If all other humans died, could you travel from...?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve had an idea for an extended thought experiment, the genesis of which might have something to do with watching “The Amazing Race 5”. Though it involves a lot of speculation, some of the questions generated will be factual, so I think I can start it in GQ. Here goes:

If all other human beings in the world were killed this instant, (say a powerful, malevolent alien does this as a challenge to you) would you be able to get from point A to within X meters of B in time T? (Hopefully the reward for doing so includes the restoration of the world to its state just before the PMA killed everyone). For what values of A, X, B, T is the task feasible?

I don’t think it makes that much difference if all others vanish, or die. The latter condition seems a bit harder to me, if only from a psycholgical aspect.

How about from A=Los Angeles to B=New York in T= one week? (The distance X is not needed for the first examples I discuss). I think this is feasible. You need a car, gas, roads, food and water. Getting a car will be easy. The roads will be littered with crashed vehicles, but you will have the only moving one. Thus in daylight, driving east on I-10, you may see a car in the road, but you know it won’t be moving, so you can pass it easily enough if there is room. How long will the electricity in L.A. and the rest of the country be on? I know there are humans who monitor the power grid. There will be some plane crashes and other accidents caused when all other humans die at the start of the problem. Will these cause instabilites in the power grid? It seems possible to me that credit-card transactions might go through for a few hours or days. You could then fill up at a credit-card gas pump just as you do now. Even without electricity, I think you would learn in a day or two what kind of wrench you need to open up a storage tank at a gas station. You could then get gas with a bucket and a rope, no? If power is gone, fresh food will be gone after a few weeks, but I think you might be able to eat filet mignon this whole trip. Couldn’t stuff last that long in a walk-in freezer?

Could LA-NY be done in 3 days? It is about 5000 km, so you would have to average 70 km/hr.

Manhattan - Newark in an hour? I can’t drive a motorcycle. I think that would be better than a car, because the bridges and tunnels will be clogged with stalled cars. A bicycle would take too long.

If my ideas about food and gasoline are correct, could you do LA - Mexico City in a month?

I guess for some values of T the season will make a difference. I don’t think LA - Montreal in a month starting on December 1 would be possible. Perhaps if you could find and learn to drive a snow plow?

LA to Buenos Aires?in less than a year? I know the Trans-American highway goes down the west of South America. Is there a highway across the Andes?

Ok, how about somewhere not connected by land to North America, say, LA to Hawaii in a year? The question is by plane or by ship? If ship, what kind, sailboat or power? A sailboat takes less fuel. It is lower-tech , so it might be easier to learn. I have done some sailing (but not blue-water sailing) and driven a water-skiing boat, and I can’t decide right now which I would use. With power boats you have a lot of choice in size. What’s the largest boat that one person can operate? Could a Naval engineer (trained to do so) operate the USS Ronald Reagan by herself? An Arleigh Burke class destroyer? It usually has 20 officers 300 enlisted men.

Assuming you can find an ocean-worthy ship, are there any spots on the surface of the earth you could not get to? I think the answer is yes.

A= Kathmandu, T=infinite, B=The top of Mt. Everest, X=0 , seems impossible to me. No training, no porters. You’d have to find your own equipment.

Even with X set high enough to avoid mountain climbing, I think you still have to learn how to fly to get to the South Pole, or anywhere in Antarctica. I know Scott and Amundsen did it with only dog sleds, but remember there are no other people to help.

(Mentioning dogs makes me think of the other animals in the world. They will all survive the initial kill-off of humans. For long trips, will large predatory animals be a problem? )

Can a person teach themself to fly the kind of aircraft necessary to cross thousands of miles of ocean or ice cap? I think a non-pilot could learn to fly a Cessna 150. You would have access to plenty of written materials. Unlike the pioneers of aviation, you would have confidence that the plane was capable of stable flight. The problem would be progressing to more complicated planes. Plenty of people died learning to fly more advanced planes, and there are no instructors are around.

What would be the optimal course of self-(flight)-instruction if you were going to attempt to fly from LA to Sydney, Australia? I would guess a 747 is too complicated. The range of an older technology plane such as a Catalina PBY (flying boat) is only 2500 mi. Maybe you could tow it behind your ship, or hoist it aboard if you are taking the Ronald Reagan. To fly to the South Pole, you might need something like a C-130.

The South Pole is my pick for the hardest spot on the surface of the earth to get to. Would something like Kinshasa-Urumuchi be harder than L.A. - South Pole?

Some other places where humans have been that are not on the surface of the earth, such as the Moon, or the Mariana Trench seem impossible. Every spot more than 100m. deep in the ocean is impossible unless a single person can learn to operate a submarine (the complement of an SSN is around 150).

Comments?

2

Everest might be possible with a lot of luck. Reinhold Messner managed a solo ascent in 1980, but even then he’d had porters to carry equipment partway up, and almost certainly had a lot of help getting base camp supplied with everything he’d need. You’d have to spend a lot of time carrying supplies up to base camp (17,000 feet), and then a lot more time shuttling up and down the mountain carrying supplies up to your camp points. Lot of time to acclimatize yourself, I guess.

3

You’re gonna have a lot of trouble with the Darien Gap.

Yep, Flo’s shrieking could definitely kill everyone in a 10,000 mile radius. :smiley: Oh wait, that was Season 3.

4

I have no real idea but in the height of the nutty cold war, we were told we were ever so safe from the big bad world all the way down here. It was a nice thought.

5

Problem is if the Big Bad Thing happens during rush hour - you won’t be able to go around any cars because there won’t be room to do so. You might make more progress riding a bicycle out to the 'burbs and picking up a motorized vehicle on the outskirts of civilization, where the traffic jam won’t be so bad.

Yeah, it would be worth a try, at least.

Or just siphon gas out of all those non-moving vehicles you pass.

As long the door remains closed, yes, the food inside a refrigerator or freezer will remain edible for a couple days to possibly a week.

It would be a stretch but yes, with the right vehicle and no major delays.

Going LA-Hawaii under those circumstances… um, probably a boat would be your best bet. It is certainly possible to do the distance in an airplane, but not just any airplane will do. It already takes what, 5-6 hours to go that distance in a 747? In a smaller airplane - because you won’t be able to safely get the 747 aloft by yourself - it will take even longer and you won’t be able to stop halfway. Well, maybe if you take a seaplane… but then you have problem of fuel supply and so forth.

Sailboats may be low-tech, but they take some significant skill to cross oceans solo. How good a sailor are you? Power boats seem to be more “point-and-go” but then, again, you have the issues of supplies and fuel.

There is a serious navigation problem involved here - if you miss the islands you’re in deep doo-doo. GPS should continue to run for some time after the Big Bad Thing, but eventually it will fail so don’t wait too long to get started.

Um… yes, it is possible. Although for long distance travel of the sort you contemplate I’d suggest a C-172 - they fly much the same but have better cargo capacity.

Until the power went out you’d also have access to the video ground-school courses - I’d check out the local libraries.

Some of us already know how to fly :smiley:

Thing is, although it’s possible to teach yourself to fly, the penalty for mistakes can be quite dear. While the average human being is capable of learning to fly, I’m not sure the average human being would survive self-instruction. If you learned to handle the C-172 sort of airplane, going up to more complicated ones would be hazardous - as an example, the landing characteristics of, say, a Piper Arrow or Mooney (which are still relatively simple, piston-engine, propellor-driven airplanes) are significantly different. Enough so that attempting to switch to them from a Cessna without proper instruction could easily kill you. Possible to make that jump self-taught? In theory, yes, but again, I doubt the average human being would be able to do this alone.

I think a boat would be safer.

However… this is as much a navigation problem as a flight problem. If you have time, a route that keeps you over land as much as possible would be better than a straight shot over open water, for reasons of safety, navigation, and re-supply.

Yes.

It is possible to map a route that never has an open water route longer than 2500 miles. You don’t have to shoot straight across the Pacific - go up the northwest coast of North America, over the Bering Straight into Asia, down the east coast of that continent, island hop through all those islands between Asia and Australia… That’s how you do round-the-world trips in small aircraft. Like I said, this a good part navigation problem - the most direct route on a map isn’t always the one that will get you where you need to go.

Nope. I know folks have traversed Antartica in RV-6’s - that’s a relatively simple two-seat airplane with fixed gear, they cruise about 200 mph, and are about the same size as the Cessna 150 you mentioned. But I think you’d need to modify them for extended-range fuel tanks - modifying airplanes as a do-it-yourself project can be as hazardous as learning to fly them on your own, try to find one already modified if you can.

Og help you if you have a break-down, though.

The way I see it, a lot of the problems in your scenario are things like navigation and being utterly without help if you’re hurt or your vehicle breaks down or you get lost. Nor will you have the advantage of modern weather forecasting anymore - you could easily blunder into bad weather that could kill you.

6

If I die, you cease to exist; you’re just a figment of my imagination you know.

Feral animals would be a problem, but maybe not until they had nearly finished eating their all the dead humans. If your scenario is that the malevolent aliens foop the other humans out of existence, rather than just rendering them dead, then the stray dogs might well be after your juicy flesh in a matter of days.

7

Well if it was me I would take a motorcycle, mine actually. But for you, or others, it wouldn’t be that hard to get an SUV or other 4x4. Then goto the hardware store get as many gas cans as you can, then head off to the gas station. I don’t know why you would worry about paying for the gas though, most should allow you to pay with cash then just drive off. You must be worried someone’s going to come after you.

Anyway, most of the highways have plenty of shoulders so you really shouldn’t have much of a problem of getting around people. Every few hours stop at a gas station and see if you can still fill up there, no need to waste your gas yet.

I would say yes, pretty easy too. There would be no cops so the speed wouldn’t matter much, especially in the west and mid-west, it’s very open out there and a lot of times you can go for miles without seeing anyone. It would be pretty easy to make time there. I would say you could easily run 160-200kmh for hours on end.

A month? I’m guessing customs might be a problem. :wink: I dont know the distance but I’m pretty sure it’s not much more if any further the NYC from LA. The problem from what I understand is bad roads.

Honestly I don’t know why you couldn’t get an oil tanker or something else really big like that. They can go for days without the need for fuel, and for the most part they are pretty stable. You would have to find one that was out in the deeper part of the water though, I wouldn’t want to learn in a channel and I wouldn’t care one bit about it getting ruined.

GPS shouldn’t be a problem for months at least, they have their own power, and for now they are not going to just fall out of orbit. After a few months they might start moving, but who cares you’ll still get within even a mile or so of where you wanted to go.

I’m going to say that I could probably get from anywhere in North America, if they had roads so don’t stick me in the middle of Canada, to Panama pretty easy in a couple of weeks.

8

One of my favorite books; deals with this issue, and actually contains two cross country trips, post apacolypse. It’s a little dated in that gasoline was easier to get out of the storage tanks, but the cars were not as reliable as today either.

9

I think it would be virtually impossible to get up Everest completely by yourself, with nobody to carry supplies up to base camp, etc.
Perhaps if a) the Big Bad Thing happened in the middle of the climbing season, so there is a ton of supplies at base camp, four or five advance camps already established, and lots of fixed ropes alread in place, and b) you were an experienced high-altitude climber and c) you were already in base camp or close enough to get there before the short climbing season ends.
Otherwise, I don’t see it happening, even with a lot of motivation. There’s just too much carrying of supplies, fixing routes, carrying more supplies, etc. for one person to do at altitude in the short period before the weather becomes too bad.

10

FTR, the record for the drive from Ushuaia on Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow Alaska is, IIRC, 24 days. The journey is recounted in the book Road Fever. Granted, that was a trip with the backing of many large companies, but you’d still have to deal with banditos and government officals looking for bribes. With that out of the way the trip is pretty smooth assuming you can, as pointed out earlier, navigate the Darien Gap.

11

But the Everest trip was t=infinite
So one year you haul supplies to camp 1, then spend the winter lower down
next year haul some of the supplies from camp 1 to camp 2
Etc.

Now this requires non perishable suplles and living years on your own but otherwise doable. (assuming you have the skills)

Brian

12

I’ve done little flying but enough to know that is very unlikely. A Cessna 150 isn’t difficult to fly as planes go, that’s why it’s a good trainer. Despite the impression that 9/11 gave, Microsoft flight sim will not fully prepare you. You have to get everything right the first time you do it. A complete novice might be able to take off and maybe do turns without overbanking into a death spiral but if you auger in on your first landing there is no reset button.

This raises safety as a big issue. If you get seriously injured in any situation you can’t expect 911 to do any good and if your car breaks down in a desolate stretch in a Western state that AAA card in your wallet is nothing more than an ice scraper.

13

Flying a plane might be made more difficult than it is now, depending on what navigational equipment was still available. GPS can probably function without human intervention for a while, but would eventually become inaccurate without time correction signals from Earth. Traditional radio navigational methods might soon fail without humans around to maintain them, and would fail once the electricity went out. With GPS, you wouldn’t really need them, but not having ILS might make it difficult to land if the weather is bad at your destination (and your fuel-siphoning stops, if the plane’s range isn’t large enough).

Operating a naval submarine alone would probably be impossible, but remember that naval submarines can’t dive all that deep. Research submarines like Alvin and the Mir submersibles in Titanic can dive much deeper and have a crew of around 3. I think only one pilot is necessary to operate these submersibles.

14

The problem is this doesn’t work so well when the winter storms will either obliterate or bury camp2. Not to mention that camp2 is on a glacier, and will be in a different place next year.

15

What’s all this landing stuff I keep reading about? If landing is too tough, couldn’t you just parachute out of the plane and let the plane keep going and crash miles away from you? Not like you have to worry about accidentally killing anyone if it crashes in a populated area…

16

And while we’re at it, what’s all this talk about climbing mountains? I’m not doing this for the sport, exercise, or bragging rights. If I want to get to the top of Everest, I’m flying there. Yes, flying (for someone who doesn’t know how) is dangerous, but I’d have to think that it’d be safer than trying a completely solo ascent of Everest.

17

The main problem experienced explorer types have had with the Darien Gap is that it’s been a nest of drug gangs and kidnappings. The Big Bad Thing scenario would make it an easier trip, especially as you weren’t exactly going to be reliant on human contact in that area to begin with.

18

You could get gas as long as there is power available. After that, good luck getting the pump to work, although you might be able to get siphoning action out of the main underground tanks if you can get them open. You don’t even need to worry about the credit card–just walk into the station and set the pump using the register (assuming there is still power of course. Without power, see the earlier point.)

You’d probably be better off switching cars, assuming you can find ones with a fairly full tank. And it’d get dicey in several parts of the country, especially in the West. I’d suggest staying on the interstates and off the back roads so that you aren’t as likely to get stuck without gas and not being able to change cars.

19

It’s about 1500 miles (as the crow flies). So say a total route of 2000 miles. Hell, you could do that in a couple of months, as a scenic cycle ride.

20

Err… no, flying is the same, finding your way is harder.

If the weather is bad enough to require an ILS, you’re better off on the ground. If you’re making this sort of trip, unless you are an extremely experienced instrument pilot, you have no business flying in anything but fine weather.

Well, for starters, if you do that you

  1. can’t ever use the airplane again
  2. parachuting can be dangerous, too
  3. either way, in airplane or under canopy, you have to do the landing right the first time and every time thereafter
  4. parachutes require proper maintenance and use as well.

By switching to parachute you’ve somewhat modified the problem, but not really eliminated it. To be specific, you still have the problem of how to impact the Earth as gently as possible, or at least gently enough to retain the use of your various body parts afterward.