Surlethe wrote:That's a good question, and one I embarrassingly haven't considered yet. I suppose they adapt, just like everything else. After all, humans do have some night vision to work with, and as time goes on, it stands to reason the night vision will incrementally improve along with all the other senses for living at night during winter.
Well, my main issue is: what do they eat come winter, especially on the aforementioned islands? Now I imagine that, with the climate change and climbing temperature, the habitability of these regions is greatly improved, so there should be abundant plant-life to support a population--when the sun is around, anyway. But, since the population is of a hunter-gatherer type, would they squirrel away food for the months where there is no sunlight? Would those who can lower their metabolism to a hibernation state be selected for survival in these extreme climates? Or would these places simply be uninhabitable?
As an example, a place like Svalbard wouldn't even see a hint of daylight from mid-November to the end of January (but conversely will have total daylight from April 20 to August 20, give or take), so what do the people there do for those 2.5 months of darkness, if they're even there?
This is, of course, a non-issue for the populations in continental Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Siberia, because they can simply move south of the Arctic Circle when winter comes to get at least some usable daylight, then migrate back north in the spring. Nonetheless, I would love to see a segment written on this idea, and thus your thoughts on it.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation." -Herbert Spencer
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." - Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, III vi.
As a question, since this is only 200 years in the future, would there not be many seed banks/survival shelters/non hit nuclear facilitates that civilizations would grow up near and worship the technologies. Or would there be humans who know the technologies and pass down their knowledge orally, sort of like the Egyptians post roman fall?
Dan's Art
Bounty on SDN's most annoying
"A spambot, a spambot who can't spell, a spambot who can't spell or spam properly and a spambot with tenure. Tough"choice."
Redleader34 wrote:As a question, since this is only 200 years in the future, would there not be many seed banks/survival shelters/non hit nuclear facilitates that civilizations would grow up near and worship the technologies. Or would there be humans who know the technologies and pass down their knowledge orally, sort of like the Egyptians post roman fall?
Two more hunting stories while I ponder trying to address Alferd Packer's questions.
9
February 18, 68320
Global Mean Temperature: 24.9° C
Gran dove down into the water, flipped, and dove again. At sixteen, he was already considered an adult in the tribe, though the elders were much, much older. Wriggling, he paddled himself forward and down with his feet, hands at his sides. He held enough air in his lungs to last as much as twenty minutes underwater, though for the last five, he'd have to slip into a state of semi-consciousness as he moved toward the surface. Flexing and giving a last furious kick, he leveled off and glided forward smoothly. He could feel the water flowing through his thick coat of hair, across his body, and past his protruding spine.
The water was thick and murky. He felt the first strands of seaweed brush past him almost before he saw them loom up out of the nutrient-rich mud. His eyes were relatively useless; he closed them, flexed his ears. They were as large as the palm of his hand, stuck out from his skull, and the tips were covered with thick tufts of hair. He also opened his mouth, let the seawater flow in. Reveling in the thick, salty taste, he rolled it around his tongue, spit it back out. He felt the warmth of his saliva dissipating as it moved past his face, and then sucked more water in. Lobster urine, very faint. Also, some shrimp, and, of course, the seaweed all around him.
Gran stilled himself with a short forward wave of his thick, paddle-like arm. He could feel his lungs starting to throb: about half his air was gone. Off in the distance, he could hear the offshore current rushing; closer, the seaweed was swishing about, though the water was relatively still. On the other side, he could hear the surf pounding against the rocks, and the peculiar sloosh-swoosh of the water sloshing in and out of his tribe's ancestral cave. He focused his attention beneath him. The bottom here was a silty muck of dead plants, crabs, and shrimp, so it was difficult to hear the movements of prey. Still, if one focused, it could be done ... .
There. Not in the muck, but a disturbance through the still water just above it. It was coming. He risked opening his mouth, tasted the water. Lobster scent, much stronger amidst the omnipresent seaweed. He opened his eyes, looked down slowly. Nothing through the murk, but that was to be expected. He listened again, then dove in a sprint. The lobster realized a second too late what was coming, and hurled itself backward just as Gran's hands shot out and grabbed it, his long, tapered thumbs locking beneath it and constricting the crustacean's movement. The lobster's pincers grabbed at Gran's forearms, but closed harmlessly on the especially thick hair covering them. They were shaped like thin elm leaves tapering toward his hand, while his upper arms were thick and muscular to pull the forearms through the water.
Lobster securely held, Gran kicked powerfully toward the surface, glimmering faintly in the starlight above him. His lungs were starting to ache: he had only a few minutes left before he went catatonic and rose automatically as he slowly expelled air. His back muscles were sore from pulling him sinuously through the water, and his thighs ached from kicking his broad, wide lower legs and feet. There -- at last! He broke through the surface of the water, kicked once to throw his body up, and crashed back down forcefully on the lobster. It was knocked unconscious, and relaxed its grip on his arms immediately. He set the shell at the top of its back between his teeth and bit down hard; it cracked slightly, and he bit again, floating and taking deep breaths. Blood leaked out, and he licked his lips, savoring the salty, iron taste. Then he bit again, peeled the shell fragments off of the lobster, and set at work tearing the fresh, tough meat from the lobster's back. Blood ran down his chin and into the water. He loved it.
10
December 1, 71412
Global Mean Temperature: 24.9° C
Vild crept through the underbrush. The long night was nearing its end, although it was still very dark. Above him, he could have caught a glimpse of faint, twinkling stars, if he'd felt like looking. He didn't feel like looking: he was instead focused entirely on the large groundsquirrel grazing on the ground several meters in front of him. When it stood on its hind feet, it came up to his chest, which meant that if he were alone, he would have to use all of his strength to bring it down once he'd chased it down. Fortunately, he wasn't alone; he knew there were three others from his clan all stalking this particular groundsquirrel with him. They had it surrounded, and when it came down, it was fat enough from eating through this winter that it would feed all of them for a week.
His eyes dilated a little more. He could see the trees standing in front of him, and the low bushes between him and the groundsquirrel. Its coat was winter-dark, so he could only see hints of movement through the trees, but he could hear it, and he could smell it. Its musk was the strongest scent in the air for miles.
Vild inched forward, then heard the groundsquirrel sit up on its haunches and sniff. Mentally, Vild cursed: he was upwind, but one of his comrades, Kin, was downwind, and there was no doubt that it would smell him. The squirrel sniffed again, bright nose quivering in the starlight. Then, it lunged forward and ran straight at Vild. He froze.
From the brush on either side of the groundsquirrel and behind it burst the other three in Vild's clan. They closed in after it, but sprinting, the squirrel had the advantage. In a second, it would be on Vild. He was still frozen, watching it approach, closer, closer -- now! Every muscle tensed, Vild threw himself at the beast. He landed on its back, and it was knocked on its side, but then it was kicking at him with hard, dull claws, and biting at him with its sharp rodent teeth.
Vild was taken aback for an instant with the ferocity of the defense, but then he pushed the groundsquirrel back, and, flopping on its belly to stifle the kicking limbs, dug into its throat with his hands. His hardened, sharpened nails tore through its skin as it squealed, and with a jerk Vild tore out its carotid artery. Blood fountained out onto Vild's hands, and the kicking quickly frailed and died.
The others surrounded him, and he looked up at them, baring his needle-sharp teeth in an expectant smile. They smiled back, and one clapped him on the back as they squatted around the kill. Vild rolled off the carcass, and sat back on his haunches, balanced by his thick, heavy lower spine. As the man who'd brought down the prey, he was allowed first choice of meat; in celebration, he chose the good, thick thigh muscle. Scratching at the groundsquirrel's body, he first pulled the skin off the leg, then brought the haunch up to his mouth and bit at the fresh meat, the points of his teeth digging in and then jerks of his neck tearing it off. He swallowed it almost whole, with little chewing to soften it up; blood ran down his chin, and as Vild basked in the approval of his comrades, he thought that life was good.
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
If you're having trouble visualizing what the day lengths are like way up north, try using this tool. You can enter in specific latitudes and see just how sharply the changeover from polar day to polar night might be, or when exactily during the year it occurs. And this tool would show you the position of the sun in the sky relative to the horizon for a given lat/long and a given time of year.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation." -Herbert Spencer
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." - Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, III vi.
I'm sorry, I can't accept the premice of the story. No farmers plus crops and farm animals survive? Come on, you'd need to nuke pretty much the entire planet.
And the GMT should've dropped by now, the big GHG producers have been destroyed, and there's still plant life to absorb the CO2 (and methane, etc.) from the atmosphere.
But other than that, I thought your writing was good. And I like the vignette medium you're using.
"The surest sign that the world was not created by an omnipotent Being who loves us is that the Earth is not an infinite plane and it does not rain meat."
"Lo, how free the madman is! He can observe beyond mere reality, and cogitates untroubled by the bounds of relevance."
tim31 wrote:Everyone loves a good horror story. Anxiously awaiting next installment.
It's not a horror story if it ends with "Life was good"
These tribesmen lead horrible lives by modern standards, but they're relatively healthy, adapted well to their environment and aren't dying of starvation en masse. Hell, they even have a rudimentary social structure. Extinction doesn't loom on the horizon, and for all we know they can survive the next hundred thousand years just fine untill conditions allow them to rebuild civilization. And if they don't? Well, the Earth is patient. It can wait for millions of years if necessary.
The biggest problem for the tribesmen right now would be a dino-killer style asteroid impact. It would really mean that fate just hates humans.
With the recent arrival of my second child, I began to think about their future, and their children's future, and their children's future... The thought of bringing up my kids in a collapsing society is a horror story to me.
tim31 wrote:With the recent arrival of my second child, I began to think about their future, and their children's future, and their children's future... The thought of bringing up my kids in a collapsing society is a horror story to me.
I'm trying to be more optimistic.
Well, I am only planning to have children, so it's possible that my perspective will change over time. However, I don't think we can ensure what the world will look like in the year 56 thousand something. The best we can do is educate two generations at most and hope they don't make the same mistakes we did - and even then, our long-term decisions may have already done enough damage.
I am pretty disillusioned with humanity, though. I only needed the realization that it's only been the 80 years or so since a small minority of humans can enjoy an opulent and safe lifestyle - and even now, most people still lead horrible lives that are little better than those of medieval peasants.
For the vast majority of human history, only a ridiculously small percentage of the population had the opportunity to lead relatively worry-free lives, while all the rest had to fight (sometimes literally) for their survival, every day. Therefore, the tribesmen of Surlethe's vignettes aren't really that much worse off than most people were during the existence of our species.
Surlethe... that was good. I enjoyed reading it. You should try to get that in print.
Lì ci sono chiese, macerie, moschee e questure, lì frontiere, prezzi inaccessibile e freddure
Lì paludi, minacce, cecchini coi fucili, documenti, file notturne e clandestini
Qui incontri, lotte, passi sincronizzati, colori, capannelli non autorizzati,
Uccelli migratori, reti, informazioni, piazze di Tutti i like pazze di passioni...
...La tranquillità è importante ma la libertà è tutto!
Personally i am wondering as why mankind reverted to cavemen. Lets say that during the ecological collapse most of the world reverts to the stone age but some pissant rural town that was but a footnote in Canberra's census douments in West Australia a few hundred clicks from Perth with a few hundred bogans and some livestock manage to grow some grain and raise Cattle and become Xenophobic bastards that kill or inslave anyone who comes across them. The basics of agriculture can be done by uneducated serfs just fine and those who do it would have a major advantage once most of the population dies off said advantage could allow some leader of the decendants of said bogans to realise that the surrounding bands of hunter gatherer barbarians should be conquered, inserfed and their lands divided up among his progeny and his buddies to begin rise of the Bogan Empire, or they reach the number of people the area at their tech level can sustain and some people leave for greener pastures, spreading and reestablishing basic civilization across a decent sized chunk of Australia after about a century and latter moving outwards. Considering the fact that they are already survivalists and subsistance farmers in the world today, it would be prity hard to completly remove agriculture from human society without whiping out the species alltogether.
Zor
HAIL ZOR!WE'LL BLOW UP THE OCEAN!
Heros of Cybertron-HAB-Keeper of the Vicious pit of Allosauruses-King Leighton-I, United Kingdom of Zoria: SD.net World/Tsar Mikhail-I of the Red Tsardom: SD.net Kingdoms WHEN ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE ON EARTH, ALL EARTH BREAKS LOOSE ON HELL Terran Sphere The Art of Zor
In this particular story, Australia is completely uninhabitable. In fact, the only place in the southern hemisphere still inhabited by humans is the extreme southern tip of South America and maybe some other points poleward.
Meanwhile, up in Canada and Siberia, there are vast tracts of arable land now, but it took so long for them to reach that state that people have, quite literally, forgotten how to farm. So, they hunt, and life is good. There's probably no need to farm, because the population density is so low that there's no pressure to domesticate animals for food.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation." -Herbert Spencer
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." - Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, III vi.
Gul's tribe was scraping out a pitiful living on the south tip of a continent that had once been known as "Australia". For a ten and a half thousand years (although Gul himself had no concept of time longer than a few years), the birds they'd preyed on had been slowly declining, and now there were only a few dozen of the birds out in the brush thickly lining the coast. During the short days, the corresponding handful who were left of the tribe were out as long as the sun was up, swinging through the tall mangrove trees and fighting pangs of hunger as they searched for prey. Although they were used to the birds, anything warm and meaty would do -- but there didn't seem to be anything at all.
Gul was huddling in a treetop nest with his wife, sleeping through the long night, when something woke him. Gul poked his head up, pricked his ears. He would have been considered alien to any human of Valdemar's time [I owe you another half-pie. -Ed.], though upon closer inspection, they could have bred, but not produced any fertile offspring. Gul's tribe, and others scattered like a string of pearls along the southern coast of the continent, were on average one meter tall, and covered with fine hair. They lived almost their entire lives in trees, a complex game hunting birds and being hunted by larger birds.
What had awakened him? He couldn't tell for a minute. Beside him, Ras, his wife, snuggled closer to him and whimpered slightly; he supposed she was dreaming. Quietly, he disentangled himself and stood up, swung out of the nest and onto the thick, forking branch. Beneath him, the river sloshed quietly back and forth with the sea. The scent of fish and brackish water assaulted his nose; beneath it, he caught a sharp, thick smell. What could that be? He scrambled down the branch and jumped lithely to neighboring tree. The mangroves here, with their roots in and out of the water like a grotesque pod of octopuses, wove together so much that one of the exploits of Dan al-Luma, the famous hero of legend, was traveling from the east coast of the continent to the west and back without touching the ground.
Gul followed his nose, careful in the cool night. His hair kept him warm, but not as warm as he would have been curled up with Ras, he thought. The scent grew stronger, and suddenly his eyes were watering as it turned from an undercurrent in the quiet sea of mangrove smells to an overwhelming acrid stench. He could see a flickering orange glow through the trees. Fire! Instincts moved him before his mind had decided what to do, and he was flying back through the trees, back to his tribe, his wife.
The fire did not move quickly enough to outpace him, but while its crackling dwindled beneath the quiet rush of the sea beneath him, the smell was always there, hurrying him. At long last, he arrived back, and as quickly as he could roused his wife, then the rest of his tribe. Gul was frantic, leaping up and down and chattering in his high-pitched voice as fast as he could. The language was primitive, but effective for their purposes, though "fire" was a little-used word. In a few minutes, everyone -- all fifteen of them -- had heard him, smelled the fire in the east, and were rushing to the west.
Perhaps Gul was faster than everyone else in the tribe; perhaps a sudden wind had sprung up and was urging the fire on; regardless, in a few hours, they could hear the rumble of the holocaust behind them. The smell was overwhelming and struck terror into Gul, even more than before. If he glanced back, he could see the glow through the trees; if he looked, up, the low-hanging clouds -- smoke or dust? -- were a dull, angry orange.
Still they fled, turning north along the shore. The tops of the mangrove trees were burning like gassed tinder; already, Gul could feel the heat on his back. They'd covered probably fifty miles by now, and were exhausted and limping along. Andu had fallen and broken his back during the second hour of flight; Jul and her baby had dropped behind them and nobody dared go back to check on them. They were down to twelve. At last, they halted for a brief rest, squatting on leafless tree branches and panting. Behind them, the inferno's rumble grew slowly louder. After a few minutes, the chief ordered them up and on, but Gul ignored him and dropped down lower into the trees. They were on the border of the mangrove forest, now, and trees of a different type climbed up the rocky slope a quarter kilometer to the north.
Gul had faint memories of a childhood here, and one place he'd gone exploring. Beckoning, he summoned his wife as they ran and explained what he remembered to her, inasmuch as their limited language allowed. She, in turn, talked to the chief and he talked to Gul again. Then he made a decision.
They cut to the northwest, across the fire's advancing front, and continued to flee in the new treetops. These weren't flat and thick like deciduous branches; they were short, thin, and leafy, though the leaves were shriveled and dead from the long winter nights. Gul constantly scanned the ground. Then -- there! He screamed his happiness and dove down through the branches toward it, running the last few meters on the ground. A cave opening loomed above him, and he entered without fear, confident that this was the one.
Everyone piled in behind him, and he led them back, feeling his way through the damp interior toward the back and the cool water pool he remembered. It was damp, and the rocks he clambered over were at once smooth and slimy. Still, before there was any sign of the water pool, the cave entrance -- far behind them, now -- blazed up with furious orange, coruscating into red and white. The heat penetrated to even this far, drying hands and singing hair, and the brilliant firelight illuminated the cave. It stretched on like a throat, ribbed and long. They continued to move away, though they were safe for the time being. After a little, the fire at the entrance dimmed and died, and in the resulting darkness, Gul let his smell, touch, and hearing guide him. At last, he heard the gurgle of fresh water before him, and dipping his hands to the stream, drank in the cool water.
12
September 11, 153268
Global Mean Temperature: 23.8° C
Juan was a matriarch in every sense of the word. A grandmother already, she led the tribe in its yearly migration across the Canadian grasslands, and had done so for five of her twenty-six years. She knew all of the wild dog packs that prowled in their path -- the Duanka pack, with its fierce, but cautious, alpha; the Dunlap pack, large but unorganized and ineffective in bringing down humans; the Kildan pack, small but machinelike in its efficiency; and five others who had marked out huge territories to roam and terrorize the many and varied prairie dog herds. Juan also knew enough to stay away from the huge rodents; they were vicious when in a group, and begrudged the use of the prairie to the human tribes who wandered it, scraping a living from the tall sawgrass and the shorter sweetgrass that only grew after a herd of the prairie dogs or rare megabirds had passed. The immense herds of grazing beasts cut swaths miles across, and tribes like Juan's could follow in their path, gleaning from the small sprouts that poked up after the great, tall cover had been mostly stripped.
So Juan had known well the feeling prickling down her spine and out onto her short tail, making the short, thick, wiry hair covering her body stand on end. It only came when the days grew short and the north sea cooled: time for the migration to the lakes. From the plains south of the body of water that was once known as Baffin Bay, Juan had led her tribe south and west to the land of many lakes, and past them to the shore of the great lake known in the ancient past as Lake Huron.
Thence also many other tribes had retired, and, of course, following them were the predators, from wild dogs to the birds that always hung around and threatened to steal infants. But Juan had led her tribe past the others and down toward the forbidden lands. They were the subject of great myth and rumor among the humans living in the due north; the heat, even in winter, was almost unbearable, they said, and the place was haunted by the ghost of the past. Juan put little stock in such legends; in fact, excellent though she was at bearing children, leading her tribe, and outwitting the stalking predators of the plains, she had little imagination to waste on flights of mystical fancy. The tribe priest balked at her wandering attention during religious ceremonies, fertility rituals and the like, but she had saved his life no less than five times and borne him two children, so she figured she had some leeeway with him.
The plants along the southern shore of Lake Huron were much, much different from what Juan had grown to know in the north, but she pushed on anyway. The ground was rocky and barren, with only sparse, tough grass and some prickly green things that grew along the water's edge. She had some trouble biting into it, but once she'd shorn off the spines and cracked it open with a rock, she was rewarded with juicy pulp. The only animals they saw as they trooped down the dusty isthmus between Huron and Lake St. Claire (though they didn't know of that lake's existence) were little birds with long, thin beaks and some catlike beasts that hunted them, though they didn't pose much of a threat at all to the larger humans.
But Juan pressed on, driven by an urge she couldn't understand. Not even the rising hormones could turn her back, although several of the men in the tribe were already courting her heavily. Rising murmurs of discontent among her tribe were enough to cause her to send them back, but curiosity -- a word she lacked the abstraction to grasp -- drove her forward, into an increasingly arid land.
She was the only person left of her tribe that day; the rest had turned back a week ago. She was still within sight of the glittering blue waters of the lake; the sun was roasting her already-tan skin beneath bleached hair. Leaning forward, and walking quickly on her toes to avoid burn from the sand that was pooled here and there in the rocks, she crested a hill and beheld a sight that no human would ever believe, even if she told it. A lone bird, wandering far from its flock, cried out shrilly as it circled above her, rather too eagerly anticipating carrion.
The sun was a brilliant yellow in the cloudless blue sky above her; to her right, Lake Huron stretched from the sterile beach as far as she could see. In front of her, sand dunes covered the vista from the base of the hill, where the rock disappeared beneath the surface of the sand, to the horizon, in every direction. But that was not what caught her breath in her throat: sticking up from the sand like a glittering forest were a million shining ... things. Strewn between them were darker, yet no less improbable hulks. They looked from a distance like rock outcrops that were a little too straight, a little too shaped -- and the shining things must have been miles away, yet towered as though they were next to her. Even the dunes ended as they approached straight rock cliffs that fell into the lake.
Juan turned and ran, loping elegantly and swiftly away from the sight. She caught up to the rest of her tribe two days later, and mating season banished all thoughts of what she'd seen; by the time of the migration back to their summer homes, she was healthily pregnant and passed the uncomfortable nights telling stories of the great shining ghost forest to her grandchildren.
13
August 30, 161189
Global Mean Temperature: 23.9° C
Ec was an aggressive little swimmer, his parents thought. He'd been in the water for a year and a half, since the age of two months, and already he was as agile as an adult, though not as fast. Ma, his conveniently-named mother, was a good eighteen years old, and had been an adult in the tribe for two years. All thirty-two people nominally lived in a cave at the base of cliffs that plunged from the snow-covered Andes peaks above them to the Pacific ocean beneath them; they actually lived most of their lives in the ocean itself.
Ma and Ec were inseperable, as all mother-child pairs were until the child was adolescent. That day, Ma was out a few kilometers from the home cave, with the Andes peaks still visible in the distance. She was streaking through the cool waves with Ec frolicking beside her when the already-short day started to darken. She was too absorbed with her progeny to notice the increase in the height of the rollers, and when the first raindrops splattered on the ocean, she was beneath the surface showing him how to swim. By the time they surfaced for air, Ma knew something was seriously wrong. Sheets of rain were pouring hard from the black sky; bolts of lightning cracked inside the cloud. She pulled Ec to her breast, took a deep breath -- hard in the water-laden air -- and dove.
Down here, in the murky depths, she could hear the storm in the background: a low, dull roar vibrating from above. But swimming was hard, too; the water pushed and pulled her in strange directions, and she couldn't see more than two or three feet in front of her. The kilometer that would have taken five minutes took an thirty, and she was exhausted at the end of it. Above her, she could still hear the storm, furious as ever, raging.
She had to surface for air, already. Ec was writhing and almost blue-faced; the underwater gag reflex overrode the breathing reflex, and while adults could hold their breaths for nearly an hour, Ec could barely go forty minutes without fresh oxygen. In a few seconds, she had broken the surface, and was bobbing up and down on the huge rollers, barely staying afloat. Both were gulping in the precious air. Then Ma dove again, and swam as hard as she could in the direction she thought she was going. Once more, the bottoms of the waves tugged and tossed her, and in fifteen minutes, she had to simply go limp, worn out. Her body was screaming prematurely for more air, so she weakly paddled herself up, snaking slowly through the water.
The storm was weaker now, and Ma could float on the surface with Ec crying on her chest. The boy had no idea what was going on, and was only afraid because his mother was. After several more minutes, the squall passed, the last bits of rain sprinkling down on the two people. At the top of the next wave, Ma looked around. Ocean surrounded them as far as she could see; there was no hint of the mountains of home, and no hint of the way they'd come.
A week later, some swimmers out hunting crustaceans and small fish found Ma's decomposing body floating at the base of a cliff. She was still identifiable. What was surprising was Ec, stubborn little Ec, was still alive, and sleeping peacefully on his mother's breast.
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
What city did the matriarch see? Was it Detroit, or perhaps Toronto?
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation." -Herbert Spencer
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." - Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, III vi.
Alferd Packer wrote:What city did the matriarch see? Was it Detroit, or perhaps Toronto?
Yes, it's Detroit. She led her tribe across the land bridge between Ontario and Michigan, and they abandoned her before she got to where erosion and the desert sands had uncovered part of the city.
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
XaLEv wrote:So whatever happened to the Siberian family's knife?
What knife? The one that was accidentally dropped in the bog several thousand years ago?
Alferd Packer wrote:If you're having trouble visualizing what the day lengths are like way up north, try using this tool. You can enter in specific latitudes and see just how sharply the changeover from polar day to polar night might be, or when exactily during the year it occurs. And this tool would show you the position of the sun in the sky relative to the horizon for a given lat/long and a given time of year.
Sweet! Thanks.
Elaro wrote:I'm sorry, I can't accept the premice of the story. No farmers plus crops and farm animals survive? Come on, you'd need to nuke pretty much the entire planet.
We've hashed over why the science is bad; thankfully, the science stopped being the point of the story after the first vignette is over.
And the GMT should've dropped by now, the big GHG producers have been destroyed, and there's still plant life to absorb the CO2 (and methane, etc.) from the atmosphere.
Actually, there's not much plant life. Most of the Earth is a huge desert, with major storms coming in from the warmed up Atlantic. All the action is taking place around and north of the Arctic circle. And if need be, I can pull out some Author's Fiat about the Sun being more active, the Earth's orbit drifting a little closer, etc. But, yes, overall, the science is bad; I could accomplish the story I want with Herr Valdemar watching a dino-killer asteroid streak south, too.
But other than that, I thought your writing was good. And I like the vignette medium you're using.
Thanks!
Stas Bush wrote:Surlethe... that was good. I enjoyed reading it. You should try to get that in print.
Thanks, Stas! That's the ultimate goal now.
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
Zor wrote:Personally i am wondering as why mankind reverted to cavemen. Lets say that during the ecological collapse most of the world reverts to the stone age but some pissant rural town that was but a footnote in Canberra's census douments in West Australia a few hundred clicks from Perth with a few hundred bogans and some livestock manage to grow some grain and raise Cattle and become Xenophobic bastards that kill or inslave anyone who comes across them. The basics of agriculture can be done by uneducated serfs just fine and those who do it would have a major advantage once most of the population dies off said advantage could allow some leader of the decendants of said bogans to realise that the surrounding bands of hunter gatherer barbarians should be conquered, inserfed and their lands divided up among his progeny and his buddies to begin rise of the Bogan Empire, or they reach the number of people the area at their tech level can sustain and some people leave for greener pastures, spreading and reestablishing basic civilization across a decent sized chunk of Australia after about a century and latter moving outwards. Considering the fact that they are already survivalists and subsistance farmers in the world today, it would be prity hard to completly remove agriculture from human society without whiping out the species alltogether.
Zor
Zor, you make me laugh. First of all, the reversion was not entirely during the collapse; the problem is that there's simply not enough arable land immediately after the collapse to sustain any vestiges of civilization. Land that was frozen is now melted and is boggy, and you can't farm in that without tons of work that simply couldn't be sustained with the production levels after a migration. Deserts were marching north and eating up all the current agriculture; you can see that occurring in the second vignette. Second, if any civilization survived, that would negate the whole point of the story, so I didn't let any. Third, once the land dried out and became farmable, farming had been forgotten, crop plants had died out, and seed banks were long-lost. If they were discovered (and they might have been several times) nobody would know what to do with them.
Alferd Packer wrote:In this particular story, Australia is completely uninhabitable. In fact, the only place in the southern hemisphere still inhabited by humans is the extreme southern tip of South America and maybe some other points poleward.
Close, but not quite. Some people managed to carve out a living along the very south coast as the "mangrove" forests grew up around them. But the point is unaffected: the vast, vast majority of Australia is without question uninhabitable. There's like five feet along the southern coast you might be able to farm if you tried.
Meanwhile, up in Canada and Siberia, there are vast tracts of arable land now, but it took so long for them to reach that state that people have, quite literally, forgotten how to farm. So, they hunt, and life is good. There's probably no need to farm, because the population density is so low that there's no pressure to domesticate animals for food.
Right on the money.
PeZook wrote:The big change will happen when they start domesticating those wild dogs for defense and to aid them in hunting small game.
Not happening. Those wild dogs are humanity's chief predator now.
Though their biggest problem is that there's not quite enough trees to make proper farming tools
Yes, that's true too.
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
This story is really depressing. Part of it makes me think of that Ringworld sequel. I think it was Children of Ringworld? When Louis Wu and the Kzin go back to the Ringworld and run into Teela again. It reminds me of how there were so many different kinds of people encountered, and they were all related to humanity long ago.
Via money Europe could become political in five years" "... the current communities should be completed by a Finance Common Market which would lead us to European economic unity. Only then would ... the mutual commitments make it fairly easy to produce the political union which is the goal"
It's a little depressing, to be honest. Wouldn't some sort of civilization start rising again after 11 thousand years? There's bound to be enough stuff left over for that, even when discounting projects like the late "seed vault" the Norwegians are going to build.
Nope, all the easy minable metals are gone. Without these it is imposible to move from the stone age to any type of metal.
The Ancient Greeks could virtually pickup near-pure metal igots off the ground, or just needing to dig down a few meters. The Legacy of Modern Mining, is you need to dig several kilometres underground and require extensive refining to get usable metal.
Any crash which destroys our ability to dig up metal from multi-km deap mines is an un-recoverable crash.
Perhaps this is a retarded question, but where the hell did it all go?
It's a little depressing, to be honest. Wouldn't some sort of civilization start rising again after 11 thousand years? There's bound to be enough stuff left over for that, even when discounting projects like the late "seed vault" the Norwegians are going to build.
Nope, all the easy minable metals are gone. Without these it is imposible to move from the stone age to any type of metal.
The Ancient Greeks could virtually pickup near-pure metal igots off the ground, or just needing to dig down a few meters. The Legacy of Modern Mining, is you need to dig several kilometres underground and require extensive refining to get usable metal.
Any crash which destroys our ability to dig up metal from multi-km deap mines is an un-recoverable crash.
Perhaps this is a retarded question, but where the hell did it all go?
Um, we used it.
The good news is that we can melt down the stuff we've already used, but it's a lot more concentrated, geographically speaking, and mostly in places that are inaccessible to our fictional descendants.
73% of all statistics are made up, including this one.
But, yes, overall, the science is bad; I could accomplish the story I want with Herr Valdemar watching a dino-killer asteroid streak south, too.
