If the people I love (even just one or two) survived, I’d do my damnedest to live. I’m a good camper and stuff, so I think I could do ok. There would be a lot of supplies around, and I’m good at roughing it. If my SO lived, we’d be doing alright; he can fix anything, knows about electricity, knows a fair amount of survival stuff…
If he and my kids died, however, I would commit suicide. I have no interest in surviving in a fucked up world without them.
My friends and loved ones number less than ten, so I wouldn’t waste a lot of energy looking for the ones who aren’t already within 100 miles.
I’d find a secluded place near a stream in the mountains and stockpile food, water, drugs, liquor, guns, and dogs. Then I’d look for hot chicks to share my little piece of paradise. I’m just bein’ honest here; I ain’t no hero.
I’d suicide; everything I care about would collapse, and I’m not interested in survival for the sake of survival. I’d expect a century or more of pure hell for most of the world population. I’d really recommend suicide for women; most will probably end up what amounts to slaves, just like the old days.
Well, maybe; some diseases preferentially kill the healthy. Like the Spanish Flu, which King may have been thinking of.
Head south and find a nice golf course. Always lots of geese and small game there, so I could hunt and golf every day. Would have to get a handle on producing enough vegetable oil to keep a diesel tractor running to maintain the course and cornfield required. Probably impossible to keep the greens in decent shape with the loss of modern pesticides and fertilizer, but hey, it’s the apocalypse. I’ll live with “temporary greens” for the rest of my life if I have to.
Would there be more crazies and gun nuts than there are normally? Really?
Same percentage, I guess. So a lot fewer…unless the catastrophe brings out the worst in us, which is quite likely. I, personally, would only stockpile weapons to protect myself and my hot chicks and dogs from the crazies. If you acted nice, I’d be glad to help you out any way I could.
That’s a very good point. Presumably the plague wouldn’t discriminate between the criminal-minded and sociopathic and the regular people; it would kill in equal proportions. The criminals will still be outnumbered by regular folks. And contrary to popular myth, most people don’t morph into “Fuck you, I’ve got mine!” types during a crisis. instead, they cooperate with each other. I’d expect regional governments would spring into being relatively quickly. And they’d have teeth, too. “Normal” doesn’t mean “wimpy,” as the sociopaths would soon discover.
In already densely populated areas such as the US Northeast there’d still be literally millions of survivors. There’d be individuals with all the skills needed to continue on with the trapping of civilisation. It would be a very difficult situation for years thereafter but I don’t think it would be the end of civilisation. The biggest short to medium term issue in areas where society didn’t completely collapse would be securing and maintaining the food, fuel etc. supplies needed in the area. If some sort of central authority could be maintained I bet extant supplies of these would tide the survivors over until they solved the issue of crops, mining, refining etc. I suppose it’s possible, perhaps probable the US would Balkanise and wars might be fought between organised bands of survivors for access to scarce resources.
By take over and secure you mean you’d deny me access to those areas?
How do you know your local Home Depot is his local Home Depot? You could go secure your own big box store!
I would probably go on a looting spree, then find a remote location and withdraw.
Thats true. But folks are going to have to MOVE.
Lets say 1 in 20 lives. For your critical things like sewer and electricity you basically need a full crew who knows what they are doing to keep things running. If only one in 20 of the work crew is alive and there things are going to eventually fall apart. Maybe right away, maybe in a month or two, maybe a bit longer. But it will happen.
So, basically this means everyone from say twenty towns with their own sewer and electric systems will need to pick ONE town to move to so they have enough expertise to man the systems.
I’m thinking more in terms of perserving human knowledge for future generations. Paper can last about two millenium under the right conditions and scholars now decipher ancient manuscripts written on clay tablets or carved into rock that are even older. As long as someone can visually see the script, there’s a chance it can one day be read. Whatever is in the Kindle, Nook, ebook abomination, etc., is lost once the technology to maintain and access that media is gone.
For the purpose of the question, sure, it’s my Home Depot.
I don’t have any reason to go and secure my own big box store. There’s going to be plenty of supplies to go around.
Likely? Off myself as quickly as possible.
Being one of the surviving 5% of the population and a female would probably be a VERY uncomfortable life, relegated most likely to belonging to whoever the strongest group of males around was and being repeatedly raped until one dies in childbirth seems the most likely scenario.
Most posters seem to have a pretty cynical view of humanity. After such a plague, civilization would wobble, but I think we would band together, breed like crazy, and get back on our feet within a generation. There would be enough canned and preserved foods to get the 5% left through the first uncertain, lean years. Hunting game and gathering wild food would be good skills to have. There would still be millions of people in the U.S. alone, and my sense is that they would band together in communities fairly quickly – within weeks – and establish some social order. My small city would be reduced to the size of a small town, about 800 people. We would probably band together (except for a few antisocial types that already live as far from everyone as they can) near the river, get some seeds and a fresh water source, set up a local government, survey the survivors to see what skills we had and what skills we lacked, try to establish some communication with other nearby communities, a school, power sources. Work together, you know? I mean, we’re civilized people.
Oh, and I would would definitely stick around to see what happens. Commit suicide at the point of the most momentous event in human history? Not my style.
The book **Earth Abides **by George Stewart is probably the most accurate depiction of what post plague life would be like.
, he screamed from the net as The Outlanders lowered him into the acid vat.
See this is why I don’t understand the thinking that society would descend immediately into violent anarchy and warlordism. The most basic human needs of food and shelter would be present in abundance, for all practical purposes free for the taking, for at least the first few years. What could I possibly have that would be worth taking at the point of a gun when you could walk into an abandoned store and take it - or something much better - for free? A lot of things - anything that ran on gasoline or electricity - would be essentially worthless anyway. It would be like the pilgrims arriving on the shore of the new world and finding giant warehouses stocked with food and empty houses waiting for them to move into.
I think there are always going to be people who think “big picture”, and some of those big-picture thinkers are going to be bad people. And a baddie who is thinking about the big picture is going to want to secure his/her turf and prove his/her ruthlessness BEFORE such a thing becomes a necessity, with the hopes that such terror tactics will make invasions when things DO become necessary a bit easier - if he/she can establish that they are ruthless to enemies but forgiving to the compliant, it makes the long term goal of running their private dictatorship a lot easier to manage.
The idea that there will be “plenty of stuff” is only somewhat true. Fresh food will be in short supply well before we reach the 95% dead stage. Even if we go with the idea that this sickness works really, really fast so that there are food stores with stuff still sitting on the shelves, vermin like rats will get into everything that isn’t sealed into a can. Canned goods, especially when they aren’t properly stored at a stable temperature , do not have an infinite shelf life. The food supply will be limited and there will be survivors who attempt to hoard all they can.
Booze, ammunition, certain drugs, batteries, and fuel are among the things that local groups of survivors (i.e. gangs) aren’t going to want to share with you at all.
Call me cynical, but humans have historically shown a deep-seated, grubby desire to dominate and enslave each other. After thing settle down a bit following the big die-off, they’ll start in on fulfilling that desire. Some places will just be dirtbags living out their warrior of the wasteland fantasies. Other places will try to put a better face on it and call it desperate measures for desperate times. Either way, lots of survivors will find themselves as somebody else’s property.
Economic need is not the only reason crimes are committed. The small proportion of criminals who do it for fun rather than economic need–sociopaths, in other words–will be running rampant, unrestricted. And if someone encounters *just one *sociopath who fucks them over without warning and without consequences, their trust will be severely damaged (if they aren’t left for dead). Taking that distrust into future encounters could make the difference between helping a stranger or killing them.
There are also crimes of opportunity. Who’s to say what might become the new status symbol post-apocalypse? Water? Guns? Hormel’s canned roast beef? Maybe someone is exhausted and borderline starving because they lived in a rural area and had to walk 20 miles, and they don’t feel like negotiating for supplies when they get to a city. So they just take the first thing they see and someone ends up getting hurt or killed.
There are also the inevitable territorial battles fought over property/money. If warlords started collecting taxes for offering their protection, someone else might kill them to horn in on it.
It really doesn’t take a lot of crazy people to fuck it up for everybody else. We would have the same number of criminals post-apocalypse as we have now, but we would lack the police and judges and jails (and basic accountability/societal “glue”) to keep them in line. I also don’t think you’re taking into consideration that a *lot *of people who were otherwise normal will go crazy because their children or wife or husband or mom and dad died. You can’t assume that everyone who goes mad with loneliness and anger will simply self-destruct by suicide. Some of them are going to get violent. Seeing a happy mom with kids might drive someone who lost their kids into a jealous fit of rage. Maybe they’ll kill the mom and steal the kids. Losing all of the dozens of members of one’s family will simply drive some people completely insane, causing an otherwise normal person to become an insane murderer.
It’s really impossible to tell what would really happen in such a situation… hopefully I never have to find out. But, I think this situation would tend to bring out the worst, not the best, in most people.