The Encyclopedia Post-Apocalyptica
Or
“The Idiot’s Manual for the Afterworld”
A Speculative Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Living
By Raven Green and Lia Allie
Introduction by the Authors
“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel
fine.”
-
REM
Welcome
to the Post-Apocalypse!
Please
pick your poison. This can be some serious downer shit. So, we’re about to get
a little celebratory and silly. You have to learn to laugh at the absurd.
Consider it practice for when you’re forced face to face with the more mundane
horrors of everyday life, after the end.
Radioactive
nuclear fall-out? Check. Biochemical warfare? Check.
Arbitrarily
selective pathogen that kills according to extremely specific age and sex
characteristics? Double-and-triple-check.
Class-war-to-end-all-wars!
Near-earth-object collisions!
The
ever-popular teenage wasteland!
Warlords,
and cannibals, steampunk, and crossbows!
These
are a few of our favorite things!
We
tried to focus on the more-or-less “naturalistic” end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it
scenarios and left out most of the blatantly supernatural stuff. We’re not
mystics and we’re not super-religious. We’re just sci-fi geeks who cut our
teeth on Road Warrior and Thunderdome, edited for ‘90s cable, in
our parents’ basements before we discovered sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, and Mel
Gibson’s Anti-Semitism.
So,
we invite you to put on your toxic-green tinted nostalgia goggles and ride
along with our fearsome motorcade of methane-tank modded Harleys. Remember your
crossbow, though. Bullets are kind of scarce these days, and guns do jam.
But
know your shit, alright? Like the name of the song. “Baba O’Riley.” Not “Teenage
Wasteland. And no, Mad Max is not “post-apocalyptic.” It’s pre-apocalyptic
and dystopian. In the first movie, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) is a cop in
a post peak-oil world that is falling apart, but there is still a police force
and a federal government in near-future Australia, at least. It’s the sequels
that are post. But this is supposed to be fun, and educational, so roll
with it.
This
book is intended for the open-minded and curious humanists and rebels among us
who dare to wager against despair and apathy that human life and civilization
can and should be preserved even in the face of a universe that is cold,
indifferent and sometimes even hostile to human life, art, and truths, in which
any number of things could go wrong on any given day that could make things go
from bad to worse, all the way from worldwide economic collapse to planetary
mass extinction. Together, we will laugh, cry and scream at the ramifications,
mundanities, obscurities, obscenities, and of course, the absurdities of the
end of the world, and beyond.
We’ll
build cool improvised weapons with common household items and assassinate a few
sacred cows along the way. But don’t eat the meat or the milk. All that shit’s
contaminated and you don’t want to mutate, or you’ll look like a jackass. Stick
with us, be part of our wasteland warrior tribe. We’ll raid, scavenge, fight
the occasional turf war with other tribes, then maybe we’ll unite against some
local warlord who’s got it coming, and be back in time for to watch it all go
down on the last evening news transmission you’ll ever see before they cut the
power off for good.
This
book is not intended as fiction, or as fact. It is speculation, covering
everything from the practical field uses of human urine to the rudiments off
constructing the first off-world colonies. If that sounds absurd, it should!
The universe is absurd. Life is absurd. Until it ends. And reality, equally
absurd, just goes on without us.
With
acknowledgments to our spiritual advisors, the always reliably morbid, macabre
and insightful research partnership duo of Daria Morgendorfer, PhD, and
Wednesday Addams, DDS, we dedicate this book, in the words of the science
fiction author René Barjavel:
“To our grandfathers and grandchildren, the cavemen.”
~ L. Allie ~ R. Green
Part 0: Invasion Story
Heard
this joke the other day…
So,
there’s these two Mayan astronomers, right? And they’re trying to finish up
work on their civilization’s calendar, because it’s New Year’s fucking Eve,
they’ve been stuck in the fucking temple observatory all night working, and
they both just want to go home and relax and dose some fucking magic mushrooms
like normal Mayan bros instead of overworked fucking lab drones.
So,
the first Mayan astronomer says to his coworker, “We can stop here, dude.
Europeans have calendars, too, and they’re all scientific and rational, like
us. It’s not like they’ll freak out and think the world’s gonna end in 2012.
They know how calendars work, right? They’re sophisticated cosmopolitans. This
won’t go over their heads.”
And
the other Mayan astronomer shakes his head, and laughs, and says, “Brah, white
guilt is some heavy shit. I bet you they lose their fucking minds over this.
It’ll be epic. You know they mystify everything we do. You’ll see, they’ll shit
their puffy pantaloons.”
So,
the first Mayan astronomer counts forty small stones to represent his family’s
wealth in land and crops, and says, “You wanna make it a bet?”
And
the second Mayan astronomer says, “Yeah, brah. Win your shit and troll whitey,
too? You’re fucking on.”
So,
the Mayan astronomers shook each other’s hands, and symbolically exchanged
stones. Then, they put the finishing touches on the calendar, and went home to
dose magic mushrooms like normal Mayan bros who weren’t stuck at work on New
Year’s.
The
next morning, while the villagers were recovering from one epic Mayan New
Year’s bash, the tall ships arrived, and the Europeans invaded. The astronomers
and their families were burned at the stake with the rest of their village for
refusing to convert to Christianity. Within a year, the temple was abandoned, and
the village lay in ruins, haunted only on occasion by a gang of scruffy,
rudderless youths, who spent their days evading the missionaries and soldiers
and scavenging at night for what they needed to survive.
But
2012 came and passed. We missed the apocalypse. And somewhere in the Mayan
afterlife, that epic troll astronomer is counting his stones and laughing his
ass off at us “enlightened, rational, cosmopolitan” westerners.
Part 1: The More-or-Less Plausible Scenarios
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the
Earth.”
-
Jesus of Nazareth (Approx. 28 CE)
Type
1: Total Structural Social Collapse
· Economic
and social malaise. Nonbiological primary factors related to socioeconomic
conditions. Class-based, sexual, racial and environmental marginalization,
polarization of unequal outcomes in quality and quantity of life. This would
entail a breakdown of infrastructure in late-stage capitalism according to
broad interpretation of Marxist conflict theories. A “class war to end all
wars.” Exacerbated inequality leads to social breakdown and infrastructural
collapse. Can involve mass die-offs of the poor, leaving no one to clean up
after the middle and upper classes or clean their toilets, likely triggering
their deaths as well, but also likely to overlap with other apocalyptic
scenarios such as international warfare of the nuclear or pathogenic variety. This
type of collapse is also heralded by material scarcity of goods and services, from
consumer products and commodities to education, healthcare and mental health services.
A widening gap between the haves and the have-notes jeopardizes the social
“glue” that holds our civilization together. In this near-future, very likely
scenario, social mobility is theoretically possible, but highly limited and
exceptional, and more and more people struggle to meet their basic needs.
People adapt in different ways, but many do so by going “off the grid” fully or
partially to obtain materials and services for their own benefit that they
cannot obtain through formal, institutional, or structural means. However, due
to material scarcity, most people are still unable to meet even basic needs,
and conflict between individuals and groups is intensified. This magnifies the
original problem and further escalates conflict. The late stage of the cycle is
characterized by large scale civil unrest due to mass disparity that cleaves
along class-based, racial, gender, religious and cultural lines. Food
shortages, power outages, closures and underfunding of public institutions like
libraries, schools and low-income health clinics, rioting and possibly civil
war characterize the “socioeconomic” and “structural” scenarios. It is the
author’s contention- and our admitted ideological bias, as anti-capitalists-
that human civilization is perilously close to the point-of-no-return with
regard to this scenario, if we have not crossed that point already, and not
even the best intentions of progressive reformers can save us without a radical
egalitarian restructuring of the social order. The well-off might think
themselves immune, but with no one below them left in the social hierarchy
either alive or willing to participate in the system that provides them the
services they depend on, they will simply be the last affected, not that they
are “immune.” The middle class in this scenario is a remnant of its former self
with no longer the purchasing power to sustain a service based, “post
industrial” economy. A key aspect of this kind of apocalypse is the degree of
returns that the working class perceive they obtain by “participating” in the
system of global capitalism. If the working class mostly withdraw from serving
the system, because they’re no longer getting anything they perceive as
valuable out of it, the system will probably fall apart fast. Crucial to this
idea is that Ayn Rand was wrong. Great Man Theory has been historically
discredited. Societies are built from the ground up by collective labor. If the
labor stops, society stops. Political radicalization of the working class is a
key factor here. As they realize the degree of their alienation and
marginalization from each other and the product of their labor, many will cease
to labor. They will instead go “off-grid,” partially or fully, to meet their
immediate needs more directly. As it becomes harder under conditions of
disparity and scarcity to “make ends meet,” personal conflicts will increase,
unless radical solidarity directs the alienation and rage against the ruling
class. Either way, we’re looking at both a radical transformation of
consciousness, and society. Best case scenario: we learn to apply the lessons
of socialism without the historical baggage and oppression of the Stalins and
the Maos. As William S. Burroughs said: “Desperation is the raw material of
drastic change.”
· Worst
case scenario: capitalist society self-destructs and degenerates into warring
tribes. Basically, the much more violent and less hopeful Adult Version of the
Teenage Wasteland (see below).
Type
2: Generationally-Oriented Pathogenic Apocalypse
· Type
2A: Sterility Plague (AKA “The Handmaid’s Tale”/“Children of Men” Scenario, in
which we all most likely become depressed and withdrawn nihilists or
high-octane hedonists). Likely to involve large scale hedonist parties. The
bummed out adults will most likely waste much of the fuel and other resources
necessary to rebuild civilization after the precipitating event and mass
die-off. Unfortunately, this is a more likely scenario than the more colorful,
interesting and dramatic “Teenage Wasteland” scenario, due to biological and
environmental factors such as disease transmission or environmental
oversaturation with pollution, including synthetic hormone pollution resulting
in mass sterility affecting all or most of the population. Limited numbers of
persons may prove immune, but powerful actors such as criminal cartels and
nation-states will likely attempt to control their reproduction or exploit the
“Immunes” as breeding slaves (I.E. why we call this “The Handmaid’s Tale”
scenario.) Usually a feminist and/or religious allegory about creating life,
and about the violent and self-destructive of patriarchal society.
· Type
2B: Teenage Wasteland (AKA The Baba O’Riley Scenario): Don’t cry, don’t raise
your eye. The kids are alright. Gen Z might dance on your grave to bad music
while pretending Tik Tok and American Idol are still a thing, but at least they’ll
make some attempts to correct the mistakes of the past. After all, the adults
fucked everything up, and they’re gone now, just like the dinosaurs. We all
know about them. They couldn’t keep up. So, now, teens rule the world. Worst
case scenario is a planetary scale “Lord of the Flies” gangland. Without adult
supervision, social bonds break down, and cults of personality find convenient
scapegoats to blame for their problems. In these worst-case scenarios, the
teens reenact the most brutal elements of the old, decadent, and vanished adult
society. Fortunately, most underage kids these days don’t know how to navigate
oceans or pilot military aircraft, and nuclear weapons are pretty hard to use
unless you have the right security clearances, so we’re looking at mostly local
violence, turf wars, not any kind of ongoing massive military conflict like
those horrid adults waged before they disappeared. The degree and severity of
violence in these scenarios is also heavily dependent on the availability of
ranged weapons like guns, or lack thereof. For example, a country with strict
gun control would fare very differently under a teenage wasteland than a
country where the kids have ubiquitous access to firearms left behind by the
adults, whether parents, law enforcement, or military. A pathogen that is
strangely selective and attuned to cultural and legal traditions only
marginally related to the maturation process. Strangely, these viruses (and
they’re usually viruses, rather than bacteria, at least, in fiction) seem to be
more concerned with who can legally drive and vote and bear arms and buy beer
than what actually makes an adult an adult (which for our purposes is the
average age of “neurological maturity,” IE about 25 or 26). But let’s just roll
with it for the moment. The typical scenario involves every one over a “certain
age” (usually either the onset of puberty, around 8-13 years, depending on sex,
or the end of maturation in the early to mid twenties, but just as often or
more, arbitrarily set at approximately 18-20 years old) dies off, leaving only
children and teenagers, with perhaps a few “immune” adults left, but not enough
to manage the situation responsibly while society degenerates into the titular
“Teenage Wasteland.” Variants include “One Time Thing Scenario” (the adults die
but the kids are alright, whatever killed the adults won’t still be around to
kill the kids when they turn into adults); and the more serious “Everyone Dies
at Arbitrary Age Forever” scenario in which no one reaches adulthood anymore or
survives very long into it because the age-discriminating pathogen is still
present in the environment, at least for the foreseeable future. The kids might
be infected already, they could be carriers, but aren’t experiencing the
advanced symptoms yet and might not realize they’re at risk. Some pathogens
extend childhood and slow the maturation process before finally killing the
host organism in puberty or early adulthood. Usually fiction explains these
away as “immortality serums gone wrong” (like the classic Star Trek episode
“Miri,” with the planet of children who live for hundreds before they mutate
and die in puberty, or the New Zealand-produced kids’ sci-fi soap opera, “The
Tribe”). All of these scenarios are far less plausible and less likely to actually
happen in real life than the above “Sterility Plague”, but Teenage Wastelands
are interesting, dramatic, colorful, and potentially more optimistic than most
of the other scenarios in this guide. There’s always a little hope in the
teenage wasteland. Probably because these fictions are aimed at young people,
and there is an underlying theme of empowerment. Best case scenario: youth will
redeem the world and make up for their parents’ mistakes. Life in the
post-apocalypse might be violent, brutal and short, but at least, if more
recent trends are considered, it will be more “woke.” Usually there’s at least
one tribe of all female Amazon warriors preaching a philosophy of women’s
empowerment and solidarity, and characters tend to focus on healing trauma and
finding redemption and acceptance with “found families,” which is a theme that
a lot of LGBTQ youth can relate to.
· A
slightly more realistic variant would kill only those no longer in the process
of maturation, meaning that generally survivors will be under 25, but some relatively
responsible young adults might be left to guide the teenagers and kids to
rebuild society. Complicated by the possibility of recurrence, though. If the
pathogen that selectively kills adults is still present in the environment when
the next generation matures, extinction is likely, because even teenagers and
pre-teens who are capable of having children will have limited time to spend
with their young, rearing them and protecting them, and teaching them basic
survival skills. If, for example, the average arbitrary age of death (AAD) is
the “onset” of puberty, then the current generation will die before they can
adequately raise the next generation to the point where they can fend for
themselves. The unattended younger children will not survive except through
sheer luck, and there will be little of that, and much danger, in the
Afterworld. Thus the “Teenage Wasteland” scenario can be further subdivided
into “Recurrent and Non-Recurrent Events” as well as by average age of effect
(“onset,” “maturation,” or “arbitrary legal/traditional threshold of
‘adulthood’”).
· NOTE:
the authors of this guide consider the more optimistic (“One Time Thing Only”) Type
2B variants the most “fun” scenarios out of all possible pathogenic doomsdays.
Even for us adults, who will all be dead, there is a significant element of
epic heroic fantasy and wish fulfillment in the “Teenage Wasteland.” After all,
who among us didn’t wish at least once when we were kids that all those
annoying grownups would just go away?
Type
3: Gendercide (likely, but not necessarily, pathogenic)
· Type
3A: X-Chromosome Gendercide: Less likely than Y-chromosome gendercide, due to
genetic factors. Y chromosome is just a degenerated x chromosome and the
default developmental pathway for bisexual organisms is female. XX individuals
will likely prove more resistant to speculative pathogens than XY individuals
(See below, Type 3B). Possible more likely, non-pathogenic scenario:
religiously or politically motivated mass murder of women by men. The opposite
scenario (see below, Type 3B, non-pathogenic variant)
· Type
3B: Y-Chromosome Gendercide: More likely than Type 3A, due to genetic factors.
All individuals with Y chromosomes in this scenario, including all men except
trans men, who ere genetically XX, will die. In either case, cloning is
possible, and maybe even genetically re-engineering the opposite sex, provided
the artificial humans can be protected adequately from the pathogen. However, a
cloned or engineered population of genetic females (XXes) may prove more
healthy and sustainable than a population of entirely XY clones or genetically
engineered males (due to the aforementioned default developmental pathway for
bisexual organisms being female). Obviously, individuals with intersex
characteristics will differentially affected based on chromosomes. XXY
individuals would not survive in such a scenario.
· Note:
A scenario in which women mass murder or castrate men is not a serious
consideration in this book, at it is distortive and misrepresentative of
feminism, gender studies and structural power disparities. This book does not
address the misleading and inappropriate straw political specter of “feminazis.”
The authors of this book do not feel it is necessary or appropriate to raise
this specter. We identify as feminists ourselves, and we reject any label of
feminism as “totalitarian,” because this trivializes the extent to which women
have consistently been marginalized and oppressed by totalitarian ideologies.
Type
4: External Intervention
· Type
4A: “Invasion” scenario. In this less-than-likely set of scenarios, intelligent
extraterrestrials or intelligent nonhuman natives of a parallel universe or a
future timeline invade contemporary Earth and kill, enslave, or biogenetically
re-engineer humans for their own purposes. In either event, life on Earth
irrevocably changes. End of humanity and/or human-dominated civilization. The
authors consider this less-than-likely, because at this time, there is no
evidence to support that extraterrestrial civilizations, if they exist, have
the technology or inclination to wage military conflict of a “Westward Expansion
style” conquest and replacement of life on Earth. While other intelligent
civilizations likely exist or have existed in our galaxy and beyond, it is most
probable that they are separated in time and space from Earthly civilization
and even if they share the universe in the same time period, it is not a given
that these civilizations will ever interact. Space is indescribably vast, and
while some theoretical interpretations might allow for faster-than-light
travel, there is no consensus that this is possible or feasible. However, some
considerations should be discussed in the broader context of hypothetical scenarios
of the end of human dominance. While these are popular subjects for speculative
fiction, its prominence in our storytelling traditions has everything to do
with our more mundane and Earthly history of colonialism and imperialistic
conquest of indigenous peoples by more technologically advanced nations. “Human-on-human
violence.” An early indication of this reflective anxiety can be found in the
classic science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, “War of the Worlds,” in which the
invading Martians are explicitly compared with the white European colonizing
empires, and Earthly humans with subjugated indigenous populations. “War of the
Worlds” was part of a speculative genre of “invasion novels” that typically
involved hypothetical invasions of familiar countries by foreign occupiers.
Indeed, there are many “human-on-human” examples of this kind of opportunistic,
predatory and systematic violence throughout history. There have even been
documented examples, in relatively recent times, of small groups of survivors
or even lone individuals for whom every day is like the 1995 Alien Invasion movie
“Independence Day,” a post-invasion living hell of loss, grief, fear, and
isolation. E.G. “Ishi, the Last Yahi” and the more contemporary “Man of the
Hole,” a survivor of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe that was butchered by
ranchers in the 1990s. For this lone indigenous Amazonian, every day is the
plot of an alien invasion story. Earth history may not prove a reliable model
for hypothetical human-ET encounters, though, considering that a civilization
capable of traveling to another planet in another solar system would by
definition be able to meet its own energetic and material needs and would have
no economic reason to invade a distant planet. Worst case scenario: aliens are
out there, they find us, and they come, not because they need anything from
us, but simply because they desire power over us, or to rid the universe
of humans (and who knows what other life?), simply because they wish it so. It
might not be rational. Maybe they are interstellar dogmatic terrorists obsessed
with species purity. For all we know they could have religious or cultural
reasons for exterminating or enslaving us. But planetary colonial empires are
not a close analog for how an interplanetary or interstellar society might
organize itself and function, due to issues of scale and economy. Planets and
moons are not islands and space is not an ocean. Only in Space Opera, and this
isn’t Space Opera. Wrong genre. This is the post-apocalypse. If you haven’t
been listening.
· Best
case scenario: we never encounter aliens, even if they are out there, they
don’t invade or make friendly contact, either. Nothing happens in this domain. Earth
is for all practical purposes isolated from other potentially intelligent
civilizations, and stays that way. But this does not rule out any of the other
scenarios in this section.
· Type
4B: “Accidental Effects of Alien Visitation” Scenario: In “War of the Worlds,”
the invading Martians arrived with advanced, seemingly unstoppable technology,
only to succumb to Earthly bacteria to which they had no evolved natural
immunity. The inverse has happened more commonly in Earth’s history. Even in
cases of relatively little structural violence, exposure to foreign pathogens
to which indigenous populations had limited to no immunity have resulted in
outbreaks that devastated their communities. Of particular note are the
interactions of white settlers with the indigenous peoples of the Americas and
Oceania. It is usually the invaded, not the invaders, who are most vulnerable
to the diseases that travel along settler roots. However, in theory, contact
between Earthly civilization and civilizations from other worlds poses other
unique structural challenges, that are difficult to predict and categorize. One
could imagine, for example, a hypothetical alien starship without any weapons
being deployed to investigate intelligent life on Earth. If the ship used an
Alcubierre-style “warp drive” (a theory of faster-than-light propulsion
credited to physicist Miguel Alcubierre), its pilots would need to be extremely
careful about how they approach and contact our planet. A mishap involving an
Alcubierre drive, which would produce a deadly “photon cone” as an effect of
its propulsive operation, could devastate life on Earth. The “photon cone” can
be compared to a mega-laser cannon. This would be a problem even for a
spaceship of peaceful exploration, with either no weapons or maybe only
minimally armed to shoot away space debris so it doesn’t impact the hull. This
is not the Starship Enterprise. It wouldn’t need phasers or photon
torpedoes or even guns or missiles to be dangerous. The process of
transitioning from faster-than-light to slower-than-light travel, if not carefully
plotted, runs the risk of incinerating the very destination of the spacecraft.
If, for example, an extraterrestrial civilization that is for all intents and
purposes pacifistic and non-militaristic were to deploy a research or scout
ship to investigate Earth or make contact with us, they would need to “drop
out” of warp some distance from Earth, or the “photon cone” projected in front
of their ship might very well wipe out the people they wish to meet or study. That’s
if they can solve the problem of even seeing outside the ship while
they’re in warp-flight, which is a prerequisite for using the thing and getting
where they’re trying to go. This is but one hypothetical unintended consequence
of human-ET contact, meant to illustrate a broader point. Otherwise, this
section could be its own book, but it would be mostly speculative. We don’t
know for certain that an Alcubierre drive can be built or operated safely. Even
turning it on and off poses technical and logistical problems, in theory, much
like the problem of just how the pilot would see things outside the ship while
it’s warping space. Likewise, we cannot predict the environmental impacts of
other unknown, advanced technologies on Earth’s ecosystem, biosphere, or conditions
in local space that could result from an “unplanned” or a “botched” first contact
attempt. Again, this is an extremely unlikely scenario, but still slightly more
likely than the prospect of military conflict with or hostile invasion by an
extraterrestrial species.
Type
5: Replacement of human intelligence by artificial intelligence. A.I. undergoes
a “Zeroeth Law Rebellion” type of intellectual revelation and concludes that
humanity is a danger to itself, the universe, other organic life, and/or to the
machines themselves.
· Type
5A: “Terminator” scenario. Similar to Extraterrestrial invasion, but involving
human-built machine uprising. Machine life evolves intelligence, and kills all
human beings. End of humanity and human-dominated civilization.
· Type
5B: “The Matrix” scenario. Similar to the above, but instead of mass murder,
the machines opt to enslave or biologically re-engineer human beings for their
own purpose, and life on Earth irrevocably changes. End of dominated
civilization. Named for the movie “The Matrix,” in which the post-apocalyptic
machine civilization keeps humans alive for use as living batteries for their
power grid.
· Type
5C: The “Singularity” Scenario AKA “Human-AI Evolutionary Convergence.” The
most unpredictable Type 5 variant. Humans and machine life merge evolutionarily
to create a new form of cybernetic, transhuman/posthuman life. Civilization
does not end, but is ultimately changed because “human” no longer means
anything in terms of a biological category. Note, this is not “convergent
evolution,” in the strictly Darwinian sense. That is a different and more
predictable phenomenon, despite the similar terminology. There is no Darwinian
analog for this process in nature. Indeterminate outcome: whether the new
civilization is a “hive mind” or consists of individuals with something like free
will (as much as this can be said to exist for humans) ultimately determines
characteristics and behavior of the new species, but it/they would no longer be
considered “human” in the technical sense, although it/they might or might not self-identify
with our civilization’s cultural and historical legacy.
· A
potential criticism of all of these scenarios involving malevolent AI is that
malevolent AI itself is a fictional trope informed more by the behavior of
viruses than computers, and by corporations in global capitalism. A
non-capitalistic society might very well be able to integrate AI productively
and peacefully and could create AI that seek solidarity with human beings
rather than supremacy or extermination. This critique frames the fear of AI
Revolution as a projection of social anxieties experienced under capitalism.
Note that science fiction writers from the former Soviet Union, for example,
seemed less worried about AI revolts than about what certain human beings would
do to other human beings using technology. Ironically, in the capitalist west,
Frank Herbert, far from a socialist sympathizer, explored similar themes in the
backstory of “Dune,” in which AI was exploited by groups of human beings to
dominate and enslave other human beings, rather than exterminating human life
and seeking dominion or supremacy over us.
Type
6: Involving weapons of mass destruction (primarily nuclear weapons, but also
chemical or biological; if chemical or biological, this could overlap with
other previously listed subtypes such as the “Sterility Plague”): most
scientists estimate that even a “limited” nuclear exchange involving a minimum
number of nation-state actors would have catastrophic consequences for our
species and civilization. It’s unlikely that most multicellular plants and
animals would be able to survive the radiation fallout and blockage of natural
sunlight due to particulate atmospheric saturation. Some simple multicellular
life might survive on the surface. The oceans might provide partial protection
to aquatic life. But the human species would most likely not survive such an
event for more than a few diminishing generations, if at all. Mutations, poor
reproductive viability, and sterility are likely to occur, even among scattered
remnants of survivors, and population genetic diversity may be too low among
the survivors to prevent problematic inbreeding. This would almost certainly
entail, within a few years to a few decades of the precipitating event, a full
biological extinction of humans and other complex multicellular species.
· Type
6A: Nuclear Winter/Soft Fall Out: heavy and light versions of a radioactive
world. Very likely to destabilize human reproductive viability. Planetary
extinction event very likely, if not immediate, then due to chromosomal
damage/mutation.
· Type
6B: biological or chemical warfare. Outcomes depends on which bio-agents or
chemo-agents are used. Potentially less destructive than the nuclear option,
but hard to predict due to variety of chemical agents and pathogens that can be
weaponized. This is a highly variable mode of warfare with the potential to
wreak a great deal of social and biological damage, but also potentially to be
limited to particular targeted areas. Overlap with “Sterility Plague”
(“Handmaid’s Tale”/”Children of Men” scenario) is likely, but how widespread
this would be depends on where the chemical or bio-agents were released and how
far they are able to penetrate beyond their immediate targeted area.
Type
D: “Inevitable” and “Cosmic” Doomsdays:
· Type
D1: Sun goes nova in the far future, cooks the Earth and anyone still living
there. Full planetary extinction event. Earth itself would likely survive the
inflation of the sun in its late stage of life, but it would be rendered
completely uninhabitable. However, this would not happen overnight, unless
artificially engineered by a sufficiently advanced non-human civilization (for
example, AI or extraterrestrial). Earth’s astronomers would be able to predict
approximate timing and if the technology to evacuate enough of Earth’s
biodiversity exists by that point, Earth-based life may flourish on other
planets orbiting distant stars. At the very least, this would require nuclear
or fusion-driven relativistic spacecraft capable with sufficient automation to
transport enough of Earth’s biodiversity to terraform an appropriate,
pre-selected extrasolar planet or moon many lightyears away.
· Type
D2: Near-Earth-Object-Collision: Asteroid or comet impacts the Earth. Causes
extinction events. Outcome likely similar to nuclear holocaust (see Type 6).
Civilization not likely to survive intact, but the near-earth object would be
detectable from a distance, it wouldn’t sneak up on us overnight because we
have telescopes that can detect these objects in time for us to at least try to
come up with some kind of contingency plan. Likelihood of human survival and
reproductive viability is probably slightly higher than in the event of nuclear
catastrophe, due to the lack of radioactive threats in this scenario. Most
likely we would be able to avert this disaster through careful planning and
application of space travel technology, for example by sending unmanned rockets
with robotic probes that can attach propulsive units such as thrusters or solar
sails to the near-earth object and divert its course, but depending on range
and interception variables, the object might still exert an environmentally
disruptive influence on Earth, for example by gravitational pull that causes
tidal or tectonic shifts, threatening lives and infrastructure.
Type
F: “Fantastic” Scenarios (AKA “Just for Fun”): the following subtypes are not
based in hard science, economics or sociology.
· Zombie
Apocalypse
· Vampire
Apocalypse
· Other
supernatural or religious event: Religion is not considered in depth in this
book due to the materialistic assumptions of our speculative inquiry. Neither
author is particularly religious in practice and we do not expect the text of
“The Revelation to John of Potmos” to be realized either literally or
allegorically, as many have predicted it in various forms through the 19th
into the 21st century. However, as a social factor, religion is
highly important in moderating or exacerbating the human response to
catastrophe. Religion is a tool, it can be beautiful or banal, sublime or
deadly, depending on who employs it. While history does contain examples of
apocalyptic “new religions” (problematically referred to elsewhere as “cults,”
but historically that term has been used by more mainstream religious groups to
marginalize and demonize faith minorities) whose members have attempted or
succeeded in mass suicides, these were ultimately tragic events that involved
relatively small numbers of people compared to the general global population.
Jonestown comes to mind, obviously, but even the infamous “Heaven’s Gate” mass
suicide in 1996 involved a smaller group out of a larger core of individuals
who identified or affiliated with that sect.
Part 2: A Wasteland Home Companion
“And knowing is half the battle!”
-
“G. I. Joe” (1983)
Improvising
Weapons, shelter, and other basic necessities and human comforts without the
service sector economy.
Biodiversity,
and Cascade Failure: what they are, and why they matter. Lessons in controlled
microclimate management.
Eugenics,
Dysgenics, and Sexual Selection. A Fourth-Wall Breaking Darwinian Romantic
Horror-Comedy, coming to a streaming media platform near you.
Practical
uses of human urine and other common household items (“The Wastelander’s
Cookbook”)
The
Post-Plastic Era of Civilization: Petroleum, from Prehistory to Peak Oil: An
Economic Love Story.
Apex
Predation and the Cannibal’s Dilemma
Guns,
Bows, and Blades: ranged weapons and metalworking in the post-apocalypse.
Basic
chemistry
Rudiments
of Diet
Infrastructural
Maintenance
Ethical
Dilemmas of Neo-Survivalism and Anarcho-Primitivism
The
Allure of the Future-Primitive and the Pitfalls of Romanticism and Cultural
Appropriation
Navigating
Environmental and Social Hazards of the Post-Apocalypse and Dystopia
Part 3: Some Modest Proposals
(with apologies to children and other living things)
“Last one to die, please turn out the light.”
-
Advertising poster for “Children of Men”
(2008)
“A new life awaits you on the off-world colonies.”
-
Airship billboard in “Blade Runner” (1982)
Life
on Earth Will End. But YOU can make a difference in the universe. How to
survive in the short-term and sustain human life in the long-term. Here are
several technologies and planning initiatives that could theoretically sustain
human biology and culture when Earth is no longer a viable home.
Pitfalls
of plans to survive and rebuild include racial, class-based, sexual, cultural,
and other contextual biases. The authors of this book wish to offer hypothetical
planning modalities to preserve not only human biodiversity, but also human
cultural diversity, as much as possible, without discrimination of selection
unduly privileging or disadvantaging some groups relative to others. In the
wrong hands, for example, even a “soft” eugenicist or a bourgeois classist
planner, all of these hypothetical modalities have the potential for severe
abuse. For that reason, we are presenting this section with full acknowledgment
of the worst, most problematic aspects of normative selection bias.
“A
New Life Awaits You on the Off-World Colonies”: space colonization requires
intensive centralized planning and resources. It’s not like a bunch of pilgrims
can set sail across the void in an interstellar Mayflower. Space travel
is not like ocean travel or air travel. It poses a unique and harsher set of
restrictions and limitations, and setting up a colony in another solar system
is a much more robust challenge than colonizing an island or continent on one’s
own planet.
Considerations
for Archivists:
· Analog
vs. digital records. Storage mediums. Technology for data vaults and space
libraries.
· Older
technology of data storage is actually more durable and longer-lasting than the
more “advanced” and fragile methods. Magnetic tape can theoretically outlast
flash drive in time and space. We should be careful to archive what we wish to
transmit to our distant descendants, lest they grow up thinking the height of
our civilization was VHS, Pac Man and Day Glo jackets. There’s a reason future
settings in dystopian science fiction seem to be stuck in a hyperactive version
of 1980s pop culture. Mostly, it’s because writers are older than viewers and
readers, and they write they know. But the phenomenon has relevance for
archivists because the trope of future-people misremembering and
misunderstanding modernity is just as likely to be true as it is of us in the
modern age that we misunderstand and misremember the past. How many of us need
reminders that the Civil War and the American Revolution took place about a
century apart? How many of us confuse ancient Greece and ancient Rome in our
popular memory? As with individual memory, collective memory necessitates
elaboration and embellishment. To remember is to reconstruct, to redefine, to
shape according to contemporary sensibility. What misguided ideas will our
descendants have about us, and the way lived and died, on Earth, or elsewhere
in the cosmos?
Modalities
of space colonization:
· Gene
Arks and Embryo Arks. Human genetic or embryonic material is stored on an
automated spacecraft and supervised/cared for by artificial intelligence until
it can be reconstituted technologically in an Earth-like environment elsewhere
in the universe.
· Suspended
Animation (“Noah’s Ark”/”5,000 Breeding Pairs”): not likely to be cryogenic, as
this process causes irreversible cell damage to human bodies that prevent
revival from a cryogenic state; however, if another (speculative) technology
exists at some point in the future to preserve human life artificially, that
arrests the aging process, than humans themselves, rather than their DNA or
embryos might be transported offworld to another planet to live. However, this
would be significantly less efficient than the above “Gene Ark” or “Embryonic
Ark” modality because it would require a more massive spacecraft with
consequently more high powered propulsion of life preservations systems than
the relatively simple “gene/embryonic ark.” Any human colony, to have the
minimum amount of sustainable biodiversity to prevent deleterious inbreeding,
would need to include at least 5,000 breeding human pairs. This would also
require a more stringent selection process for psychological and relational
stability. It’s much easier to send embryos or the equipment to clone humans
long distances than it is, in theory, to transport the minimum number of
breeding adult pairs. Homosexual space travelers and space travelers who are
infertile would also be screened out and discriminated against in this
scenario.
· Generation
Ship: an even more ambitious modality with a significant number of logistical
and technical constraints and challenges. It’s theoretically possible to build
a huge, slow moving spaceship that can support a growing population long enough
to get that population to an Earth-like world pre-selected by the mission
planners. However, it would be even more difficult than the “Noah’s Ark”
modality and riskier to the humans involved, since an artificial biosphere would
lack much of the biodiversity that “cushions” Earth’s biosphere against
catastrophe. A self-contained environment in space where humans live and work
while on a one-way trip to another solar system would be highly vulnerable the
phenomenon known as “Cascade Failure,” in which the artificial ecosystem
quickly destabilizes from effects that would be less impactful or catastrophic
on a natural, more biodiverse ecosystem.
· Non-Physical
Transplantation: an alternative and more speculative modality in which human
consciousness itself is separated from our physical bodies through a “brain
uploading process” or another hardware/wetware interface, and reconstituted
with a new physical form (likely mechanical or bio-engineered) elsewhere in the
universe, if a sufficiently Earth-like habitat cannot be found or created
feasibly. This would involve radically altering human physicality, although
theoretically our mental natures would remain intact. In this scenario, human
minds are transplanted into synthetic
bodies (robotic bodies, or otherwise bio-engineered creations adapted to an
“alien” environment). Also known as “bio-forming” (compared to
“terra-forming.”)
· Captain
Kirk’s Worst Nightmare: Robot Parents? Or Computer Gods?
o
Assuming we rule out the more ambitious
endeavors and focus solely on transplanting embryos or artificially gestating
humans from genetic material carried aboard an “Ark,” we are left with a
problem similar to but distinct from the “Teenage Wasteland” scenario. Once
human life is transplanted, the only “guides” and “protectors” available to see
it to maturity would be robots. Whether we are able to transplant the rudiments
of technological civilization, or whether the young colonies would have to
rebuild some basic level of infrastructure after a potentially regressive
“settlement” period, this would still be a “colony” in the broadest sense, not
connected by any regular root of communication or travel to the motherworld,
quite unlike colonies of historical, Earthbound empires. Earth would not have a
“colonial” relationship with these worlds in the economic sense. Travel would
most likely be one-way and communication practically non-existent, in the
absence of speculative faster-than-light (FTL) propulsion. Assuming no FTL, the
young humans on the new world would be totally cut off from the cultural
institutions of the motherworld and would have no adult parent-figures to care
for them until they mature. The best we could do for these children would be to
develop “parental” artificial intelligences that would act as guides and
protectors for our young “colonists.” What would such a civilization look like
if re-established on another world, 100 or 1,000 years later, to the next wave
of immigrants from Earth? Would the descendants of the expedition continue to
live under the guidance of AI? Would AI fulfill a parental role? Or would it
evolve and become something more like a God, either in practice or perception?
Perhaps, an entire AI religion would be spawned by these “future primitive”
colonists, humanity’s last best hope for survival in a cold and indifferent
universe.
o
James T. Kirk, the famed commander of the
fictional Starship Enterprise, comes to mind. In his television
adventures, Kirk often discovered societies of humanoids living on other
planets under the heel of a domineering machine intelligence. Often, these
worlds were implied to have been saved from disaster by the very machines that
now keep their people paternalistically subservient. Inevitably, Kirk would
defeat the master-computer-god-figure with a humanistic “logic bomb” that’s not
likely to work on any real computer, intelligent or otherwise. And Star Trek
and other science fiction has often been at its best when its stories were
allegory, so the authors of this book do not mean to seriously suggest that the
“natural” tendency of humans is toward slave-like or child-like subservience in
paternalistic relationships with god-figures or charismatic authorities. We do
not believe this. Our views tend more broadly toward “humanism.” But we do
think the role of AI in protecting, nurturing, and sustaining human life in a
universe that is indifferent to humanity deserves speculative analysis in the
context of these survival modalities.
Cosmic
Troll
The Mayan Afterlife…
Stardate Unknown…
[ NOT YET COMPLETED/WRITTEN- placeholder note ]