The End of the World (as we know it.)

I’ll get trip insurance in case Europe collapses before we embark on our cruise. You never know.

- Laurie Smith

I'll be turning 50 this year, and to celebrate this milestone I've decided to take a three-week trip to Europe.  For part of the journey, I'll be joined by the tanned and toned Laurie Smith, who agreed to make a guest appearance provided that we do a cruise around the Mediterranean. In spite of some initial misgivings (I've had some negative cruise experiences, as some of you know) I looked over the options for ports of call and so forth, and now I'm on board, so to speak.

Ms. Smith is taking care of cruise arrangements, and when asked if I wanted trip insurance, I refused, on the basis that if I miss this trip, there will be far larger problems in my life than the cost of a week on the Med.  Her reply is the opening quote.

At this point in time, the theme of a post-apocalyptic world has been solidly established in our cultural matrix via novels, games, movies and comics.   We all know what it would be like, whether caused by a thermonuclear exchange or lack of gasoline: governments cease to exist, society falls apart, it's every man for himself, despair prevails, and eventually it's nothing but cannibalism, filed teeth, bad tattoos, odd bits of armour made out of car tires and spikes, and everyone gets mohawks.

Would they? Really? Why? Could there be a disaster on a such a scale that it would actual overwhelm our civilization's ability to repair itself? (Or at least to provide decent haircuts.)

Maybe yes, maybe no. We've had some oddly telling incidents in recent years. For example, I visited New Orleans a year after the hurricane blew through, and there were places in the city and along the coast, as above, that had an uneasy resemblance to sets from an after-the-war science fiction movie. Even today, over five years later, they're still cleaning up derelict houses in one of the best-known cities in the United States.*

The Russian city of Chernobyl is now a ghost town, and could easily be the poster child for anyone who wants to show how a city looks 30 years after The End. Haiti a year post-earthquake? People are still living amidst, and in some cases in, piles of rubble while agencies attempt to make any sort of headway in the process of cleanup, let alone rebuilding.

I realize that all these examples are isolated one-off events rather than disaster on a planetary scale, but that makes the slow recovery time even more noteworthy. These are pins in a map, surrounded by an entire planet's worth of options in terms of technology and helping hands, and yet the process has taken place at a snail's pace, or, in the case of Chernobyl, not at all. Now imagine a global catastrophe: big meteorite, nuclear war, rogue disease vector, whatever you like, I think we all have our favourites.

Personally, I see the global pandemic option as the most plausible.  Imagine a slightly mutated version of Ebola Zaire, airborne rather than transmitted through infected blood, a slow enough killer that victims have enough time to spread the contagion around the planet before starting to bleed out.  How would the world handle a crisis of that magnitude? 

Who knows? Maybe we'd make the unfortunate discovery that civilization, like any other artificial structure, falls apart when you get rid of enough of the foundations.

- Sid

* My reaction at the time was that something must have gone horribly wrong in the United States. Can you imagine a city having to rely on volunteer labour and church groups to rebuild itself during the Eisenhower or Kennedy eras?