So humans are almost gone - what next?

Lets say something horrible happened - bird flu might do. It wipes out all but about 1 in 100000 people.

How do you think the survivors would regroup and progress? What works do you feel are most likely to be accurate descriptions of the initial regrouping period? The longer term implications?

I ask because I've just finished Earth Abides, and I find it difficult to accept the basic premise - that generations would live on the bones of civilization and that skills and literacy would be lost extremely quickly. The characters who survived did nothing but open cans of food and live in their old houses for the next 50 years after the disaster! Their children were illiterate.

Wouldn't literacy be one thing they would strive hard to maintain?

The Canticle for Leibowitz approach makes more sense to me - with literacy being revered and knowledge passed down for generations until the skills to use it have redeveloped. Or maybe being a reader I am literocentric in my ideas of what is important.

I liked the initial regrouping portrayed in The day of the triffids. I was intrigued (if unconvinced) by the long term societal change of The Gate to Women's Country and The Sea and Summer. Even pseudo sci-fi like Dragonsdawn made more sense, with skills being passed down via an apprenticeship system and careful attention paid to breeding lines and the importance of having children.

I'm interested in other opinions.

Ray Kurzweil has one in The Singularity is Near. http://singularity.com/aboutthebook.html. It is psychotically optimistic.

Lucifer's Hammer dealt with a situation like that. One thing one of the survivors did was stow away as many "important" books as possible. He was a physicist and general bookworm, and so his library was quite expansive. It's been a while since I read the book, but I believe his stowed-away collection ended up playing an important role when some small communities came together. However, the bulk of the people of the community spent most of their time doing work for their subsistence based living, and I don't really recall much being said about the passing along of knowledge, other than general comments about losing knowledge quickly.

Well part would depend on how the wipe out was distributed. At 1/100000 50-60 people would survive in the entire state of Minnesota. They would ALL have to join forces to have any chance of surviving and propagating the human species. How do they even contact one another in the first place?

Now if remote communities are generally missed as a whole then little pockets of civilization would endure, though to be honest these small out of the way communities are not generally going to be the paragons of knowledge but also more likely to survive with out the support of infrastructure.

I absolutely agree with the depiction of Ray Kurzweil as "psychotically optimistic". I prefer more cautionary views of the future, like Bill McKibben's ENOUGH (brilliant book). Let me also give a plug to a new release called THE WORLD WITHOUT US by Alan Weisman. A scary look at what the earth will resemble once humanity is gone (for whatever the reason). Here is the author's page:

http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html

Be sure to check out the extras, especially "Multimedia", which takes you on a tour of New York as nature overruns it.

This whole thread brings to mind that old Talking Heads song from NAKED called "Nothing But Flowers". David Bryne sings about overgrown parking lots, a transformed 7-11, etc.

And, of course, J.G. Ballard has a lot to say about depopulated worlds and post-civilization dystopias, methinks...

I'll second THE WORLD WITHOUT US. I thought it was a pretty fun read. I never seem to forgot the parts talking about nuclear reactors and what would happen to them if the humans up and disappeared. Even if we went somewhat slowly, the outlook didn't look too peachy.

I think readafew has a good point about the 1/100000 issue. I think that would be pretty extreme. Plus you would have no guarantee for the abilities of the remaining people.

Thanks for the book recommendations. Need to do some reading where the death of civilization is serious as opposed to what it was like in A Fire Upon the Deep that I just finished. Death of civilizations was a normal part of the natural order in that.

> I think readafew has a good point about the 1/100000 issue. I think that would be pretty extreme.

I agree. It's the sort of mortality rate that would leave about 50 survivors in all of Sydney. It's unlikely, I only chose it because it was the rate that was in Earth Abides, which is what got me thinking about all this.

I was irritated with the book because *spoiler warning*, the small group of survivors that found each other did nothing for fourty years. They didn't even persist with a vege garden after their first season failed or teach their kids to read. They had uni and local libraries at their disposal and didn't read up on medicine or animal husbandry. It all seemed so unlikely to me. Who could sustain such apathy for so long?

>How do they even contact one another in the first place?

In a city this would be fairly easy. A fully charged megaphone. Using a generator to light up one building among many unlit buildings. Using a gestetner and doing a leaflet drop. Driving around in an ice cream van, music on. Broadcasting on a ham radio, and so on. But would you want to find others?

If I was a lone survivor, would I even be willing to approach other survivors? A group of men for example? How would you know whether the person you approach wants to build a lifestyle or just live off the bones of society. How do you know you'll be safe with them etc? If they're armed / psychotic / on a power trip / whatever.

Anyway, I'm just rambling. I'm off to follow those links now. Thanks!

I think one of the points of Earth Abides is that what the survivors would do depends a great deal on the abilities and character of the group. Ish, as an academic with an observer's outlook, was not prone to start things on his own unless forced by necessity, but rather would either wait for someone else to start it, or wanted a lot of support for a project before beginning it. The rest of the initial group that coalesced around him were, in Ish's own opinion, not the best sampling of the human race, either in intelligence or ambition. Add in the psychological trauma attendant upon having the world turned upside down overnight, a trauma that in most people leads to a retreat to the closest thing they can get to that prior world, and its easy to see how this particular group went down the path it did.

Assuming that the survivors would represent a random sample of the human population, the small number of members in each surviving 'tribal' group would mean there would probably be a very high variation in abilities and desires between groups. While Stewart chose to focus on this 'do-nothing' group, mainly for the purpose of getting his thematic points across, he did indicate that there might be other groups that were taking different approaches. This shows up in Lucifer's Hammer, also, as different surviving groups have markedly different characters and goals. Even A Canticle for Liebowitz supports this, as it was only a very small group of survivors of the original holocaust that tried to preserve knowledge, while the great majority were actively burning books.

So I find Stewart's scenario quite believable, even if it is somewhat depressing to see mankind retreat so rapidly back to much earlier modes of living.

Joanna Russ' We Who are About To has a theme like this. It's about a small group of people stranded on a planet. It takes a totally different tack than most survival stories. The main character questions the point of surviving at all. Very thought provoking.

Check out Malevil by Robert Merle. I liked it as much, or more, as Earth Abides and Lucifer's Hammer. The survivors story covers about the same length of time as in Earth Abides but the survivors are a very different group.

I had a hard time finding a hardback copy but I think paperbacks are easy enough to find.

I can't believe no one has mentioned The Stand! Also, Nightfall by Isaac Asimov tells a great story about a planet of 6 suns where almost everybody goes crazy and starts setting things on fire once every 2000 years when there is an eclipse, the only time they ever experience darkness. The few survivors rebuild civilization, only to have it destroyed again 2000 years later.