Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

[Ulzgoroth]

We've got all this metal and all these domesticated species around. Even if we lost too much ground for, say, electricity to be of much use to us, our agriculture has some big edges that aren't going to go away easily and we've got all the scrap iron you can eat.

Originally Posted by Ji ji

In 20xx, a devastating pandemy strikes humanity. It can be a failed experiment of bacteriological world or anything you like. The disease kills everybody is infected by it. Everybody but 4 years (or less) old.
We can imagine that only a few of older survives to first months. However, there are enormous stocks of food long lasting in warehouses and shops, buildings to protect themselves (in a world with few or no predators, like USA or western Europe), cloth to cover themselves and so on, and somebody manages to survive. So, let's imagine that, over 1% of population (4 years old), only 0.1% survives to reproductive age.
70.000 kids became men and women.

Among these survivors, nobody can read. Moreover, there is a very low density. They will develop creol languages. They lack technological knowledge at all. They cannot read, ignore writing basis - for instance, phonetic value of letters - and so books are written, to them, in an unattainable code and in a stranger language, that is likely to be never discovered.
After two generations, stories about previous world are already far legends and myths. After six generations, they are a new simple religion. With the total loss of technological skills and the total impossibility to decifrate the least bit of information, they're returned to TL 0-1.
A stone age society in a world of wonders, remains of what is called "the god's era" or so on.

Yeah, I was thinking on the same lines. The only relatively plausible way to actually put humans back to the stone age would be to really annihilate our accumulated knowledge, including the brains that house it. People may not have all that much in mere biological memory, but they know enough to blow past TL1 without even trying unless you've somehow scrubbed every material trace of the old world away.

...However, I think you'd be pretty likely to exterminate the species there. 70 milion 4-year-olds worldwide have to survive to adulthood on their own and then manage to form breeding populations?

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

We've got all this metal and all these domesticated species around. Even if we lost too much ground for, say, electricity to be of much use to us, our agriculture has some big edges that aren't going to go away easily and we've got all the scrap iron you can eat.

Yeah, I was thinking on the same lines. The only relatively plausible way to actually put humans back to the stone age would be to really annihilate our accumulated knowledge, including the brains that house it. People may not have all that much in mere biological memory, but they know enough to blow past TL1 without even trying unless you've somehow scrubbed every material trace of the old world away.

...However, I think you'd be pretty likely to exterminate the species there. 70 milion 4-year-olds worldwide have to survive to adulthood on their own and then manage to form breeding populations?

If someone can posit a catastrophe that kills everyone over four yet leaves seventy million four-year olds alive they can also arrange a way for them to survive.

[Yorunkun]

Allright, thanks for all the fascinating replies so far. This is very valuable to me.

I’m left with the impression that a natural disaster alone would not suffice to put mankind under in quite the way I want – it wouldn’t kill enough people and the retention and recovery of “lost” knowledg, esp. scientific concepts would be too swift for civilization to truly perish and an agrarian society to take shape. And I don’t want a weird coincidence of two events, or cascading failure, I think society is too resilient to not deal with it. No, I guess the only way we can plausibly do ourselves in is we do ourselves in. So consider this:

What if today’s global financial elite, that network of the super-wealthy and its bought henchmen, figured out that the worst predictions about Global Warming were actually coming true and that the only way left to halfway stop it was to drastically reduce the human population by 99%, right now. A managed collapse instead of impending global extinction, but managed of course according to the interests of those in power, The Rich. Yes, it’s pulpy and crass, but is it feasible?

Assume the Rich take preparations and unleash a genetically engineered swine-flu variant and actively attempts to drive the world into chaos and self-destruction. And once the dust settles, they round up the survivors and introduce a neo-primitivist tribal lifestyle, the people once again controlled through religion, working the land (organically) for their lords.

Reading is forbidden, books are to be burnt for fuel. Using old technology is forbidden, but there are few items left to be found anyway, and energy sources to work machines would be forbidden for fear of Global Warming and soon most people wouldn't even know what to do with those things anyway.

It’s back-to-the-roots fascism, like Ancient Rome, except run by evil capitalist holdouts from the present.

Would that work?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Which could be an entertaining plot point: the locals think 'reading' means understanding mere paragraphs of meaning, while the PC's can actually read.

Uh. What's the difference?

Originally Posted by Yorunkun

Assume the Rich take preparations and unleash a genetically engineered swine-flu variant and actively attempts to drive the world into chaos and self-destruction. And once the dust settles, they round up the survivors and introduce a neo-primitivist tribal lifestyle, the people once again controlled through religion, working the land (organically) for their lords.

Reading is forbidden, books are to be burnt for fuel. Using old technology is forbidden, but there are few items left to be found anyway, and energy sources to work machines would be forbidden for fear of Global Warming and soon most people wouldn't even know what to do with those things anyway.

It’s back-to-the-roots fascism, like Ancient Rome, except run by evil capitalist holdouts from the present.

Would that work?

Who is providing the muscle, and are these would-be neo-Roman nobles really willing to knock themselves down to the same level as everyone else?

So, first off there's the ludicrous plot. That's of course vanishingly unlikely to come together, let alone succeed, like all absurd super-villain plots. But suppose we handwave past that, and have the world fall.

Then there's the step where the 1% and their minions are trying to take control of the world and lock down the survivors for de-education, and secure the more obvious caches of old technology. This is pretty much hopeless, again. Even if they're using old-tech, they can't possibly have the numbers to round everyone up, worldwide. You'd have free enclaves recovering to higher technology levels, then likely coming back for blood. Maybe if you make the plague not 99% fatal, but 100% fatal unless the 1% give you antiserum, you could get everyone under their thumbs.

Then there's the part where you've got three groups in your society. There are the new-minted peasants. They know too much, but you're oppressing them and you've taken all their materials away so maybe they're controllable until generational time makes them ignorant. There are the new oligarchs, who know too much and are almost certainly not going to keep to the prohibitions, so don't count on them to forget...but they're on top of the world, so maybe they'll refrain from breaking it. And then there's the people who actually made it happen. The muscle, if nothing else, but also anyone else who managed to be deemed too valuable to turn into peasants. (The gunmen get that automatically, on account that they'll certainly shoot their bosses before they'll enslave themselves.) How do you control them, and their descendants?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Uh. What's the difference?

Comprehension. Find a small child or a fairly uneducated person, and tell them to read a difficult passage. They can literally sound out the words, but good luck when you ask them what it means.

In addition, without the level of communication we have today, language will degenerate and you will get "old english" type comprehension problems.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Comprehension. Find a small child or a fairly uneducated person, and tell them to read a difficult passage. They can literally sound out the words, but good luck when you ask them what it means.

You said mere paragraphs, not words.

Also, reading comprehension as distinct from just understanding the words...sure, but unlike literacy, I don't think that's really a thing that needs to be handed down.

Originally Posted by ericthered

In addition, without the level of communication we have today, language will degenerate and you will get "old english" type comprehension problems.

Do you mean development of mutually non-intelligible dialects? That'll happen eventually if there's little enough contact, but probably not fast.

[Ji ji]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

...However, I think you'd be pretty likely to exterminate the species there. 70 milion 4-year-olds worldwide have to survive to adulthood on their own and then manage to form breeding populations?

4 years old are not totally uncapable. I think that, in an ambient with little natural hazards (like our western world), food supplied for years and years in the form of conserves (these children know what is a supermarket), building to shelter them from cold... A minor part of them can survive enough to become adult, learning to look after themselves.

This story is "luckily, somebody managed to survive". Even if there was the possibility (among every other) that they all died, this just didn't happened ;)

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Ji ji

This story is "luckily, somebody managed to survive". Even if there was the possibility (among every other) that they all died, this just didn't happened ;)

Along the same lines, a point I always make in these discussions is that if nobody in the setting knows exactly how it got that way, you as the setting designer don't have to put much thought into it either. The story is about this setting, not the fine details of its past. If you are going with this background "everybody old enough to read dropped dead, a few children luckily managed to survive to grow up" is all the work you need to do on it. Don't waste effort thinking about mechanisms for doing that or exact numbers or what the odds any particular child survives are, they don't matter you the story anyway.

[Cornelius]

Well, I'm afraid you're seeing the problem from a first world prospective. There are large parts of the world where people is far less depending from technology than us. Usually this means shorter and nastier lives, but in your scenario they would recover much faster than the first world people.


A solution could be moving the whole scenario in the far future.

The higher they are, the harder they fall.

The human race has mostly left Earth for the deep space, leaving only a minority of enhanced humans on the planet.
These Eloi would live a life of pleasure and bliss, served by robots (or genetically enginnered biodroids) and slowly forgetting the hard won knowledge of their fathers. On the other hand why bother when it's easier to ask a robot?
The Earth would have been restored to a pristine state, maybe resurrecting old species exticed in the past (like in TH). Only The great monuments would be spared, or maybe the Eloi would have ancient cities from the past rebuild for their fun (Augustus' Rome, Pericles' Athen, victorian London, Wu Ming 5' Neo Aztlan...).
One day, the machines suddendly stop working, the biodroids die or go wild into the forests and the robots slowly stutter to an halt, trying to impart some knowledge, some pratical knowledge to their helpless masters...

Jack Vance wrote many tales on these themes (a couple won Hugo awards). Also Robert Silverberg's Sailing to Byzantium, an Hugo award too, could be interesting (the whole tale just shouts "adapt me to a rolegame!"). You could also check out Olympus by Dan Simmons.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Cornelius

Well, I'm afraid you're seeing the problem from a first world prospective. There are large parts of the world where people is far less depending from technology than us. Usually this means shorter and nastier lives, but in your scenario they would recover much faster than the first world people.

The Amish spring to mind.