Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

[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.

[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 ;)

[Jonas]

Originally Posted by Ji ji

Our technological world is build over hyper-specialization and ultra complex mansion network.

Society in general has been built upon specialization since it first came into being, its the primary reason for its existence and yes did even exist in the stone age.

However, let's imagine that, after a total catastrophe, humanity can return to medium TL in few generation. We can follow a total different fantastic path to obtain a TL1 world in near future.

*Cracks Knuckles*
Alright, lets begin.

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.

Lethality is only part of the picture. You also have to consider transmission vectors, incubation period, lethality period, treatment options, and natural resistance or immunity, and quarantine among other factors and many of them actually hurt others. In short its impossible for the disease you've postulated to actually exist outside of poorly written post-apoc fiction.

Another fatal flaw in your set up is the age of the survivors since at 4 years old one is not able to take care of themselves and are dependent on older humans for survival. So even hand waiving away the impossibility of such a disease existing outside of a Wizard or Alien Space Bats actively meddling in things you've just killed off your young survivors as well by removing their only means of support. Congratulations you now have your TL0 society just with whatever creatures manage to take up humanities mantel as a sapient, self aware species of tool users.

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.

No one would survive given the setup as described above but for the sake of argument lets assume that due to the aformentioned ASB's they do. As of 2010 the estimated world population four years or younger is ~619,208,543 so thus a .1% survival rate to adulthood would give a total survivor population of 6,192,085.43 rounded down to 6,192,085 as you can't have a partial person. While fairly tiny its estimated that the lowest population number of humans was around 10,000 based on examinations of the human genome and thus should be eventually recoverable.

I'd try taking a stab at possible recovery times using the population worksheet included in the so far only apocalypse themed Pyramid issue but there's a number of assumptions I'd have to make to the point the results would be worthless.

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.

Assuming they managed to survive long enough to start the slow process of rebuilding from such a low level eventually they'd probably crack the meaning just as we ourselves have done with many ancient and otherwise dead languages. Especially given they'd possibly be speaking a dialect descended from said languages even if they don't know it at the time.

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.

There wouldn't even be a first generation given the senarioes setup, though taking it at face value (along with a boatload of suspension of disbelive) yest they would return to a stone age level.

It seems to me, Jonas, that you are a bit too optimist, Jules Verne-style :D

More like a realist who's actually examined this sort of thing for some time as an amateur and understands at least to some degree the actual problems involved

[Ji ji]

Ok, let's continue with the match.

The odd, unlikely disease is the main point of the story. I've proposed its guidelines; I'm sure that an epidemiologist can tweak details to fit the base idea. The effort have to lead to satisfy the conditions: no person above four can survive.

If we can satisfy these conditions, there are no further problems.

1. children depending on adult to survive. Anthropological and linguistic literature bring us examples of 4-years-old that manage to survive in wilderness, completely alone, without technology, caregivers and even contemporaries. It's nearly impossible that, over millions of children, no one reaches reproductive age. And the situation we're foreshadowing is not a single children in wilderness.

2. dead languages cracking was and is performed by persons that are able to read and know the basis of writing (to say it better: by persons that know the basis, that know every aspect of linguistic and that dedicate the largest part of life to decript dead languages). I know examples from linguistics literature of persons that use signs they don't understand to create new languages (for example, using T letter for the ch syllable). People that, knowing that others can write ideas or sounds, creates new sets of signs and related writing rules for their own languages.
I can't remember of persons that can't write and read but decode existing signs set (nor that decode other languages; a growing children society will develop a creol, that is a new language, and not a dialect directly descending from the original).
Language is an istinct hard-wired in neural structures. Writing is not.

On linguistic and language ontogenetic development I'm not an amateur but a professionist; I believe that, when I claim that a similar society can't decrypt previous writing, I've got solid bases. So on ethology and possibilities of specie continuity by 4-years-old.
I'm definitely not a professionist on epidemiology, so I have to trust on better authorities to support the odd disease. On this matter, I let speaking the experts.

[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.

[Dustin]

Originally Posted by Yorunkun

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.

It might be sufficient, for purposes of your campaign, for the near-total collapse you're looking for to be local. Perhaps knowledge of higher TL was retained better elsewhere, and is being exploited there, but local conditions are such that the fall was nigh absolute, and the recovery hasn't reached here yet.

[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.