It's All Over: Top 10 Post-Apocalyptic Worlds (farmers, wheat, convert, water)
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They forgot the Terminator world. Resident Evil, too. Some of those detailed were pretty lame. The Hunger Games? LOL, its a kiddy novel.
It might be a kiddie novel, but the author put some thought into the direction our society is heading. I saw lots of similarities as I read that one. Especially our society's obsession with glitter, hollywood, "reality tv," spotlight living, central authority, statism, etc... while "the rest" can basically go to hell.
Revelation was written by the Catholic establishment to inspire fear into the pagans that if they don't believe in Jesus and God, that they would spend their afterlives in sorrow and pain. If the rest of the story and their army didn't entice them, that is. So that's the joke.
On the flip side, I was reading about a particular parasite that doesn't do any harm to people (that we know of) that's infected around half the world's population. It is carried in cats, and they jump to us. Their primary purpose is hang out in the brains of rats and mice to basically cause them to be suicidal. Instead of fearing cat urine, they go towards it. Once the rat is killed, viola, the cat has it too.
Nature has a way of changing though. Just imagine if the parasite evolved to cause people to essentially become more aggressive in some way. This is the closest thing to a zombie apocalypse. A real zombie apocalypse, like either 28 days later or any of the slow-moving zombie movies, is impossible. Once you're dead, you're dead, period. Once the blood stops flowing, it stops delivering vital nutrients and oxygen to your cells. Now, there could potentially be a virus that causes people to ACT like zombies (like shutting down our pain nerves which limits our physical ability) but that is pretty far fetched.
Similarly, if peak oil happens, nothing will happen long term. Yes you heard me: NOTHING. Oh there'd be short term issues, but we wouldn't see a breakdown of society. Why? Society's been there, done that. When cars were first invented, electric and diesel engines split the market with gas engines taking the remaining third. Just so happened that gas ended up being cheaper. Old tractor engines were meant to run on PEANUT OIL. Heck you could even convert a diesel to run on used vegetable oil.
So yeah. End of oil? No biggie. Just convert to diesel and electric, or with today's tech diesel hybrids (many buses do this today). Done. Next.
The thing I didn't see on here was also economic collapse. Similarly if economic collapse happened we wouldn't see long term issues. Things would be bad for a couple years, sure. But look at Russia, Argentina, Iceland, and other countries that went through a collapse. After a few months of badness, things re-stabilized around a new normal that looks very much like how they were before. In short, I'm not worried about an economic collapse.
Another thing I didn't see was environmental change (maaaaaybe The Road counts as this). This is worrying, but again, there would be a new normal. Farmers are already changing their crops to deal with drier climates and to be robust to flooding. Think of another crop that is good to drought AND flooding. Yep. Rice and a specially bred strain of wheat developed by Borlaug. Done. Next. Cities would have to change, which would be expensive, but not un-doable. Total environmental collapse is unlikely, but environmental change is on us currently and anyone with half a brain can see it (those who pull wool over their eyes / be lemmings to climate change skeptic leaders notwithstanding).
So what AM I worried about, specifically?
An EMP from the sun likely will happen in my lifetime or my childrens' and we'd better prepare for that I think so much of our society is built on technology. And there's always "run of the mill" local disasters, like earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, etc. that cause 1-2 weeks of badness. Heck there may be hyperinflation that causes issues for a year or so but in all reality technically astute folks are needed in any economy, I'd just retool if worse comes to worse. Best way to prep for that is 1-2 months of food and self defense to get through the worst of it while the economy retools. Hey, 300 million people need food, water, clothing, housing, electricity/power however it comes by, ... you can't ignore the economic drive this causes, and demand would force a change to go back to a new normal quickly.
For disease and "black swan" evens, I don't worry about those; we'd likely all end up dead despite any prepping anyway.
Wow, works of fiction? Basing your life on fictional works doesn't seem like a sound or even reasonable base to me.
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