No real spoilers expected here, I think, but some broad facts about the world of the film will be discussed.
Suppose that every plant and non-human animal on Earth died in the course of just a few minutes. How long could humankind survive afterwards?
In the film, the big problem is procuring food. How long could we last on all the food that exists right now (including… you know… people meat… and I guess you have to estimate how many people will resort to that method of nutrition…)
I wonder also, though, how long our oxygen would last.
BTW (very minor spoiler alert) the film (I don’t know about the book) seems a slight bit inconsistent on this, as it’s stated that no animals survived, but later on it seems that at least some dogs survived. So maybe it was just supposed to be understood that “almost no animals survived” but anyway, for this thread, I figure we can pretend all animals died.
But, yeah: we die off, fast. The first winter will see one hell of a famine. This will lead to war, which will just hasten the dying. After the second winter, there isn’t anything like “civilization” left at all. Then it’s just repeated decimations, year after year. The very last few guys might kick the bucket fifteen, twenty, maybe even thirty years down the road. But 99.99% die in the first two years.
ETA: I think we die of other causes before the lack of oxygen replenishment in the atmosphere becomes seriously noticeable.
Though I’m sure the oceans in the book were impacted as well, I think they’d hold out against a die off better than the land. Loads of ocean life made it through the Cretaceous-Paleogen extinction event. If you could scavenge enough resources to start a fishing/canning operation, you could last. It could even be sail and oar powered if fuel was out of the question.
Failing that, I think the operations that grow mushrooms in caves would be running strong.
I wonder how quickly synthetic food production could come online. They can already make artificial proteins and fats in the lab. It seems like a reasonable people-chow could be created completely artificially.
Would we still have electricty? We can grow plants indoors. Lots of mary jane is grown under lamps and never sees the sun.
I would think there would be some communities that would be able to get this going pretty quickly. How long they would last would be determined by how long they could defend themselves from outside attacks and how long the equipment lasted. They could probably use existing equipment, but might not know how to make new equipment.
Shesh, that line just gave me the shivers in a way even the book didn’t (I haven’t seen the movie).
Its like the sensation I got when reading about how the last Neanderthals are believed to have been pushed to a network of caves at the very tip of what is now Spain.
Imagine being one of the last of your kind, looking out over the ocean and knowing that when you die your entire people is gone.
btw I’m currently reading ‘Swan Song’ by Robert R. McCammon which posits a global nuclear war with similarly apocalyptic results, the story is currently set seven years after the exchange with a total nuclear winter and most plant and animal life having died off. The characters in the story seem to be doing OK though. I question the authors scientific accuracy but wow does he know how to craft an image.
How can you grow plants indoors when all the plants are dead?
Of course the premise as stated is ridiculous. There is nothing that could kill all plants and animals that wouldn’t kill all humans as well. The classic explanation for such things is “Alien Space Bats”–some implausible event happens, and even though the catastrophe would require some sort of purposeful direction–something did this to us on purpose–there is no way for the people involved in the catastrophe to ever find out how or why the catastrophe happened. So explaining the how and why is pointless, and besides the how and why is not why the author and the audience is interested in the catastrophe scenario.
So complaining that nothing could kill all multicellular life on Earth except humans is beside the point. The point is to follow the protagonist as they attempt to cope with a world where there is no life except human beings. And the answer is, within months people are starving to death, and pretty soon the only survivors are those who resort to cannibalism. Of course, pretty soon the only thing for the cannibals to eat are other cannibals, since everyone else is long dead. When the population density of cannibals drops below a certain point cannibals start to starve to death before they find another person they can kill and eat.
Stuff like capturing people and keeping them alive and eating them in pieces is nonsense, because what are you feeding your prisoners/livestock? Synthetic food is likewise impossible, since it would require the output of an entire global industrial civilization to create synthetic food, but that output of synthetic food would be so small that only a few people could be kept alive. If it takes a million people working to provide enough synthetic food for a thousand people what do the thousand people do when the million factory workers are dead of starvation?
This is exactly why I have avoided this movie (and book for that matter) even though I generally love post-apocalyptic fiction. It’s just too implausible, even moreso than zombies. I can’t suspend my disbelief.
Of course, while I haven’t read the book I don’t think there’s any explicit statement that one day everyone woke up and all the plants and animals were dead. Rather, there was an unspecified catastrophe some time in the past and the end result is that as far as they can tell there are no living plants or animals left, just a few starving people. The point is, the author isn’t interested in the mechanics of the catastrophe, he’s interested in how his characters live and die during the catastrophe. It doesn’t matter if it’s a nuclear war or bioweapons or asteroid strike or gamma ray burst or Alien Space Bats that caused the catastrophe.
The book is more about the prose than the plot. If you like writing, you should read it. If you like plot/idea driven sci-fi or speculative fiction, you’re not missing anything.
What about all the stored food? The US Government will accept food as payment in kind for taxes - there are warehouses of government commodities like cheese, honey, wheat and so forth. Not to mention stockpiles of MREs and other emergency supplies. I think if you toted up all the food stockpiles there is actually a fair amount of food hanging around.
And you could check the various forms of fungus for fat content to prevent rabbit starvation. .1g fat is damned low fat, but that is only the common farmed portobello and crimini shrooms.
I didn’t really read the book or see the movie - did aquatic life survive? Fish are a decent source of the omega based fats - if you could add something like mackeral to the diet it would go a long way towards preventing rabbit starvation. [I wouldn’t survive, I am shroom-allergic and I detest mackeral, I would have to supplement with fish oil caps. ]
What about the feasibility of keeping a small group of people alive with breast milk? If you get all the women pregnant, then keep feedings going so it never dried up, and also fed the women off each other… could that work?
It wouldn’t be pleasant for the women involved (at least until it became a norm). I don’t know how many calories a woman could put out in a day. I imagine that such a society could keep going longer if male infanticide was practiced, since you only really need a few males per generation to impregnate all the women.
That is, in fact, part of the book. The bands of savages keep women to birth infants, which they then consume. But of course that doesn’t really work because the resources required to support that system are almost certainly greater than the resources gained.I agree entirely that the nature of the disaster is unrelated to the point of the book, which is more concerned with the nature of humanity and the possibility of a meaningful existence in a world without a discernible future. And also the writing.
This violates the laws of thermodynamics. To produce breast milk a woman has to consume calories from an outside source. The calories in the breast milk are much less than the calories she consumed. There’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.
As for growing mushrooms (assuming that whatever killed all the animals and plants wouldn’t kill all fungi as well), fungi live off of dead plant material. Fungi can extract energy from rotting logs and compost and so on that humans can’t eat, but they need the rotting logs in the first place. With all the plants dead pretty soon there’s no more usable energy for fungi to extract from the remaining dead plants, and the fungi die off.
Anyway, though I do like well-written fiction, it takes a back seat to cinema (under which I include high quality TV); and when I do read fiction I generally prefer to read short stories rather than novels. In any event, were I to read some Cormac McCarthy, it would make more sense to start with the source material for a film that is in my all time top five.
[spoiler]I only just finished the movie this morning, so now I know they spot a living beetle at one point. This would seem to me to indicate a glimmer of hope, though a very bare one. If there are still beetles alive at this late stage, there’s got to be some kind of hidden plant ecology of some kind somewhere I’d think. Enough to support enough beetles to keep them common enough to find mating partners.
ETA Though I guess they could be surviving on dead plants. How long does a dead tree trunk retain nutritive value of any kind?
[/spoiler]
But that’s a little beside the topic of the OP which is intended as more of a hypothetical inspired by the premise of the film. Are we all agreed that food deprivation will be a finisher for us far quicker than any oxygen problems there may be?