A common theme of films like Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Melancholia, Deep Impact, Children of Men, On the Beach and others deals with the ramifications of the impending end of the world.
So the question is this. How much notice for the impending and unavoidable end of the world would cause civilization to shut down?
I’m not talking so much about people running around screaming, trying to avoid tsunamis and falling skyscrapers or survivors sifting through the ashes of their ruined civilization. I mean a scenario where everything is pretty much normal, except that bright star in the sky that gets a bit brighter every day.
On the one hand, people don’t seem too concerned about the sun swallowing up the Earth in a few million years. OTOH, if we found out an asteroid the size of Texas was going to smash into the Earth on Tuesday, not too many people would show up to work on Monday.
A year would make people think they had time to find a solution. So maybe 1 week to 1 month from announcement. But perhaps if we knew total destruction was coming in a week or a few days, maybe most people would make a different choice than rioting and stay mostly calm and spend time with their families and friends and/or get really, really religious.
I’ll take drug fuelled orgies over rioting, spending time with my family, or religion. Especially since I’ll have to put up with #3 if I do #2, and it’d probably end in violence anyway.
This is more or less the premise of the novel The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters. The world gets about a year’s warning that an Extinction Level Event asteroid collision is going to occur. Society is slowly coming apart as more and more people decide there’s no point in following routine anymore. The title character is facing the dilemma of solving a murder when it’s debatable what good it would do.