Apocalypse!

As civilization grows toward dizzying heights, we become increasingly aware of how far we have to fall. We dote on collapse, destruction, and survival, because of the uneasiness we feel living in a world too complex to understand. Its machinery has evolved beyond our control, and we are all trapped in lives that we call normal. The sub-genre of science fiction that deals with apocalyptic (and post-apocalyptic) scenarios appeals to this dread, and offers a second chance - to blow away the fluff, to reduce civilization to its imaginary core values, and, maybe, to design and rebuild it better than before.

The futurist is concerned with rebounding from this collapse and rebuilding a technological society. After survival is assured, we'd like to skip past all the grime and pollution that came with the Industrial Revolution and go directly into clean, renewable structures. At the last H+ meeting, there was a great deal of discussion on these two ends of the spectrum: basic survival needs like agriculture, medicine, metal-working, tool-making, and sustainable solutions like solar and wind power.

But how do we connect the two? How do we go from subsistence to prosperity and beyond? Are there any shortcuts? There are, but it has less to do with technology than with the propagation of ideas and social structures (at the meeting, interesting analogies were drawn to the role of technology in developing countries). We'd have to consider what resources are available, and how to take the most advantage of them. Let's talk about the end of the world:

Scenario: Biological catastrophe

This broad category includes scenarios of destruction targeted at the human population: any disaster that kills off most of the people without damaging the things we built.  It includes pandemic (The Stand), reproductive failure (Children of Men), gendercide (Y: The Last Man), zombies (28 Days Later, I am Legend), famine due to climate change, ecological collapse, gamma rays and ozone depletion.

Though most of the infrastructure will deteriorate in a decade or less, our most precious resource can last for much longer: the wealth of knowledge stored in books, hard drives (inactive), and optical media. First priority will be the protect repositories of knowledge - libraries, datacenters, and universities - against looting and environmental damage.

As people begin to repopulate and rebuild, we'll need to distribute knowledge to far away communities. The people with access to life-saving information (for example, how to grow food and maintain greenhouses, how to survive cholera or perform an appendicitis) have a responsibility to share it with everyone. Without people operating the network of communication satellites, the easiest way to send information around the world is shortwave radio (around 10 MHz). These radios can be operated by individuals and many are built independent of the electric grid.

Education should be a prime focus. When people become scarce, each person must be encouraged to develop to his or her fullest potential. The problems that caused the disaster, whether pandemic or famine, may prevent any progress until we can find a fix. And that can't be done until we train enough engineers, researchers, and scientists to replace the ones lost in the catastrophe.

Technology level follows the standard decay curve - crumbling quickly as nobody is around to maintain it, but eventually levels off so all that's left are Twinkies, Spam, and those plastic things that hold six-packs together. Population level, following the initial collapse, will slowly grow to a level that's limited by the technology (agricultural, infrastructure, medical, etc) - a logistic curve. Units in the following graphs are arbitrary.

Here is a model of the worst case scenario: nobody bothers to rebuild or maintain the tech, so people keep exploiting what was left from the catastrophe until everything runs down. Buildings crumble to dust, cities turn into wilderness, forests spread across the land. The survivors band together in small tribes and live a hand-to-mouth existence. Even worse: there is no guarantee that we would ever return to a pre-collapse level of civilization.

The recovery model: we preserve enough knowledge to rebuild and use the existing structures to speed up the process. Note that technological decline is reversed quickly and the population limit rises as a result. There's a feedback process here: the more technology and infrastructure we save, the faster people can recover their former lives and become productive (and reproductive!). Optimistically, we'll restore the electric grid in 10 years and networks in 30. Recovery is a race against time - the longer we wait, the more we lose to decay, and the harder it will be to fix things up.

Resources for survivors:
Download the offline version of Wikipedia

Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

National Library of Medicine at Bethesda, Maryland

Research libraries at Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, etc.

Google datacenters


Image taken from "28 Days Later", Fox Searchlight Pictures