I don’t want to get stuck in the philosophical quagmire of debating whether mankind is intrinsically evil or not, and whether a controlling authority is a necessary construct to impose a set of laws and maintain order through the threat of punishment. But it is clear that with the evaporation of centralized governance and a civil police force, those with ill intentions will seize the opportunity to subjugate or exploit those more peaceful or vulnerable. And once the situation seems sufficiently dire, even previously law-abiding citizens will resort to whatever action is necessary to provide for and protect their own families. To ensure your own survival you may have to forage and scavenge for what you need: a polite euphemism for looting.
Part of the glue that binds societies together is the expectation that the pursuit of short-term gains through deception or violence is far outweighed by the long-term consequences. You’ll be caught and socially stigmatized as an untrustworthy partner or punished by the state: cheats don’t prosper. This tacit agreement between the individuals in a society to cooperate and behave for the collective good, sacrificing a certain amount of their own personal freedom in exchange for benefits such as the mutual protection offered by the state, is known as the social contract. It is the very foundation of all collective endeavor, production, and economic activity of a civilization, but the structure begins to strain and social cohesion loosens once individuals perceive greater personal gains in cheating, or suspect that others will cheat them.
During a severe crisis the social contract can snap altogether, precipitating a complete disintegration of law and order. We need look no further than the most technologically advanced nation on the planet to see the effects of a localized fracture in the social contract. New Orleans was physically devastated by the rampage of Hurricane Katrina, but it was the desperate realization by the city’s inhabitants that local governance had evaporated and no help would be arriving anytime soon that precipitated the rapid degeneration of normal social order and the outbreak of anarchy.
So after a cataclysmic event, we might expect organized gangs to emerge to fill the power vacuum left behind after the evaporation of governance and law enforcement, laying claim to their own personal fiefdoms. Those who seize control of the remaining resources (food, fuel, and so on) will administer the only items that have any inherent value in the new world order. Cash and credit cards will be meaningless. Those appropriating the caches of preserved food as their own “property” will become very wealthy and powerful—the new kings—controlling the allocation of food to buy loyalty and services in the same way that ancient Mesopotamian emperors did. In this environment, people with special skills, such as doctors and nurses, might do well to keep this to themselves, as they may be forced to serve the gangs as highly specialized slaves.
Lethal force may be applied swiftly to deter looters and raids from rival gangs, and as resources become depleted the competition will get only fiercer. A common mantra of people who actively prepare for the apocalypse (called Preppers) is: “It is better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.”
One pattern likely to recur over the weeks and months after the Fall is that small communities of people will gather together in a defensible location for mutual support and protection of their own stash of consumables, looking for safety in numbers. These small dominions will need to patrol and protect their own borders in the way that whole nations do today. Ironically, the safest place for a group to barricade themselves in and hunker down during the turbulence would be one of the fortresses dotted across the country, but now turned inside out in its purpose. Prisons are largely self-contained compounds with high walls, sturdy gates, barbed wire, and watchtowers, originally intended to prevent the inhabitants from escaping, but equally effective as a defensive refuge for keeping others out.
The outbreak of widespread crime and violence is probably an inevitable effect of any catastrophic event. However, this hellish descent into a Lord of the Flies world is not something I will discuss any further here. This book is about how to fast-track the recovery of technological civilization once people are able to settle down again.
THE BEST WAY FOR THE WORLD TO END
Before we get to the “best” let’s start with the worst. From the point of view of rebuilding civilization, the worst kind of doomsday event would be all-out nuclear war. Even if you escape vaporization in the targeted cities, much of the material of the modern world will have been obliterated, and the dust-darkened skies and ground poisoned by fallout would hamper the recovery of agriculture. Just as bad, even though it is not directly lethal, would be an enormous coronal mass ejection from the Sun. A particularly violent solar burp would slam into the magnetic field around our planet, set it ringing like a bell, and induce enormous currents in the electricity distribution wires, destroying transformers and knocking out electrical grids across the planet. The global power blackout would disrupt the pumping of water and gas supplies and the refining of fuel, as well as the production of replacement transformers. With such devastation of the core infrastructure of modern civilization without any immediate loss of life, the collapse of social order would soon follow, and the roving crowds would rapidly consume the remnant supplies and so precipitate a subsequent mass depopulation. At the end, survivors would still encounter a world without people, but one that has now also been stripped bare of any resources that would have offered them a grace period for recovery.
While the dramatic scenario favored by many post-apocalyptic movies and novels may be the collapse of industrial civilization and social order, forcing survivors to engage in an increasingly frantic struggle for dwindling resources, the scenario that I want to focus on is the inverse: a sudden and extreme depopulation that leaves the material infrastructure of our technological civilization untouched. The majority of humanity has been erased, but all of the stuff is still around. This scenario presents the most interesting starting point for the thought experiment on how to accelerate the rebuilding of civilization from scratch. It grants the survivors a grace period to find their feet, preventing a degenerative slide too far, before they need to relearn all the essential functions of a self-supporting society.
In this sense, the “best” way for the world to end would be at the hands of a fast-spreading pandemic. The perfect viral storm is a contagion that combines aggressive virulence, a long incubation period, and near 100 percent mortality. This way, the agent of the apocalypse is extremely infectious between individuals, takes a little while for its sickness to kick in (so that it maximizes the pool of subsequent hosts that are infected), but results in certain death in the end. We have become a truly urban species—since 2008 more than half of the global population lives in cities rather than rural areas—and this crammed density of people, along with fervent intercontinental travel, provides the perfect conditions for the rapid transmission of contagions. If a plague like the Black Death, which wiped out a third of the European population (and probably a similar proportion across Asia) from 1347 to 1351, were to strike today, our technological civilization would be much less resilient.*
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WHAT, THEN, is the minimum number of survivors of a global catastrophe that is sufficient for humanity to have a feasible chance of not just repopulating the world but being able to accelerate the rebuilding of civilization? To put it another way: What is the critical mass to enable a rapid reboot?
There are two extremes on the spectrum of surviving populations, which I will call the “Mad Max” and “I Am Legend” scenarios. If there is an implosion of the technological life support system of modern society but no immediate depopulation (such as would be triggered by a coronal mass ejection), most of the population survives to rapidly consume any remaining resources in fierce competition. This wastes the grace period, and society promptly descends into Mad Max–style barbarism and a subsequent mass depopulation, with little hope of rapidly bouncing back. If, on the other hand, you are the sole survivor
in the world, or at least one of a small number of survivors so dispersed that they are unlikely to stumble across one another during their lives, then the notion of rebuilding civilization, or even recovering the human population, is nil. Humanity hangs on by a single thread and is inevitably doomed when this Omega man or woman dies—the situation in Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. Two survivors—a male and a female—is the mathematical minimum for continuation of the species, but the genetic diversity and long-term viability of a population growing from just two individuals would be seriously compromised.
So what is the theoretical minimum needed for repopulation? Analysis of the mitochondrial DNA sequences in the Maori people living in New Zealand today has been used to estimate the number of founding pioneers who first arrived on rafts from Eastern Polynesia. The genetic diversity revealed that the effective size of this ancestral population was no more than about seventy breeding females, and so a total population a little over twice that. A similar genetic analysis deduced a comparable founding population of the great majority of Native Americans, who are descended from ancestors who crossed the Bering land bridge from Eastern Asia 15,000 years ago when sea levels were lower. Thus a post-apocalyptic group of a few hundred men and women, all in the same place, ought to encapsulate sufficient genetic variability to repopulate the world.
The problem is that even with a growth rate of 2 percent per annum, the fastest the world’s population has ever grown when sustained by industrialized agriculture and modern medicine, it would still take eight centuries for this ancestral group to recover to the population of the time of the Industrial Revolution. (We’ll explore in later chapters the reasons why advanced scientific and technological developments probably require a certain population size and socioeconomic structure.) And such a diminished initial population would probably be far too small to be able to actually maintain reliable cultivation, let alone more advanced production methods, and so would regress all the way back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, preoccupied with the struggle for subsistence. Ninety-nine percent of human existence has been spent in this lifestyle, which cannot support dense populations and represents a trap that is very hard to progress out of again. How do you avoid regressing that far?
The surviving population would need plenty of hands to work the fields to ensure agricultural productivity, yet leave enough individuals available to work on developing other crafts and recovering technologies. For the best possible restart, you’d also want the survivors to number enough that a broad swath of skill sets is represented and sufficient collective knowledge is retained to prevent sliding backward too far. Thus an initial surviving population of around 10,000 in any one area (which for a large state such as Texas represents a survival fraction of only 0.04 percent), who are able to gather into a new community and work peacefully together, represents the ideal starting point for this thought experiment.
So let’s turn our attention to the sort of world that the survivors will find themselves in, and how it will change around them as they rebuild.
RECOLONIZATION BY NATURE
Immediately after the termination of routine maintenance, nature will seize its opportunity to reclaim our urban spaces. Trash and detritus will collect on the streets and pavements, blocking drains and causing the pooling of water and accumulation of debris rotting into mulch. Pioneering weeds will first begin proliferating in pockets like this. Even in the complete absence of pounding car tires, cracks in the asphalt will steadily expand into crevices. With every frost, water pooled in these depressions will freeze and expand, crumbling the hard artificial ground from within with the same punishing freeze-thaw cycle that steadily wears down entire mountain ranges. This weathering creates more and more niches for small opportunistic weeds, and then shrubs, to become established and further break up the surface. Other plants are more aggressive, their penetrating roots pushing right through the bricks and mortar to find purchase and tap into sources of moisture. Vines will snake their way up traffic lights and street signs, treating them like metallic tree trunks, and lush coatings of creepers will grow up the cliff-like faces of buildings and spread down from the rooftops.
Over a number of years, accumulating leaf litter and other vegetative matter from this pioneering burst of growth will decay to an organic humus and will mix with the windblown dust and grit of deteriorating concrete and bricks to create a genuine urban soil. Papers and other detritus billowing out of broken office windows will collect in the streets below and add to this composting layer. A thickening carpet of dirt will smother the roads, sidewalks, parking lots, and open plazas of towns and cities, allowing a succession of larger trees to take root. Away from the asphalt streets and paved squares, the cities’ grassy parks and the surrounding countryside will rapidly return to woodland. Within just a decade or two, elder thickets and birch trees will have become firmly established, maturing to dense woods of spruce, larch, and beech trees by the end of the first century after the apocalypse.
BUILDINGS CRUMBLE AND NATURE RECLAIMS OUR URBAN SPACES, INCLUDING OUR STORES OF KNOWLEDGE LIKE THIS NEW JERSEY LIBRARY.
And while nature is busy reclaiming the environment, our buildings will crumble and decay among the growing forests. As vegetation returns and fills the streets with wood and drifts of windblown leaves, mingling with the trash strewn out of broken windows, piles of perfect kindling will collect in the streets, and the chances of raging urban forest fires increase. Tinder accumulated against the side of a building and ignited by a summer lightning storm, or perhaps by sunlight focused through broken glass, is all that’s needed to unleash devastating wildfires that would spread along the streets and burn up the insides of high-rises.
A modern city wouldn’t be razed to the ground like London in 1666 or Chicago in 1871, the fire ripping rapidly from one wooden building to the next and leaping across the narrow streets; but blazes spreading unopposed by firefighters would still be devastating. Gas lingering in underground pipes and throughout buildings would explode, any fuel left in the tanks of vehicles abandoned in the streets only adding to the intensity of the inferno. Dotted throughout populated areas are bombs waiting to go off when a blaze sweeps through: gas stations, chemical depots, and the vats of highly volatile and flammable solvents in dry-cleaning stores. Perhaps one of the most poignant sights for post-apocalyptic survivors would be watching the burning of the old cities, sprouting thick columns of choking black smoke towering above the landscape and flushing the sky bloodred at night. After a passing blaze, the brick, concrete, and steel matrix of contemporary buildings would be all that is left behind—charred skeletons after their combustible internal viscera have been gutted.
Fire will wreak devastation across great areas of the deserted cities, but it is water that will eventually bring certain destruction for all our carefully constructed buildings. The first winter after the Fall will see a spate of burst frozen water pipes, which will disgorge inside buildings during the following thaw. Rain will blow in through missing or broken windows, trickle down among dislodged roofing tiles, and overflow from blocked gutters and drains. Peeled paint from window and door frames will allow moisture to soak in, rotting wood and corroding metal until the whole insert falls out of the wall. The wooden structures—floorboards, joists, and roof supports—will also soak up moisture and rot, while the bolts, screws, and nails holding the components together rust.
Concrete, bricks, and the mortar smeared between them are subject to temperature swings, soaked with water trickling down from blocked gutters, and pulverized by the relentless pulsing of freeze-thaw at high latitudes. In warmer climates, insects such as termites and woodworms will join forces with fungi to eat away at the wooden components of buildings. Before too long, wooden beams will decay and yield, causing floors to fall through and roofs to collapse, and eventually the walls themselves will bow outward, then topple. The majority of our houses or apartment blocks will last, at most, a hundred years.
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bsp; Our metal bridges will corrode and weaken as the paint peels off, allowing water to seep in. The death knell for many bridges, though, is likely to be windblown detritus collecting in the expansion gaps, breathing spaces designed to allow the materials to swell in the summer heat. Once clogged, the bridge will strain against itself, shearing off corroding bolts until the whole structure gives way. Within a century or two, many bridges will have collapsed into the water below, the lines of rubble and debris at the feet of the still-standing pillars forming a series of weirs in the river.
The steel-reinforced concrete of many modern buildings is a marvelous building material, but although more resistant than wood, it is by no means impervious to decay. The ultimate cause of its deterioration is ironically the source of its great mechanical strength. The steel rebars are cocooned from the elements by the concrete surrounding them, but as mildly acidic rainwater soaks through, and humic acids released by rotting vegetation seep into the concrete foundations, the embedded steel begins to rust inside the structures. The final blow for this modern construction technique is the fact that steel expands as it rusts, rupturing the concrete from the inside, leaving even more surface exposed to moisture and so accelerating the endgame. These rebars are the weak point of modern construction—and unreinforced concrete will prove more durable in the long run: the dome of the Pantheon in Rome is still going strong after two thousand years.
The greatest threat to high-rises, though, is waterlogged foundations from unmaintained drainage, blocked sewers, or recurring floods, particularly among cities built along the banks of a river. The supports will corrode and degrade, or subside into the ground to create listing skyscrapers far more ominous than the leaning tower of Pisa, before inevitably collapsing. The raining debris will further damage surrounding edifices, or the buildings will perhaps even topple over into neighboring monoliths like giant dominoes, until only a few remain spiking above a skyline of trees. Few of our great high-rise buildings would be expected to still be standing after a few centuries.
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch Page 3