Doomsday — and the 10,000 years of returning to nature.

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Doomsday, Doomsday survival, Lefehaven, Lifehaven, policy, survival

Ten thousand years after Doomsday the Earth was a very different place from what the pre-doomers had exploited, and then destroyed. Nature has her ways, and some of them are inexorable, even if they are sometimes slow by human standards. Climate shifts have quite a few factors which affect them, but the Doomsday H-bombs were quite different. They were sudden, and created rapid global cooling at a time when everyone was worried about global warming. With the dust in the air over the Earth, and especially the northern latitudes, there had been an accumulation of snow. Years later when the dust had finally settled out there was once again a layer of snow all over the north which hadn’t totally melted each year with the coming of spring. Over the years this had accumulated, and after these many years the cooling effect had totally shifted the climate towards colder, but with more rapid shifts from summer to winter conditions. This had changed what plants would thrive, which in turn changed what animals could survive and what crops could be planted.

In general it was bad for humans because it made everything more unpredictable, which had forced populations to be much smaller to cope with the shortfalls in the lean years. Of course humans are much more adaptable than all other species so they were surviving where others were not. The climate led to an ecosystem of only species that were able to survive rapid swings of temperature. Those species with wide-ranging habits did better than more fixed ones and migratory birds and animals did better than those who liked to maintain fixed homes. Some trees that had survived because of the Lifehavens had done well at first but when these new more variable conditions started to prevail they failed. Now the world was populated by greater numbers of a given species at any particular spot, but with fewer species being there. Similar to farms with a few monocultures.

The humans were a special case: because of their intelligence and sociability, they had regained a sustainable lifestyle after ten years and after one hundred were doing quite well again, even if their population was tiny compared to pre-Doomsday standards. For the next several hundred years the Earth was a paradise, because there was an abundance of everything humans would need. And, the earlier civilization had left a  wealth of entertainment, and knowledge encapsulated for their easy consumption. Because population controls were enforced on a fair basis the population fitted the environment, and one thousand years after Doomsday the population was quite large at one hundred million people, and thriving. People everywhere accepted the population restrictions because they felt that they were fair and justly applied. There had been a policy of encouraging people to move freely about the planet, and so religion, politics, and group identity were homogenized, and because everyone was so interconnected the problems that any particular person had were problems which concerned everyone. So the problems and the expenses of the solutions were born equally by all the people.

There had been some people that wanted to be in close association with others for some particular reason or another, but so long as anyone could join in or leave any particular group there hadn’t been any sustained problems. That is the way it was for a quite a long time, and it worked because there was always an abundance of necessities for everyone, or at least a sufficiency during bad times. With the realization that the climate was growing more difficult there was a referendum to reduce the world’s human population. This was to be done by limiting some random proportion of mothers to a single child guaranteed instead of two as was usual, but they could petition for a second baby. In this way there could be a slow, and orderly reduction of world population.

Somehow — no one seemed to know quite why — people grew increasingly disaffected with the way things were being done, and this birth control allocation seemed to be the most contentious. It seemed that some people identified with some particular genetic strain, and felt that they were being discriminated against, and saw this as a first step toward extermination of their group. When world genetic homogenization was in full swing this problem hadn’t been serious, but now it seemed almost everyone was upset.

Then it happened – people separated into groups situated on particular pieces of property, and were willing to defend that place against all outsiders. Also, they set up their own new laws. They quickly found that if their population was greater than their enemy’s that they had an advantage. Thus, there began a worldwide population explosion with each group trying to out reproduce all the others. It was baby madness, some people said. It would produce a population race like the ones of the past eons which were by now ancient history. But everyone agreed that things were different now, and that wouldn’t happen. We all knew better now, and the immediate problem was to outbreed the folks over on the other side of the hill, or wherever they were. Of course they soon needed weapons, and then better weapons, and because the historical archives were available to everyone the weapons race was very rapid. All sorts of cooler heads tried to stop the ugly direction things were going but to no avail. Well, mayhem proceeded in much the same order it had in the pre-Doomsday times, but much more rapidly, and with the same awful results.

This seems to be nature’s cruel joke. Outbreed your competitors, and let the survivors outbreed their competitors until the end of time. For a short period humans had overridden that natural driving force, or thought they had, but then it came back, again and again. Human intelligence, and sociability had time and again brought about this horrible end to their struggles. After ten thousand years the only method for maintaining calm for very long was to have an agreed upon population limit imposed by orderly human laws rather than nature’s laws. Humans in their natural state cycle endlessly through boom and bust. Unfortunately, in this case, nature’s laws are stronger than man’s.

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Doomsday recovery — One thousand years of hope fulfilled.

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Doomsday, Doomsday survival, Lefehaven, Lifehaven, policy, survival

A thousand years after the Doomsday events the world was a very different place from what the pre-doomers had known. In some ways it was much better, and in others it was much worse. The thing which most of us pre-doomers would notice right away was how pleasant everything was, and how much calmer everyone seemed to be. People had developed a social ethic to live within their personal, and public means which after a thousand years had become quite stable. Part of that meant that a real effort was made for all humanity to live in an ecological balance with the Earth, which meant consuming only renewable energy, and renewable natural resources. This had been impossible for the pre-doomers, because of the necessity of maintaining group, and personal survival. This Darwinian survival of the fittest problem of out-breeding one’s competitors had been eliminated by the public voting on just how many people the planned world should have, and then maintaining a population policy of approximately two children per woman. Adjustments were occasionally made but they were now very modest ones because stability had been achieved, and everyone liked it. Undocumented people including undocumented babies were sent to a  big natural wild island which was maintained without outside contact with the rest of humanity. Those people lived a totally free existence except that they had no contact with the outside world, and they couldn’t leave their island, and thus their population was contained by natural methods. Crime in the new world was rare, but when it did occur, and the people were convicted they were simply sent to a particular landing spot on the big island.

The very paucity of different species became evident when one traveled around this new world. It seemed that everywhere you went there were only rabbits, dogs, cows, and several other domestic species. But, everywhere they were largely the same ones without much difference in species, but a great deal of difference in varieties, and breeds. The Lifehaven strategy had worked okay, and a lot of seeds had been saved, and these were bred up into a reasonable variety which fit the different environments, but the kinds of animals were much more limited. The surviving animals had been almost exclusively small ones at the Lifehavens because of the problem of keeping them in the restricted space, and feeding them. It had been decided to have mostly smaller animals so there could be more species kept. This had worked out well because there were sperm banks fitted to each of the species. Thus, it became possible to breed up lots of different breeds of dogs, rabbits, sheep, and quite a few other domestic animals, but there were very few species, and subspecies of wild animals; mostly small predators had been kept. It had seemed like a mini-zoo. What had happened after a few years was that many of the surviving domestic species that had been brought out had gotten free and gone wild, and had population explosions, and collapses. This is a typical effect when there are few predators, and a very limited supply of different species for food resources. This problem had been recognized beforehand, but still there wasn’t enough species variety to totally smooth out the boom and bust cycles. It appeared that ten herbivores, and ten predators with about one hundred plant species at a given location was the minimum that would stay stable over many years.

The people which were followed in the previous blog posts have now all been dead for almost a millennium, and all of them would have been forgotten except for this literary device of tracking them.

The first man who was vaporized in the blast is now being studied in the form of part of the sedimentary band found scattered worldwide in old lake beds. It is part of the ongoing effort to understand the event, and its geological impact. This man never existed after the first few seconds of Doomsday as anything other than atoms, but now there is an effort to find out if humans had some particular radioactive components to their makeup. It is a moderately funded study, but mostly it is considered a futile undertaking.

The second man and his family were recovered by some archaeologists and his diary was found, and translated. It is called “The Mason Jar Diary”. It had been found because, as literary luck would have it, he had been on-line playing a game called “Chicken Run” with some other people when Doomsday commenced, one of whom, person number five, was in a Lifehaven. Much later these digital records were scanned at the huge data bank of the world’s knowledge which had been maintained at all of the Lifehavens, and the archaeologists who were going to a dig in that particular city thought this seemed like a more poignant spot than most. The “Mason Jar Diary” was a real piece of serendipity. It was a fascinating story of a hopeless struggle against impossible odds by an ordinary self-reliant, man and his family.

The third person who apparently had died of a disease was exhumed recently by biologists trying to determine the exact cause of his death. Their goal was to find vaccines for whatever the disease was that had infected his community. It appeared that it might have been a human concocted microbe, a weapon of war, which after it had run its course seemed to die out completely. On the chance that it was still lurking somewhere it was decided to make a vaccine if possible. It was thought that it was his son who had taken the sailboat down the river, and successfully sailed to South America. The boat had been identified by its ID markings many years later in Chile. He himself was never heard of again, but then records were almost nonexistent for the next hundred years. Back at his former home people realizing their struggles would be interesting to later people had kept diaries, and put them in the bank vault before they all had perished. The vault’s combination was thoughtfully chiseled into the face of the vault.

The fourth man had chosen to be buried high up in the Andes mountains in southern Chile, and therefore his corpse was in near pristine condition. He knew that he had lived an extraordinary life, and so he had dedicated his body in such a way so that it would be found by future scientists. A thousand years later he was exhumed by a scientific team who found him wrapped like a mummy in cold storage, in perfect condition. He had a smile on his face, and a chicken in each hand, but no one knew why. It was his little personal joke dedicated to those people with whom he was playing “Chicken Run” on-line when Doomsday commenced.

The fifth person a thousand years later had become something of an ancestral hero, and almost everyone alive could trace their ancestry back to him on at least one branch of their family tree. That wasn’t particularly unusual because most of the survivors of Doomsday had many linkages to subsequent generations. But, this man apparently had some special genes because quite a few of his offspring had became prominent over the following centuries, and his simple gravestone back at the Lifehaven had been preserved especially well because there had been a huge dome built over it. Inscribed in golden letters on the walls of the dome were some of his sayings, his deeds, and the names of many of his famous descendants and space was left for more.

A thousand years later the Earth was a healthy place again. There had been sustained efforts to make it perfect again by setting up automatic pollution sequestration factories. These took extra energy from off-hour power plants, and converted the pollution to storable forms which were then tucked away deep in the sub-ducting earth, and some of it to the bottom of the oceanic trenches where it was stable and then covered over with sediment to make certain it never surfaced again. The background radioactivity had very slowly dropped back to the pre-Doomsday levels, and techniques for radiation free living had further reduced human exposure. The geneticists had achieved considerable success in making food crops resistant to the lingering radioactive assaults. Also, careful genetic monitoring of people as well as plants and animals had kept the inevitable genetic flaws from being transmitted to future generations. Thus, the overall population was now extremely healthy, and it was considered normal to live past one hundred years. People found life affirming work, and other activities rather than the death defying wars, stunts, and tattoos of the pre-Doomsday years. Part of this was because the average age of the population was quite old, and thus the values of old age became the dominant theme of society. These older people were revolted at the savagery portrayed in almost all of the still available movies of that bygone era and wondered why those early people found them anything other than disgusting examples of how not to behave. People had found ways of nurturing life to be as exhilarating as had their predecessors in destroying it.

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Doomsday — one hundred years later. A pitiful resolve.

Tags

Doomsday, Doomsday survival, Lefehaven, Lifehaven, policy, survival

The re-population of the world, and the reseeding had been much more difficult than anticipated. The Earth just wasn’t the cooperative place that it had been before the Doomsday events. Although many species of plants had been stored in the Lifehaven seed banks a lot of them didn’t thrive in the new situation, and others because there were no limitations exploded, and became like weeds. Strangely they often disappeared the next year, and were replaced with something else in overabundance. The weather had also been highly variable, and unpredictable, and since no one knew what to expect it became difficult to know what to plant. Planting a complex of seeds in one field seemed to work out well sometimes, but not others, and no one knew why. It was always too much of some necessity, and too little of some other necessity. There were very few people around to figure out the problems even though there was a huge storage of information still available from data banks. It seemed that most of the information was inapplicable because the situation was so very different from the earlier times. Another strange thing was that although people were alert, and eager to learn they didn’t seem to be as smart, and informed as people were reported to be before the Event. Apparently the massive mixing of people, and constant bombardment with stimuli had resulted in the previous people being able to think more broadly. Now for any given person there was a lot of work, but it tended to be very repetitive, and not intellectually stimulating.

The individuals we have been following after Doomsday are all dead now. The first one died in the blast when he was vaporized into a radioactive cloud. He was almost totally settled out after one hundred years, and was still visible only as part of the sedimentary lines which were now overlain with a hundred years of accumulated new dust. For him it had been an instantaneous death, and as they say, he never knew what hit him. —

The second person, from the suburb, is now totally buried in the muck, and soil which collected in his basement fallout shelter. He and his family are whole skeletons huddled together for eternity with their diary in a glass jar waiting to be read at some remote time by some remote being. Their passing had been very stressful without a moment of happiness after the events of Doomsday, just a few weeks of suffering, struggle, and hopelessness followed by oblivion. —

The third person, the one who lived on the edge of a remote farming town managed to struggle on for almost a year watching all that was dear to him slowly succumb to various stresses which were just too much to be coped with. There had been times when hope had returned, and things looked like they might get better, but then something nasty would occur, and the hopelessness returned. But, there had been occasional moments of merriment, and good times, so perhaps it had been worth the struggle. He was buried by his few surviving friends, and like those who had recently gone before him the gravestone was labeled not only with his birth, and death dates, but also with the number of days which he had survived Doomsday. —

The fourth person, south of the equator, lived on for several years but it wasn’t anywhere near what his life expectancy appeared to be the day before Doomsday. It had been a constant struggle with all sorts of problems, the worst of which had been the diseases. Fortunately there was always someone around when he was sick to pull him through, and he had reciprocated several times. Mostly this consisted of bringing in some food, and offering a little supportive care, and encouragement. Everyone had been angry, and resentful toward the people who had brought them this disaster, but eventually that mellowed into bereavement for all that had been squandered.
Within the limitations that were imposed upon this person he felt he had lived a full, and meaningful life; it was just shorter than he had expected it to be. —

The fifth person spent many years in the Lifehaven, and eventually died there, and was buried in the small cemetery nearby. He had gone out for several years to help with the reconstruction, but had returned in his old age to teach the younger people, and set an example for them. He fathered, and helped raise quite a few children at the Lifehaven, because after the Events the community had decided to maximize the number of children for several years. This was because these Lifehaven people had been chosen in the first place as particularly healthy specimens from all over the world to form a new supply of healthy people when the others had been killed, and even those outsiders who survived had been subjected to radiation, and would not be expected to be perfectly healthy genetically. He was one of the luckiest people to have ever lived because he was among those few who were able to do the most for humanity. Because of his efforts humanity has been given a second chance. —

After a hundred years the Earth was definitely on the mend, and although things were still very chaotic in many ways the people, and the other living things had found niches for themselves where they were able to thrive some of the time, and survive all of the time. The people were once again filled with hope of a glorious new future, and the worst was clearly behind them. They knew what they had to do and were eager to do it, and they resolved to do whatever was necessary to never repeat the horrible mistakes of their predecessors.

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Doomsday — ten years later. The worst extinction Earth ever experienced.

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Doomsday, Doomsday survival, Lefehaven, Lifehaven, policy, survival

Ten years after the Doomsday tragedy the Earth is recovering in some ways, but still getting worse in others. The radiation from the H-bombs themselves has lessened, but because many of the nuclear reactors had been targeted they had gone into meltdown mode, and had continued to spew radioactive pollution into the atmosphere at a prodigious rate. This hadn’t been noticed in the first year because no one had gone to the Northern Hemisphere, but when they did they found these monsters. Even in the past with a fully functioning country like the USSR the problem of coping with the Chernobyl disaster had been almost impossible, and that reactor hadn’t even gone into a full meltdown phase. With these bombed reactors the problems were much worse. Below is a map showing the location of many of the current reactors of the world. Most are in the US and Europe, but as you can see there are quite a few others. In this Doomsday scenario all of the reactors are destroyed even those few in the Southern Hemisphere.

IPPNW: Nuclear Reactors worldwide map

See also some related materials from Answers com

• Radioactive contamination
• Radioactive waste
• List of civilian nuclear accidents
• List of military nuclear accidents
• Nuclear and radiation accidents

A visit with our Doomsday victims ten years after the event shows very different results in their outcomes resultant from their pre-event choices of where to live.

Person number one who chose to live on a target was now a sedimentary layer scattered throughout the world which would be visible as a line, in some places, for billions of years. —

The second person, and his family who lived in a suburb, and had survived for almost a month are now skeletons which are partially buried with the dirt washed into their basement survival shelter by repeated rains over the years. —

The third person and his family perished from disease after several months of struggle with a cascading barrage of problems, and because they were in a community that died off rather slowly the whole family was buried in the local cemetery. It was thought that some people may have survived from this community, because one person left a message in a jar on the mayor’s desk stating that he and his family had fled in a sailboat down the local river and were headed out to sea, and were headed south. —

The fourth person was well south of the equator to begin with, and hadn’t been seriously affected by the Doomsday problems for a couple of months, but then things got worse, and kept getting worse, and yet again worse. At first it was just worrisome reports but then came the hazy dark skies, and a dim sun, and then the crops didn’t grow very well, and weren’t productive when they did grow. After a couple of months it became very difficult to find enough to eat. People had noticed that even from the first month most wild plant life was withering, and the wild animals were rarely seen. Sometimes, there were rapid expansions of insect species such as ants or roaches which were everywhere then in a few days they would vanish, and be replaced by something else. But, always there was something which seemed to make things a little more difficult, and which killed some people. Everyone got skinny from lack of decent food, and then the diseases came on constantly, and everyone seemed to have something nasty. Because, the people were so undernourished a lot of them died, because they couldn’t forage for food, and fight off the sickness at the same time, they were just too weak. It wasn’t that things everywhere became impossible it was just that everything was difficult, and so miserable that most people just couldn’t cope with all of the unusual problems at the same time, and just expired from weakness, and disease. —

The fifth person was part of a Lifehaven community, and everyone there had survived without much trouble. They had been essentially going to school every day for the entire time learning all sorts of practical trade skills from recordings, and manuals which they would need to know when they went back out into the world with their small supply of seeds which were thought to be appropriate for the places which they were to go. It was all very stressful, but in an exhilarating way, because they all knew they were doing something which was very important. The big question was just how soon they should return to various places on the planet. Should it be soon to try, and save as many of the outsiders as possible, or should they wait until the earth had stabilized, and the diseases had run their course, and vanished? If they went out too soon they themselves would become victims, and part of the problem rather than part of the recovery. — +++

After ten years most of the disaster had run its course, but the world was a vastly different place than it had been. Some estimates were that 99% of the species had been exterminated in the Northern Hemisphere, and others estimated that perhaps as much as 50 percent had vanished in the Southern Hemisphere. It would be many years before an accurate count could be made. And, what did it matter what the count was? What mattered was that they were gone! It was no longer a cute theory that mankind was dangerous for planet Earth it was an ugly proven fact. Humans had wreaked the worst extinction ever visited upon the Earth!

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Doomsday – a year later

Tags

Doomsday, Doomsday survival, Lefehaven, Lifehaven, policy, survival

A year after the disaster of Doomsday when some 5,000 H-bombs were detonated, the Earth is still reeling, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. The radioactivity has dropped below lethal levels, and plant life is beginning to reassert itself where there is some sunlight, but because a lot of dust is still in the air only those plants that like more modest sunlight are doing well. This gives rise to a very different vegetation than had been there before the event, and it is rather slimy. The Northern Hemisphere had been subjected to devastating radioactivity for the first couple of weeks, and most plant life had died, and the animals that were dependent upon that plant life died also, and after a year of this even a good deal of those plants, and animals that lived underground discovered that they lived upon various things that were now dead, and they had nothing to left to eat, and so they too were dying. Very few humans survived, essentially only those who had found a year’s supply of food, and water, such as those lucky enough to be located at grain silos with hand operated water pumps to deep well water. The Southern Hemisphere hadn’t had much of a problem for the first month, but then the sky darkened, and the weather fluctuations turned consistently weird. The tropical plants were found to be very intolerant of these fluctuations, and were dying in unpredictable ways which precipitated all sorts of chaos for the ecosystem. Some relatively rare insects thrived briefly, and then vanished.

The first person in these Doomsday scenarios, who had been converted to radioactive dust in an H-bomb explosion, was now mostly precipitated out in the form of tiny particles in little layers of dried clay in some places, and a thin layer of fine sediment on lake beds, and ocean bottoms. —

The second person, from the devastated suburb, was now a rotted corpse lying with his rotted family in the basement of what had been their home. They were now little more than skeletons, with strange loose fitting clothing, after the various insects and other living things had devoured them. He had written a diary while in that desperate place and placed it in a glass mason jar to protect it — for posterity to find. —

The third person, in the distant farming town, had struggled mightily for almost a year desperately trying first one thing, and then another in an all out effort to keep himself, and his family alive. Several times it had appeared that they were going to survive, and that kept their hope alive, and fueled their struggle. The first problems were what to do about the oncoming radiation, and as it turned out they had a couple of days to prepare for the worst of that, and no one died who took precautions. Strangely, quite a few people refused to take any precautions, and they were the first to get sick. Some attempt was made to save them, but to no avail. Water was a real problem at first but soon the few wells that were in the area were being tapped fully, and necessary personal water was available. Then of course food was a problem because most food eaten by these people was shipped in and distributed at the supermarket. After that food was gone they had to eat animal feeds which they had stored for shipment to outside markets. No one complained much about the coars quality of the little food there was because they knew they were among the few people who were even alive let alone eating anything. The weather had been very gloomy, but after several months it started lightening up a bit, and so people were hopeful. But, then the months long accumulation of stresses started telling on the people, and strange diseases started cropping up. They were unusual diseases which came on very quickly, and the doctors had difficulty in diagnosing them, and they didn’t clear up with antibiotics. Soon the doctors died too because some of these new diseases were highly infectious. A few people survived one disease only to be struck down almost instantly by a second disease, because of their weakened condition. Some people thought these diseases might be brought in by rats, but then it was realized that the rats had died the first month. Then another disease, and another! Some people blamed Ken Alibeck the bio-weapons biologist. Soon, with the next wave of disease nearly everyone was dead. —

The fourth person had lived his life well south of the equator, and for the first month after the Doomsday war it had been little more than a worried conversation topic between local people who heard of it by reports on TV. But then the sky started getting a little darker, and darker every day, and a little hazier day by day. They talked about it on TV, and the newscasters, and pundits predicted that it would get worse, and had various suggestions as to what should be done. But what these pretty celebrities suggested seemed so impractical that they were laughed at and ignored. Dig fallout shelters, plant food crops quickly, get iodine tablets, create dried food stores for a year’s supply of food for your family. Such suggestions were just so much silliness to people who found their food on a daily basis at the local farmers market, and from their own gardens. They had no way to lay up food for a year. Another strange thing was that there had been a fierce epidemic that had killed lots of people so there was more food available than usual, so why worry about laying up food for a year? —

The fifth person we have been tracking lives in a Lifehaven, and is located a thousand miles from the nearest town. They have good electronic communication with the rest of the surviving world because that was part of the original design planning for this community. Although they might have had supply ships come in from the various cities in the Southern Hemisphere they haven’t done so. The reasons were that they were self-sufficient for a longer time than that because of the desire to maintain absolute biological isolation from the rest of the world. It was expected that some of the biological warfare weapons would be deployed or perhaps that even if they were not deployed that the chaos of the war would disrupt the storage facilities, and these most horrible of humanly refined diseases would escape and spread throughout the world. So it was intended to maintain all of the Lifehavens in absolute isolation until the diseases had run their course or the methods for coping with them had been developed. —

So one year after the Doomsday event there are very few humans still surviving in the Northern Hemisphere, but quite a few doing okay in the Southern Hemisphere even if things are still grim.

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Doomsday — a month later.

Tags

Doomsday, Doomsday survival, Lifehaven, survival

What would it be like at the typical locations mentioned yesterday a month after the Doomsday event?

Quite a bit of the first person, who was on the target, and got obliterated by the blast, continued to drift as radioactive dust around the Northern Hemisphere.
But, after a month of mixing in that turbulent atmosphere, most of his particles had settled out onto the surface, and been swept into radioactive pockets of dust. —

The second person, who was in a distant suburb, has just died a horrible death. It was a combination of too many stressful things any one of which might have been survived had it been an isolated problem with normal medical facilities available, but it wasn’t. It was just one horrible thing after another until finally the combination of stresses took his life. First it was the blasts and fires, then the strange, and horrible winds filled with dust, debris and terror. Then, an hour later, came the crunchy radioactive fallout coming right down through the cloudy murk, but having realized what had happened this person grabbed some food, and water and retreated to his basement with his family, and spent the day trying to make that semi-destroyed place livable, and so they survived there for a month. Outside, mutilated people were lying dead, scattered aimlessly about, and the stench of death was heavy. But, other strange rotten smells were in the air. They were not recognizable from personal memory, but they were produced by the diseases familiar to his great-grandparents, and which this generation of people knew only by the names on their vaccination cards. He had found water in their house for a couple of weeks in the form of toilet tanks, and hot water heaters, but that had run out, and filtered puddle water was at last resorted to but even after it was boiled, over a fire made from broken lumber, it was awful. An annoying part of the problem was that the roof had failed and rain water seeped all the way to where they were trying to stay and sleep which made things miserable. Then of course they ate the last of their stored food supplies, and had to scavenge briefly outside, but that was fraught with danger from lingering radioactivity, rampant disease from the rotting corpses, and because there were other desperate people scavenging, and willing to kill to get food, and water, and safe sleeping places. In the end it was just too much and the whole family just succumbed. —

The third person, from the distant farming community, has survived the month, and the fallout has been coped with by retreating to a sheltered basement. Some other people had gone to local mines, and a few large concrete-walled public buildings like schools had earth hurriedly bulldozed over to the sides of them to help keep the radiation out, and were made habitable. Because they were distant from the blasts all of the infrastructures of this community were still in good condition, and even electricity was available, but it was restricted to essential things, and someone went around, and pulled the plugs on electric heaters, and air conditioners, and took away all the tungsten light bulbs. There were some outside people who had come in from the devastated areas, but not so many as might be expected because several of the bridges had been knocked out. All the same after a month things were getting worse because, although this was a farming community, most of the food the local people actually ate was shipped in and that had totally stopped. Many people were beginning to eat their stored crop foods which in the past they had considered animal food. However, it was becoming apparent that their growing crops were outside in the radioactive fallout all the time and were not doing very well, and the sunshine was definitely dimmed by the haze in the air. It appeared that there would be little to harvest this year, and besides there was little fuel to operate the farm machinery to bring in what little would be available. So, at the end of the month everyone was still alive, and most were in good health, but the future looked grim. —

The fourth person was a farmer working out of a small town south of the equator, and so far there had not been much impact from the Doomsday war itself. There was some haze in the air from the few H-bombs that had been exploded in the Southern Hemisphere, but they had been thousands of miles away, and the radiation had dropped to the point where it wouldn’t make people sick, at least in the short run. The media was full of stories of the awful war, and how stupid those foreign northern people were for doing what they did, and there were questions of where they were going to sell their crops now that their markets no longer existed. There was some talk of building fallout shelters, and laying up food and water supplies, but because all of this war problem was so very far away, and people were generally poor anyway it didn’t make sense to waste a lot of time and money on something which didn’t seem necessary. —

The fifth person was in a Lifehaven, and the supply ship had arrived with new routine turnover of fresh people, and the fresh supplies. They were welcome as they had been planned for as part of the Doomsday scenario contingency plan, and seen to their quarters, but then the facility was locked down, and every effort was being made to make it impregnable to armed outside interlopers. This whole facility had been designed from the beginning to be made up of people from around the world, and to be absolutely non threatening to the outside world, but at the same time absolutely impenetrable to armed intervention. This was the reason for locating the Lifehavens so very far from other human communities. It had to be that way because this facility was created to sustain a seed population of people, plants, and animals, and if there were more people admitted there would not be enough to sustain them all. So rather than let the late arriving survivors in and have everyone starve it was planned to keep everyone out who wasn’t invited. This take-no-visitors policy was broadcast worldwide so people would know that they had a better chance of trying to survive where they found themselves.

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Doomsday dawns when a nuclear state has a famine.

Tags

A-Bomb, corn, Doomsday, Doomsday precursors, drought, famine, food costs, Lifehaven, positive feedback, rice, wheat

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A patriotic young man fighting off the vultures of world famine coming to steal the food he has brought forth from the earth with his honest labor and toil.

These are probable precursors to the Doomsday event:

1. The possession of an arsenal of A-bombs by one of the victim countries of famine.
2. A leadership that believes it has the right to use atomic weapons to obtain food.
3. A supporting population of people who feel dispossessed of a necessity like food.
4. An essential item, probably food, water or energy, becoming difficult to acquire.
5. A dearth of an essential like water for crops, and even for personal use because of another country’s actions.
6. The price of food exceeding 80% of the income of most of a country’s people with associated thefts becoming commonplace.
7. A religious belief in the righteousness of killing other people to save ones friends.
8. A 50% worldwide shortfall of a major food crop — wheat, rice, corn, soybeans.
9. Major theft of food supplies at sea, or on highways, by organized groups.
10. State sponsored theft of another country’s water or food.

A Doomsday can happen at any moment because of accident, error, mistake, or simple stupidity which triggers a positive feedback cycle of hostile actions. However, the aggravating factors listed above are probable immediate precursors of that type of event happening, because they increase the stress that is felt by all of the people, and by their leadership. The final triggering event won’t be the lack of food per se, but the perception of an imminent condition where the victims feel that if they don’t act immediately they will become so disadvantageously weakened as to become supine, and unable to defend themselves. When they are so weak that they can’t defend themselves then their enemies will step in and take what little they still possess, and leave them to wither and die. They obviously can’t permit that to happen, and so they will attack. Because, the leadership realizes the attack will provoke a counter attack they will be forced to attack massively on this first assault. If they possess atomic weapons this means that they will use them. However, when they do use them there are other nuclear states who will be tempted or perhaps even forced by circumstances to use their A-bombs, and almost instantly a positive feedback cycle is in action, and a general conflagration begins. Thus Doomsday is triggered by a food shortfall. The shortfall is only relative to the population’s needs, and so that becomes a question of temporary local overpopulation. The exact order, and development will be unique to any given Doomsday event but this is the general order of development.

Top 10 or Top 100 or TIME Person of the Year, says who?

Tags

Add new tag, Lifehaven, person of the year, TIME Top 100, Top 10, Top 100

Top ten, and Top 100 lists are ubiquitous these days, but what do they mean? It is totally dependent upon how the creator goes about defining the qualities which are being measured. Whoever chooses the measure, and its definition determines the results. The May 12, 2008 issue of TIME magazine came out with its 100 most Influential People in The World, but without any other definition than the title, which gives them plenty of latitude to pick whomever they feel like. Their list is interesting, and certainly most of the people have clout in some particular way but what struck me was how temporary the clout will prove to be. When one comes to this list and asks the question, “Will this person be important a thousand years from now?” the results change dramatically, and very few if any of them will pass that test. There were a lot of cool actors, and such but will they be as famous as Sophocles or Shakespeare? There are a lot of powerful politicos like Putin and Bush, Obama, Clinton and McCain but will they be as famous as Caesar or Mao? Sure the Dalai Lama, and Bartholomew Ist are really cool guys but certainly they have done nothing to be remembered a thousand years from now. Brad and Angelina, Oprah and Mia are doing politically correct good deeds and Armstrong and the Wrights are leading the way in health issues which desperately need to be done. Their efforts may still be effective thousand years from now but will their names be remembered? Blair, Kyi, Mitchell, Bloomberg, all very worthwhile but … ?

Finally on page 80 there is Craig Venter who has a real shot at being remembered forevermore – cracking the human genome, creating life, solving the energy problem. Each of those things will grant him a potential place on that pedestal. Jill Taylor and Larry Brilliant may prove exceedingly successful at eliminating various diseases, but as soon as the disease is cured they will be forgotten, and so are the researchers who discover these things, and their sponsors. Chivian and Cizik got a Nobel for stopping nuclear war, and global warming, but a thousand years from now their efforts will, almost without doubt, prove far too feeble. Jepsen’s $100 computer is wonderful, but in that time frame they will be ho hum, and people will say, why didn’t she … ? … it was so obvious. Allen’s and Schiff’s work on brains is great and so is Zuckerberg’s Facebook, but the way science, and technology advance their current works will be superseded very soon. Yamanaka and Thomson’s embryonic stem-cell work is profoundly important, but their names will probably be lost in a sea of other people’s work, even if it is dependent upon theirs. Griffin, if he is successful in returning man to the moon, will be overshadowed by the first-person halo of remembrance, and Armstrong will forevermore have the title. The SETI project when successful will garner a place, but who will get the credit? Probably the person in charge of the lab that night. Solomon and Berzin are fixing the planet, and we must do everything possible, and even impossible to help them succeed, but a thousand year memory of them is doubtful unless they succeed in some specific way.

The Artists and Entertainers are wonderful, but one must expect their work to be as interesting to people a thousand years from now as we are interested in the troubles of hunters of the Pleistocene or their petroglyphic depictions of their problems. The current crop of builders, titans and moguls will garner the same ho hum respect as our antiquated hunters.

So, by my criterion of being influential a thousand years from now, only Craig Venter stands out of the list that TIME created as having much of a chance from the year 2008. You might ask, who would you pick? Well, the person who gets credited with triggering the Doomsday catastrophe is sure to be remembered if there is anyone to do the remembering. Of course that person will be a super villain far more odious than Hitler is presently considered. Oppenheimer and Einstein will probably get that mantle also and possibly Ken Alibek if his biological efforts pan out. Probably, Alibeck’s work will fade away, and be forgotten as immunities evolve, but a background radiation from an atomic war will last forever, at least in perception, and memory whenever anyone gets a cancer. One of the robot creators like Helen Greiner might come up with something infinitely memorable, and hopefully more positive than the bomb although her efforts are not even close just yet. A robot, unless it is very unique, and personal, and lasting and named, will be forgotten. I haven’t any idea who created all of the industrial robots that make modern living so easy. One group of people will be remembered a thousand years from now, and that is that those who set up the Lifehavens. After the current problems resolve themselves into a Doomsday catastrophe, human life, and civilization will spring from a very small base, and those few people who provide that base will be fondly remembered a thousand years from now. You can be among that small number. Support the Lifehaven Strategy.

— The time is ripe for Doomsday —

Lifehaven — Doomsday sense and nonsense.

Tags

Doomsday, Lifehaven, survival

Discussions of Doomsday will generate nonsense responses quicker than any other topic except perhaps the question of how to please a woman. Both of these subjects are of critical importance to the human species, and thus there is a great deal of generalized conversation about them. Ultimately, there can never be clear cut resolution to either subject before the action, and after the action there is nothing left to say. Thus, the arguments will persist until the end of time. At least until the end of time for man.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet #129
Th’ expense of sprit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and, till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

The post “Hilarity – is a symptom that someone might be thinking” gives some underlying reasons for the qualities of human thinking and why we think the way we do. The post “Lifehaven – Request to dock the ship Queen Mary in Tasmania.” with its projection of a precipitous drop in human population, discusses the reason people don’t want to think about survival, and just blank out the whole subject and call it foolish. And, the post “Intelligent Design — of humans by humans and for humans.” brings us back to the problem of why humans are the way they are and behave in the way they do. The problems are just too intractable to be solved with current wisdom, and the outcomes too horrible to contemplate, so any real solutions haven’t been pursued. They are politically unpalatable, and can’t be implemented, and so the impending disaster is blurred over with a distorting rhetoric of transparent fabrications. The problems are simply too big to face.

Overall the situation for most people of the world is better than it has ever been at any time in the history of humanity. People have food, which is proven by the fact that the population continues to expand. There isn’t a major war, proven by the fact that the population continues to expand. There isn’t a major epidemic, proven by the fact that the population continues to expand. The pollution of the environment isn’t a problem, proven by the fact that the population continues to expand. The resources of the world are plentiful, proven by the fact that the population continues to expand. Modern weapons are not being used, proven by the fact that the population continues to expand. The farm land, although nearly fully utilized, isn’t a problem, proven by the fact that the population continues to expand. A long and prosperous future is ahead, proven by the fact that the population continues to expand! Not!

If any of those factors concerning the overall health of the population of the planet falters there will be repercussions felt throughout the rest of them. When that happens it is possible for a progressive collapse to ensue with a positive feedback cycle bringing on a general collapse. That will probably trigger a major war, and that will trigger a really catastrophic collapse. Hence it is necessary to prepare for a fall back position, to prevent the absolute dissolution of all we hold worthwhile. Thus, we need a Lifehaven Strategy to be put into place as quickly as possible. At present we are quite wealthy, and it would be very easy to do. A single philanthropist could finance it. — That is an interesting word. Philanthropist, a “Lover of humanity”. — For a government, any government, it would be a minor appropriation to finance a Lifehaven. Even for a group of not particularly wealthy people it would be easy to create a Lifehaven. Preparations for Lifehavens in the Southern Hemisphere by those people living there would entail little more than creating a livable location, laying up supplies, and supplying a gene bank. However, a group of dedicated people must step forward soon.

Because, the time is ripe for Doomsday.

Lifehaven Strategy — Who and what will live in the havens?

Tags

Apocalypse, Doomsday, famine, Lifehaven, Tasmania, war

Lifehavens are intended as a chance for humanity to rise from the ashes of a totally destroyed modern civilization. The most probable cause of a complete collapse is from the detonation of a large percentage of the 30,000 atomic weapons which are currently armed, and ready to explode. Each of the Lifehavens is designed to be a complete starting seed from which as much as possible of the Earth’s plant, and animal life can be restored as well as a broad representation of the human species with its accumulated intellectual knowledge, and wisdom. Because it is unknowable what all of the problems will be after the Doomsday event, it is desirable to build in as much redundancy as possible. The List of Lifehavens has been drawn from the remote parts of the Southern Hemisphere, because they are the places least likely to be destroyed by fallout from a war which will be waged almost entirely in the Northern hemisphere. Also by being very remote they can shut down any physical communication with the outside world, and thus avoid most disease pathogens which might be released by warring parties. Also, they are remote from current population centers to prevent them from being easily attacked by small, but organized groups of bandits.

A basic Lifehaven is comprised of about 300 fertile couples with a child or two, a large number of animals, probably small ones for more species variety, given the space available, and a large gene bank for as many species as possible. This gene bank would include specimens from species not present at the haven. Some animals might survive outside of the Lifehavens, and it would be desirable to have non-irradiated genetic material available for future use to reconstitute all possible surviving species. There should be genetic material for as many species as possible in the seed bank including as many as possible for wild species. All of the Lifehavens would have seed, and gene banks, but those located in very cold places like the South Pole station would be best for these uses, though not very desirable for human havens. The information of modern society should be duplicated, and stored in their libraries both on paper and on several different types of digital media for redundancy, and located as deep as possible to reduce threat of EMP or some other form of disruption destroying the data.

There is the question as to who would be permitted into the Lifehavens? There should be as great a variety as possible of answers to that question depending on the kind of Lifehaven. Here are a few:

1. Commercial ventures located 50 kilometers from cities with basic supplies.
2. Vacation spas at remote locations with a side line of a seed bank and a bunker.
3. Supported sites local to civilization, and fully stocked, but occupied by worker maintenance.
4. Remote to civilization, but fully stocked, and semi-occupied.
5. Remote, and fully stocked, and fully occupied at all times with selected people.
6. Remote, and fully stocked ,and totally defensible from all outsiders.
7. Remote, hidden, unknown, and unfindable, but fully stocked, and semi-occupied.
8. Unoccupied Antarctic seed banks in remote locations with ideal temperatures.
9. South Pole Station seed bank, occupied, and attended by occasionally involved caretakers.

The list can be expanded, but this is a start. There is a need to get a standard Lifehaven operational as quickly as possible because has been stated elsewhere, the time is ripe for Doomsday. It could strike at any second, and if it is a very bad Doomsday, there will be no one left to remake the world. The quickest Lifehaven would be to move a large cruise ship such as the Queen Mary into a bay west of Hobart, Tasmania, and make it radiation proof. Once it was on site, or to some extent even before, it could be outfitted with a great deal of the desirable equipment, and food supplies. The original crew would be made up largely of workers skilled in the trades of outfitting a ship. In this case the Lifehaven would be made as permanent as possible.