Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

[DCB]

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.

How about a toxic meme? In essence, the neurological patterns involved in comprehending this idea interact badly with certain hard-wired parts of the brain, leading to negative outcomes; for example, a feedback loop in the language wiring that leads to increasingly worse seizures.

Make the idea simple enough that it can fit on billboards, but complex enough that it requires reading rather than just pictures. The result is that everyone who can read - or who later learns to read any of the old languages - dies. That should offer long-term suppression of old knowledge, while still allowing enough of the support structure to survive (blind or illiterate adults) to remove worries about anyone surviving the transition period.

This would have lesser effects in less-developed parts of the world, but there are options for that (e.g., set it far enough in the future that literacy is near-universal; make it a deliberate attack that comes after a curable-but-expensive disease attack; have it transmitted by sound as well so only the deaf and illiterate survive; etc.).

Without this kind of ongoing suppression, though, it seems likely that people (a) with knowledge of what reading is, (b) surrounded by useful knowledge in written form, and (c) able to find books/tapes/etc. meant to bootstrap the learning-to-read process among that knowledge would learn to read that knowledge sooner or later.


A second alternative is to have people actively attempt to eradicate technology, perhaps due to blaming it for a terrible disaster (e.g., nuclear war); that's the setup for "A Canticle for Leibowitz".

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by DCB

How about a toxic meme? In essence, the neurological patterns involved in comprehending this idea interact badly with certain hard-wired parts of the brain, leading to negative outcomes; for example, a feedback loop in the language wiring that leads to increasingly worse seizures.

I'd put toxic memes into the category of "magic", especially ones with such a dramatic effect. They can be interesting (the Neal Stephenson book Snowcrash is a great example) but they are ultimately unbelievable. Of course, we may need to resort to magic to make this scenario work.

A second alternative is to have people actively attempt to eradicate technology, perhaps due to blaming it for a terrible disaster (e.g., nuclear war); that's the setup for "A Canticle for Leibowitz".

I think this is a much more believable situation, though I'd only seeing it coming about after the infrastructure has already collapsed. People are generally resistant to change, so conservative ideologies fight against new technology... but they also fight to keep the status quo, so would be unlikely to intentionally abandon working technology. If society has already been battered down to TL0, those who benefit from keeping it there may fight to do so.

[starslayer]

What if the disease actually caused the lost knowledge. Some sort of brain infection that literally wipes all active knowledge from all humans on the planet resetting us to muscle memories only (an airborne version of syphilis might be able to do it, some sort of new bacteria or virus that hosts in the brain and mimics the action of the neuron release hormones would do it it too). Most people die in horrible starvation (even though they might have cans of food right in front of them they don't know to open it), no one can communicate with one another, everything is new and scary, people don't know who there children are, or parents are.

Some people are immune, like with any disease, but they are fleetingly rare, just enough to make sure that society does not completely die out. If you want to make it ironic make people who are fundamentally flawed in some way be the immune, like say- those with MS are unaffected by the virus because there brains are already under constant autoimmune assault.

The disease lasts a few generations with multiple full force 'resets' for the infected, before mankind adapts and becomes immune (this would mean that the few who were immune from the get go are now dead, and they may never have found another immune individual to pass on there knowledge to).

Everything is forgotten, but a lot of the stuff might still be there. Now that the disease is largely in regression things are going to advance, and quickly; but for the scope of the game you can have whatever mix of 'rediscovered' technology you like (Just expect that the PCs are going to 'discover' a lot of things you were not expecting them to do so by pointing out how simple it would be).

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Yorunkun

I would like to get some feedback on a particular kind of Post-Apocalypse setting I have been thinking about. It’s nothing to do with PSI, Mutants or Mad-Max-type survival-porn. Rather, its about a primitive agrarian society reemerging after a near-total collapse of civilization. There’s a 1937 genre-text called “By the Waters of Babylon”, by Stephen Vincent Benét that captures the spirit pretty well.

This forum has had a very informative 2009 discussion on the PA genre in general. In it, Kromm amongst others, argued that society would be unlikely to still be so far in regress such a long time after the extinction event. I’m hoping we could come up with conditions that would make this plausible.

The hard part is making the regression happen in the first place. Keeping society there is much, much easier and more plausible. Historically, slow change and slow technological advancement, even in circumstances where other possibilities exist, is the norm. Based on real human history, it's probably safe to say that the necessary social, political, cultural, and religious conditions for fast technological advance only come together occasionally.

Here’s what I envision:

- A world still largely devoid of people, Tl0/1 agrarian tribes
- Our world still climatically / geographically recogniseable, but shot through with large stretches of wilderness and most past infrastructure /material culture decayed or useless
- no knowledge of society before the collapse event or the event itself in living memory; this is at least the fourth or fifth generation after X, if not more

Depending on how you define 'devoid of people' that's easy. By modern standards, the world of TL0 was almost devoid of people, the total global population was tiny. Yet that tiny group of humans managed to have a very significant impact on the environment and to interact over large distances.

If by 'wilderness' you mean places that could be used by humans, but are not, you probably need to assume that some aspect of the downfall made them unusable for long periods, and they're only lately accessible again. Otherwise, somebody would probably have used them for something.

The infrastructure will fall apart quickly wihout skilled maintenance, except for things like roads, which will fall apart slowly. Even after the pavement is a broken mass of gravel and trees, the path of old roads would still represent some of the easiest travel routes and old mountain cuts and the like would provide routes through otherwise hard-to-pass terrain for a very, very long time. Such sites might well become strategically valuable.

The 'no knowledge' part probably requires something verging on magic, unless you put it way, way, way off in the future. If nothing else, there'll be legends and myths. Heck, the myths would continue to propagate and mutate for millennia, everything else being equal. When technological civilization finally did return, even after thousands of years, you'd see mythologists and the like theorizing about our world the way fringers talk about Atlantis and Lemruria today, only with more evidence. A few things from our world will be almost immortal.

If you want an example of something that might inspire them, that could last a while, waterworks. The actual dams and support systems would soon quit working right without maintenance, but the remnants would be recognizable as the 'water works of the gods', so to speak, for a long time. They might not be salvageable but they might inspire things.

[Yorunkun]

Originally Posted by starslayer

What if the disease actually caused the lost knowledge. (...)

That's actually the path I'm pursuing at the moment. A global pandemic that attacks nerve and brain cells, similar to rabies. Spreads like influenza (sneezing and coughing), long latency (1 to 2 years), barely noticeable onset but high, lasting infectivity ... and leads to slow but incurable brain decay.

IMO, this would not only wipe out a large enough number of people to interrupt the functioning of society, it would also burden the few who escape or turn out to be immune with a growing number of demented infected who use up resources and cause all kinds of trouble for at least a generation, maybe more.

I reckon this would actually be worse than 99.999% of the population just dropping dead.

Again, thanks all for the replies; keep 'em coming.

[Ed the Coastie]

Originally Posted by starslayer

What if the disease actually caused the lost knowledge. Some sort of brain infection that literally wipes all active knowledge from all humans on the planet resetting us to muscle memories only (an airborne version of syphilis might be able to do it, some sort of new bacteria or virus that hosts in the brain and mimics the action of the neuron release hormones would do it it too). Most people die in horrible starvation (even though they might have cans of food right in front of them they don't know to open it), no one can communicate with one another, everything is new and scary, people don't know who there children are, or parents are.

If memory serves (pun intended), that is similar to what had happened in the anime A Wind Named Amnesia.

I second the reference to Earth Abides; it was the first thing I thought of when I started reading this thread.

I have also used the "young children survive" idea in a past game. Specifically, I was rewriting the old AD&D Expedition to the Barrier Peaks adventure module and changed the vegepygmies into the descendants of what had originally been toddlers in a couple of automated nurseries; the plague that had scythed through the ship did not affect anyone who had not yet reached puberty, but the older children (who were in "school" in the ship's library at the time) either fell prey to the insane adults or were taken from the ship by an android teacher in an attempt to save them.

[DCB]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

I'd put toxic memes into the category of "magic"

YMMV, but I would argue that they're at least as plausible as FTL drives, reactionless thrusters, and many other common tropes of SF.

Briefly, we'd need two things for this to work:
1) A set of sensory inputs that shut down a brain.
2) The ability to use that attack against all brains.

#1 is perfectly realistic -- epileptic seizures can be triggered by flashing lights.

#2 is the stretch; however, we know that there are components which have significant similarity across human brains (e.g., visual cortex, language centres) so it's perfectly realistic to assume all human brains have aspects which are functionally the same. It's not unreasonable on the face of it to imagine that there are structural flaws in these brain regions which could lead to abnormal signals and thus seizures.

Moreover, an attack which operates at least in part via language and thought has the benefit that it will be inherently adapted to the target brain, making the need for a shared structural vulnerability less stringent at the cost of making the attack more broad-ranging and complex.

Either way, the components needed for this are largely realistic, with the unknown parts buried deep inside what we don't know about brain function. For all we know, this is actually possible; I'd certainly consider it plausible enough for a background setting detail, though.


A bigger problem, IMHO, is that this kind of information/brain hackery gives the setting a definite feel, due to the style of writing it's associated with. It feels different to have the apocalypse caused by a valiant but failed struggle against the aftermath of war and disease than to have it caused by people just falling over because humans are weak.

I think this is a much more believable situation, though I'd only seeing it coming about after the infrastructure has already collapsed.

I consider it much less believable, personally. Unless tech was destroyed everywhere, the scenario we're looking for wouldn't work (as the enclaves which kept their tech would dominate the ones which had destroyed theirs), and that level of cultural homogeneity for such an extreme behaviour strains my suspension of disbelief.

IMHO, getting the whole world to behave in the same -- highly extreme, highly self-destructive -- manner all at the same time doesn't sound that different from a toxic meme, but one that drives people to behave in complex ways, rather than one which just does, essentially, a buffer-overflow attack on the brain.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by DCB

It's not unreasonable on the face of it to imagine that there are structural flaws in these brain regions which could lead to abnormal signals and thus seizures.

I'll just leave this story link here.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Ji ji

4 years old are not totally uncapable.

More specifically, my four year old can read simple words and understands how to sound things out. She's not good at it, but she has the idea, and she's not unusual. Reading will survive. Some books will survive. A whole bunch of scrap metal, domesticated animals/crops, and durable hand tools will be lying around. TL 0 reversion from where we are now is hard.

I think both the "far future" and "mental affliction" approaches have merit.

How about:

In the future, humanity lives an idyllic existence serviced by nanotech "hives." Except some people are jerks, and some Super Jerk designs a nanobot to circumvent the safeguards, infect everyone else and pseudo-lobotomize them. The resulting animalistic people are well taken care of by the hives, and used as meat puppets by said Jerk, at least until the unfortunate raspberry trifle accident.

A few thousand years later, the (very robust, but not impervious) hives start breaking down. This is initially a gradual process, so the high end stuff like the Lobotimizer goes first, resulting in a few generations of intelligent humans in an idyllic Eden that feeds, protects, and unpredictably grants the odd wish but is otherwise unresponsive. Then it all goes bad as the safeguards finally fail and the nanotech starts melting folks, starting fires, and reducing large parts of the landscape into exceptionally fertile potting soil.

Clueless and traumatized refugees from a low knowlege utopia are eventually left to repopulate the earth.

A few dozen generations later, the global water management system, which no one alive had any clue about, failed spectacularly.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by starslayer

What if the disease actually caused the lost knowledge. Some sort of brain infection that literally wipes all active knowledge from all humans on the planet resetting us to muscle memories only (an airborne version of syphilis might be able to do it, some sort of new bacteria or virus that hosts in the brain and mimics the action of the neuron release hormones would do it it too). Most people die in horrible starvation (even though they might have cans of food right in front of them they don't know to open it), no one can communicate with one another, everything is new and scary, people don't know who there children are, or parents are.

I am vaguely recalling some SF story where a human is asking ultratech aliens for help with humanity being about to destroy itself and they offer to cause something like this. Not quite as bad, I think people would be able open cans for food and use guns till they broke or there was no more ammunition. But they would not be able to grow or process more food or make new ammunition.

But the human thinks this is too extreme and tries a third option of some kind.