Writing About the End of the World discussion

After the apocalypse, what is required to rebuild? (Beyond having a few males and a few females.) Would it require going back to stone knives and bear skins, or could survivors ramp up faster to get back to where they were?

Would you need a critical mass of people? Specific skills? Robinson Caruso-like ingenuity?

What would it take?

I think with the number of already-created tools lying around, we'd be able to get back faster. We might end up back in pioneer days, but I think Stirling's series about The Change handles fairly well what it would be like. No running water for most folks would be a huge adjustment, methinks.

I would think that, depending on the apocalypse in question, it would depend on what kind of people survived. Certainly you would need enough skilled people to survive in order to pick up almost from where they left off, or to recover faster, but if a lot of the 'survivors' are unskilled, people are going to find it a lot harder to survive and may have to go back to more simple methods of surviving. Certainly the latter would be the more expected method, because I think often in our own modern society we would wonder how we would survive if we were stripped of all our technology and going back to medieval ways.

At the same time enough strong-willed people would have to survive to organise and rebuild communities, otherwise order would crumble and people would fall into disorganised chaos, create rifts and hatred and distrust between peoples, potentially leading to more bloodshed (if that is the kind of apocalypse that occurred) as all those who feel they have the right to survive fight against those they feel don't, hoarding the skills they refuse to share with others, and so forth.

If we're lucky, all of the Society for Creative Anachronism folks and Amish will survive, and they can reboot the rest of us because they'll know how everything was done back in the day!

I do think the community aspect is big. In Ice Forged, one of the issues is the people who want to seize the power vacuum to create their own power base, and those who want to protect the common good.

And in that scenario of people trying to sieze power in the vacuum you end up with the commumity sometimes needing to turn to someone who is harsh and brutal but honest enough to make that stand against the power grabbers to protect them.

And once you've got the community, you begin to have politics. It's a requirement for social creatures such as humans. And if there are multiple groups within contact of each other, there will be trade.

I think it is not so much what materials survive - though it greatly increases freedoms, travel, & interaction - as much as it is the number of survivors and where they're located.

One of the most entertaining aspects about End of the World scenarios is the vast amount of variables, each one having a significant impact on the best way to restart civilization.

Certainly with a restart of civilisation, you will come up with groups of people who will develop new and unique ways of living, and different ideals and rules, because most people seem to have this idea that they have been given a fresh start and can correct the mistakes they made in the past, but quite often can become so fixated on that ideal that they end up just as bad as the civilisation before. And in their desperation to find a leader they can turn to following this crisis so they can return to normal lives, they will turn automatically to the first one who shows promise, even if that person turns out to be the worst possible choice.

I always go back to my favorite post-apocalyptic property, which are the Fallout games from Bethesda. In that game the United States was ravaged in a colossal nuclear war with China, and everything has basically become what the in-world characters call "The Wasteland", and they change the term to fit certain regions. For example, Washington D.C. in that world is known as "The Capital Wasteland", and so on and so forth.

I kinda mirror John's idea that there would be tools ready for those who could find them, but I also think that if an apocalypse occurred, it would be a lot like Fallout--supplies of anything are limited, and you truly need your wits to survive in what essentially will become Mad Max. Water would be a huge issue, especially in a situation where the populace has to deal with things like a nuclear fallout or even surviving something like a meteor hitting the earth would require luck more than anything.

Peter brought up the point about location, but even in those locations there would be an entirely new set of rules that the survivors would have to deal with, no matter the location. Everything in the restart of civilization, which is a very difficult term to grasp in such a situation, requires that everything falls into place perfectly. Again, John brought up the frontier-- A LOT of people died on the frontier and in many cases had absolutely no control in stopping their fates.

As far as skills go, I think you would need hunting, camping, food and water management on a person level, knowing how to stay clean (massively important!), and also the ability to think clearly and calmly in the middle of a literal hell. Common sense would be the greatest skill to possess. At least that is what Cormac McCarthy says you should have, and that guy is endorsed by Oprah after all.

As far as politics go, I don't know if it would necessarily come down to those who want to have power and those who want to do good. Those are very black and white terms, and I think there would be a rise of people who would be in the middle, not wholly good but not wholly evil. I think that in the scramble to survive it would definitely happen on a small scale, but it would take decades for there to be a really formation of power localized within specific groups.

"Would you need a critical mass of people? Specific skills? Robinson Caruso-like ingenuity?"

Interestingly enough, the more advanced we become the more difficult recovery will probably be. If you lived in a stone age culture in the Amazon and a solar storm destroyed the electrical grid, you probably wouldn't even be aware of this. If you lived in typical middle class America, you also might not be aware of this, since, if our power grid went down, most of us would be isolated from any means of getting information. I check the internet a dozen times a week to find some little tidbit of information that I haven't bothered to memorize. I've outsourced a good deal of my memory to the cloud. Cut me off from the datastream and I wouldn't have any good way of quickly learning the skills I would need to survive.

I think the lack of immediate communication would have a huge psychological impact on modern-day survivors. And along with the easy access to the Internet has come the idea that you don't have to memorize anything, because you can always look it up--until you can't.

The same can be said for many other 'luxuries' that we're used to in modern times. The convenience of going down to a shop to pick up all your food, a machine that washes your clothes, even something as simple as getting paid to work. Hell, even central heating is a luxury. How many people would die in winter without a way to heat their homes? Certainly the ill, the young and the elderly would struggle. 'Survival of the fittest' they would say.

It certainly would be interesting to see how people would respond if something like the Internet was wiped out--all the world's knowledge gone except in the minds of those who survive. Would they share that knowledge again, or hoard it for themselves? Certainly I think in our society we would share it, but perhaps in a fantasy-based society that information would be hoarded, especially if it was of a magical nature.

In a world where basic civilisation as we understand it has come to an end, people may be expected to work for nothing in order to get things going again. Even the value of money would alter, perhaps skyrocketing or plunging to almost nothing. People would have to revert to older ways of life.

And again, to bring people back from this, you'd need enough people surviving with the knowledge and skill of these sorts of things. That includes people like farmers, who have the skills to harvest and grow food, care for livestock and can sell them to others who are in need of them.