Tristan's Thought Exercise #1
I came up with this exercise while on a long car trip to Lake Powell with some friends. This is a great way to kill some time, and you can learn a lot about people by the way they respond to this scenario.
Scenario
For some supernatural reason, all other humans have suddenly disappeared from this planet. There was no warning, it was as if they were all teleported away at the same time. You are left alone on the planet and must now decide what to do with your life. Here are some topics to consider:
The world is your oyster
Congratulations, everything in the world is now yours! Of course you won't be able to use it all, and things that are normally considered valuable, such as gold or money, will now be worthless.
Declining infrastructure
Without anyone else running the place, things will start to deteriorate. The speed at which this happens depends on many variables. I expect that many cities will be destroyed by fire in the first week. Electricity will only last for so long, and running water will stop working eventually. You could use portable generators to provide power for your electronic devices, but you will also need a reliable source of gasoline for those generators. Will nuclear power plants shutdown automatically, or will they meltdown? Best to stay far away from those, just in case.
Taking Risks
Just because you can do anything you want, does that mean you should? If you get hurt, there will be no one to take care of you. There are no doctors, but there are unlimited medical supplies at hospitals and stores. Also, it might be a good idea to keep a gun with you in case a wild animal decides to play "eat the human".
Travel
You can go anywhere in the world, assuming that you can get there by yourself. Where would you go?
By Land: There will be an unlimited supply of vehicles on the road. Most of these will have crashed after their occupant disappeared, but some will be stopped at red-lights or parked. You better learn how to hotwire cars, because you may not have the keys. You don't know how to hotwire a car? Well, since there is no one around to teach you this, you better hope that there is a book about it at your local library.
Which vehicle would you drive? You can always drive one until it runs out of gas, and switch it for another. Gas stations will probably not work, but you should be able to find a way to manually pump or siphon the gas.
By Sea: It might be fun to find a large yacht and sail around the world. But you better know what you are doing, or you could become stranded at sea. Remember that the local weatherman is no longer around to supply you with semi-accurate weather predictions. GPS will work for a while, but it would be a good idea to learn to navigate by the stars or compass.
By Air: Always wanted to learn how to fly but never had the time or money? Now is your chance! Read as much as you can about flying and maintaining airplanes, then go to your local airport and try your best! On second thought, perhaps flying would only be feasible if you were already a pilot.
Animal companions
Because there are no other humans on the earth, you could get a little lonely. You may want to find some pets to keep you sane. The sad thing is that most pets will soon die, locked in their kennels, cages, and homes. How many pets would you keep with you? Perhaps you would want to travel with a pack of dogs, or perhaps some monkeys from the zoo. If so, you better get to the zoo quickly before they run out of food and water.
Living conditions
You can live in any home you wanted, or you can live in a different place every night. Canned food would always be available in either stores or homes, but perishable food will soon spoil and will not be replenished. This means that you will soon have no fresh meat, no milk, no fruit, no bread, no eggs, etc. If you really wanted a steak, you could visit a cow ranch but you would need to butcher it yourself.
Entertainment
After the internet goes down, you will need to find another way to spend your time. You can always read books at the library, assuming that has not been destroyed by fire. Or you might want to go through people's homes and try to learn as much as you can about them. Watch their home-videos, read diaries and journals, and look at pictures and scrapbooks. You can do this for your family and friends, complete strangers, or famous celebrities.
Post your responses
Now it is your turn to share what you would do in this scenario. Feel free to post a comment on this blog, or post your answer on your own blog and link to it here.
Scenario
For some supernatural reason, all other humans have suddenly disappeared from this planet. There was no warning, it was as if they were all teleported away at the same time. You are left alone on the planet and must now decide what to do with your life. Here are some topics to consider:
The world is your oyster
Congratulations, everything in the world is now yours! Of course you won't be able to use it all, and things that are normally considered valuable, such as gold or money, will now be worthless.
Declining infrastructure
Without anyone else running the place, things will start to deteriorate. The speed at which this happens depends on many variables. I expect that many cities will be destroyed by fire in the first week. Electricity will only last for so long, and running water will stop working eventually. You could use portable generators to provide power for your electronic devices, but you will also need a reliable source of gasoline for those generators. Will nuclear power plants shutdown automatically, or will they meltdown? Best to stay far away from those, just in case.
Taking Risks
Just because you can do anything you want, does that mean you should? If you get hurt, there will be no one to take care of you. There are no doctors, but there are unlimited medical supplies at hospitals and stores. Also, it might be a good idea to keep a gun with you in case a wild animal decides to play "eat the human".
Travel
You can go anywhere in the world, assuming that you can get there by yourself. Where would you go?
By Land: There will be an unlimited supply of vehicles on the road. Most of these will have crashed after their occupant disappeared, but some will be stopped at red-lights or parked. You better learn how to hotwire cars, because you may not have the keys. You don't know how to hotwire a car? Well, since there is no one around to teach you this, you better hope that there is a book about it at your local library.
Which vehicle would you drive? You can always drive one until it runs out of gas, and switch it for another. Gas stations will probably not work, but you should be able to find a way to manually pump or siphon the gas.
By Sea: It might be fun to find a large yacht and sail around the world. But you better know what you are doing, or you could become stranded at sea. Remember that the local weatherman is no longer around to supply you with semi-accurate weather predictions. GPS will work for a while, but it would be a good idea to learn to navigate by the stars or compass.
By Air: Always wanted to learn how to fly but never had the time or money? Now is your chance! Read as much as you can about flying and maintaining airplanes, then go to your local airport and try your best! On second thought, perhaps flying would only be feasible if you were already a pilot.
Animal companions
Because there are no other humans on the earth, you could get a little lonely. You may want to find some pets to keep you sane. The sad thing is that most pets will soon die, locked in their kennels, cages, and homes. How many pets would you keep with you? Perhaps you would want to travel with a pack of dogs, or perhaps some monkeys from the zoo. If so, you better get to the zoo quickly before they run out of food and water.
Living conditions
You can live in any home you wanted, or you can live in a different place every night. Canned food would always be available in either stores or homes, but perishable food will soon spoil and will not be replenished. This means that you will soon have no fresh meat, no milk, no fruit, no bread, no eggs, etc. If you really wanted a steak, you could visit a cow ranch but you would need to butcher it yourself.
Entertainment
After the internet goes down, you will need to find another way to spend your time. You can always read books at the library, assuming that has not been destroyed by fire. Or you might want to go through people's homes and try to learn as much as you can about them. Watch their home-videos, read diaries and journals, and look at pictures and scrapbooks. You can do this for your family and friends, complete strangers, or famous celebrities.
Post your responses
Now it is your turn to share what you would do in this scenario. Feel free to post a comment on this blog, or post your answer on your own blog and link to it here.
hmm... two options:
ReplyDelete1) learn how to clone myself and try to stick two of my X genes together
2) mate with the apes (jekkie) back to ice age!
Sam,
ReplyDeleteI have had female thinkers suggest going to a genetic bank and using that to get pregnant. However, I don't know if I would take the risk of solo, unmedicated childbirth. I guess that is how they did it in the past, though.
I've often thought of the same scenario (kind of spooky actually), except that in mine, there was usually a girl with me. That changes the scenario quite a bit.
ReplyDeleteJason,
ReplyDeleteAfter we run out of ideas on the initial scenario, we usually introduce a second person. This changes many aspects of the scenario, since you can do a lot more things if you have two people.
This exercise is not based on a worldwide disaster, but it might help prepare your mind for what it could be like.
someone said it better than i could :) http://www.rakemag.com/stories/printable.aspx?itemID=24655&catID=146&SelectCatID=146
ReplyDeletesno
Sounds like there is plenty of gasoline to be had from all those abandoned cars, if you are located in a city.
ReplyDeleteI would not get bored, and maybe not even lonely. I think the first thing I'd do is gather supplies and head south. Finland is too much hassle to live in in the winter without heating or steady supply of electricity.
I already live in a wonderful area. My only 'grid need' currently is power (phone would become moot in such a situation), and I'm already planning to install solar panels this summer.
ReplyDeleteThe area I live in is mostly farms (Central Wisconsin), and the land I live on used to be farmland. Growing up in this area has given me the absolute basic knowledge of how to grow food (at least enough for myself) and butcher an animal properly. With no one around, bringing in a few chickens, cows, goats, etc. from local farms to my area would be no problem. As this is primarily a farming community, there's a wealth of knowledge in the local libraries on such practices.
Basically, I'm pretty much 'set' out here. I would, of course, take time to travel, and would attempt to find other 'survivors' of whatever happened. I am pretty self-sufficient though, and it would be a near-utopian, albeit lonely, situation for me.
Gas would go bad after about a year, although there are chemicals that you can add to make it last longer.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't want to live out of a can forever, you should keep in mind that fresh fruit would become seasonal rather than disappear. Bread would be fairly easy to make. Yeast keeps pretty well, and you can always get more. One of the first things you might want to do is start keeping chickens. They are easy to take care of and they produce eggs. Also learn to hunt and fish.
Even if you don't want a full fledged farm, a vegetable garden would be a good idea.
You might want to find a local solar power supplier and loot the place.
Here's my answer in comic form: http://surlyben.com/?cat=1
This was the premisse of a very interesting movie called The Quiet Earth (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089869/)
ReplyDeleteYour answer in film form: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_Earth_%28film%29
ReplyDeleteAnd in book form: Z for Zachariah.
ReplyDeleteSee also New Scientist’s “Imagine Earth without people”, and The Times’ timeline of the same.
If you haven't I would suggest reading Stephen King's "The Stand" as it pretty much is this scenario. 99% of the population is gone.
ReplyDeleteHmm... I'd try to get/make a simple yet powerful radio transmitter powered by a long-lasting source such as a simple nuclear pile, and transmit a repeating signal (probably a cycle of 3.14159 pulses) out into the atmosphere and beyond. I'd locate it near a vast store of collected data in a format that is easily understandable (maybe analogue, or maybe an uncompressed digital format with an analogue instruction manual for decoding it). I would also put some less high-tech symbols around the area, so that if anyone else finds it, in however long, they know its purpose is for communicating knowledge (I know, there is nobody else around, but I can't assume that when I'm there can I?). I'd then probably go travelling through areas of the world with long-established civilisation (ie. I am not off to explore Antarctica, or a tropical rainforest, as the chances of getting killed accidentaly are too great). From Britain I can get to the European mainland pretty easily, then by land anywhere from South Africa to China. In the knowledge storehouse I've created I'd leave a notification about where I was headed (probably an X on a map), then set up a new one when I get there.
ReplyDeleteI always need some kind of project to keep me motivated, and in the ultimate situation of no motivation this would be the ultimate UI challenge; how to communicate mankind's intellectual and cultural achievements to anybody else that may exist out there.
Of course if I survived long enough then I'd probably kill myself nice and quickly to avoid starving to death as an old, infirm man with nobody to look after me (hey, I'm going to die anyway, why try and avoid it when I can dive headfirst off a cliff, which I've always wanted to do were it not for the whole 'it would kill or severely handicap me' thing).
Anything else I'd do during that time would be relatively unimportant, like speedboating around Venice and whatnot :)