in the 19th century, which emerged in those historical circumstances, and try to apply it to different circumstances and it obviously doesn't work. But that doesn't imply that every model doesn't work. The UK used coal because charcoal became more expensive as the small country became deforested, the much larger US used charcoal for much longer thanks to the vast wooded areas in the country, in Brazil, wood was the dominant energy source until the 1970's (when it was overtaken by oil). Brazil is a country that industrialized without ever using coal as a main energy source due to the lack of coal deposits and the availability of other sources of energy.

There is also huge disparities in the efficiency of utilization of energy between countries: Russia uses several times more energy per dollar of GDP than UK does (actually 5 times more). So it's possible, for instance, to increase per-capita GDP several times without actually increasing the total utilization of energy.

Things are much more complex than you care to imagine with your simplistic model of "available coal reserves = industrial revolution, not-available = no industrial revolution". Human civilizations are extremely complex systems, in fact, they may be the most complex systems in the universe given that they are formed by millions or billions of interacting human minds, which are already extremely complex on an individual level. To reduce the historical phenomena called "industrial revolution" to simple energy extraction is extremely ignorant. First, humans have been using various sorts of energy sources for thousands of years before the industrial revolution, though, over the past 250 years the world has increased the elements in the set of available energy sources by as a large number as in all previous history, the outcome of a much faster process of innovation caused by 'ideological change'.

One significant factor is that the basic knowledge will not go away. Even laymen know that moving a magnet along a wire generates electric current, something that was not widely known even three hundred, let alone three thousand, years ago. Thus, for example, post-apocalyptic socieites would still use electricity on a small-scale, even if generated by a bicycle generator.

[Purple]

On a low level you will see people using bicycle powered lights and trying to recover from what they remember from science class. But on the other there will be a huge amount of institutional knowledge that is just lost. As you said anyone can make a bicycle generator to power his lights. But ask your self how many people know the math required to manufacture a working pressure vessel. Or have the skill required to smith tools without modern industrial methods? Worse yet, a lot of modern machinery requires steel alloys that you just can't make without an industrial base. And the knowledge that has been lost and will end up being lost is the knowledge of how to build said industrial base in the first place. So for the interim at least we might well end up in a society that uses home made electricity and knows of concepts such as sanitation but at the same time has to rely on animals for farming and can't even physically hammer out a steam engine.

[SMJB]

But ask your self how many people know the math required to manufacture a working pressure vessel. Or have the skill required to smith tools without modern industrial methods?

Is it less than one in five thousand? Because if it's not, chances are good one of the survivors in any genetically viable colony will have the skill. Because there has to be at least five thousand of them, or they're fucked, anyway.

Worse yet, a lot of modern machinery requires steel alloys that you just can't make without an industrial base. And the knowledge that has been lost and will end up being lost is the knowledge of how to build said industrial base in the first place. So for the interim at least we might well end up in a society that uses home made electricity and knows of concepts such as sanitation but at the same time has to rely on animals for farming and can't even physically hammer out a steam engine.

Even if we're dealing with a world without fossil fuels, there's still such a thing a geothermal and hydroelectric power, and if the survivors happen to be set up in such a place and/or conquer one with their superior numbers once they realize they need one, they can scavenge machinery with which to set up said industrial base.

[Purple]

Is it less than one in five thousand? Because if it's not, chances are good one of the survivors in any genetically viable colony will have the skill. Because there has to be at least five thousand of them, or they're fucked, anyway.

Probably yes. We are talking about a narrow subset of engineers who both specialize in the field and happen to have their books and manuals handy after the end. Since no one is going to memorize all those formulas and constants. (let me tell you there would be a lot to memorize).

Even if we're dealing with a world without fossil fuels, there's still such a thing a geothermal and hydroelectric power, and if the survivors happen to be set up in such a place and/or conquer one with their superior numbers once they realize they need one, they can scavenge machinery with which to set up said industrial base.

This is assuming that there is enough left to scavenge. It's not the lack of resources that will kill us. It's the lack of spare turbine blades, special lubricants and other stuff.

[Guardsman Bass]

Yeah, there is a scenario where civilisation basically gets limited to pre-industrial levels once all fossil fuel deposits are suitably depleted. That is, all the economical stuff is gone and something happens to kill off any excess energy production we have. It'd be like trying to make a rocket to get to the moon, but all you had was coal wood for fuel and not enough to even make decent metals with.

There are potential end-runs around this. If they can figure out electric motors (earliest experiments were in the 1700s, but didn't really come into being until the 1820s), then they might be able to figure out how to turn water and wind power into electricity, and then transmit that power for industrialization purposes. It would be much more difficult to get right than the use of coal-fired steam power, but I think it's something that would have eventually emerged if coal was historically much more scarce. And once they have that going, they can figure out alternative means of power (such as nuclear eventually).

The real convenience of steam power was that it allowed for things like steam-powered ships and trains, and that it allowed for power production to be utilized away from reliance on water supplies. Figuring out electricity would do the same thing, eventually.