[coop?] hard post apocalyptic setting

Remember that cooperative fantasy setting we did a couple years ago? I am wondering if there is any interest in something similar here.

An object passed through the system 75 years ago and disrupted the orbits of some planets and the tilt of Earth. It is now 8 degrees more than it was. Subsequent climate change and the resulting wars have altered the political map as well as extremes of weather. In the 3 generations that have passed, more than a billion people have drown, another billion have been displaced and 2 more billion have been born. It is unknown how many died in the wars following the cataclysm.

What I am aiming for is the description of a small area (Lakes Ontario and Erie and NY, PA and Ohio inland a hundred miles or so) and ignoring the rest of the planet. If anyone wants to work on anywhere, even where I am developing, please feel free to post your ideas.

Hey everyone and Derek in particular

How quick is this 8 degree change gonna set in Derek, 10 seconds, 10 minutes, 10 hours, 10 days, 10 weeks, 10, months, 10 years.

In any of those time scales it is still an unprecedented catastrophe. The first three mean we're all (99.99% of us) dead or dying in less than a day, and the others means that most of us (99.9 %) are dying within in a year or two.

Currently Earth does change its axial tilt by +- 2.4 degrees every 40000 years. Or about 0.00006 degrees a year.

This results in (or greatly assists) cycle of Ice ages which has dominated our planet's history.

Eight degrees in 75 years is about 0.106 degrees a year or something 4 or 5 orders of magnitude more drastic than what we naturally experience..

An 8 degree change in Earth's tilt would be brutal, catastrophic, truly Apocalyptic (with a capital A, a Biblical Final Days sort of apocalypse, be prepared to meet your maker). This is not in your grandpa's touchy-feelly-nicey-Mad-Max apocalypse.

Eight degrees is +-8888 kms (5555 miles for those still living in the Dark ages).

Picture moving the winter snow fall maximums eight thousand kilometers toward the equator. Picture moving late summer maximum drought eight kilometers closer to he poles.

Now consider both of those in one year. Remember it doesn't get better again after one year. Next year is just as bad, for forever. It won't (likely) fix itself over the next 40000 years.

Only the very strong (and I suspect that doesn't mean humans) will survive.

I think Derek's die-off figures are very conservative (i.e. far too hopeful). About half the worlds current population (about 3.4 billion people) depend on modern agriculture to eat. Unlike previous ages most of those people don't have a seven year surplus of basic food stockpiled in case things go bad. Most of 'em don't even have a two week backup. Modern agriculture operates on a quarter by quarter basis. So disruption in supply one season means people will go hungry (or pay lots more) for their food in the next. Unless supply is majorly stepped up in the subsequent quarters the hunger or the higher prices don't go away.

Modern agriculture is dependent on modern machinery and modern petro-chemical based fertilizers and insecticides and pesticides. Disrupt the flow of those for a quarter and the next harvest will be 50% or 75% smaller. People go hungry or pay lots more for food.

My estimate is that in event of a sudden climate change (like 8 degree in 75 years) half to three quarters of that 3.4 billion will die in the first six to twelve months. The survivors will probably continue to suffer negative population growth for at least four generations until they learn how to deal with the New World.

Of cause 1/3 of modern agriculture's produce goes into making cows fat and beer. If we gave up those maybe a few more of us will survive. But is it worth it? A world without affordable steak and cheep booze? That is too frightening to contemplate :-)

Note to kiddies reading this forum, Uncle Orc is being SARCASTIC here - life without beef and cheep booze is quite doable even without an apocalypse to force the issue. In fact it is quite wise. Forget that: Uncle Orc SAYS: stay away from cheep booze (and the expensive stuff too) and limit the amount of cheap cow too. You want to live long happy life not a short miserable one complicated by huge doctor's bills and daily handfuls of prescription medicine to keep your liver, arteries, heart and pancreas from trying to murder you. This public service announcement was brought to you free, courtesy of A.net.



The other half (who don't rely on modern mechanized agriculture) rely on subsistence, subsistence plus cash crop or seasonal commercial farming. In the event of a drastic climate change (in the order of 8000 kilometer movement of weather patterns in 75 years) the pure subsistence population will crash to almost nothing. You can't subsist when icicles are growing on your banana trees or when the dust bowl just blew in over your maize field.

The subsistence plus cash crop guys have a small buffer. They are either growing a food cash crop (seasonal fruit or maize or wheat) or a non-food one (tobacco, sugar cane, coffee, hemp, cotton). Those growing a food cash crop have a buffer to avoid population implosion. Those growing non-food cash crops need to burn their cash crop and start planting food. Either way rapid climate change will still screw a substantial number over.

The seasonal commercial farmers grow seasonal crops for commercial sale, they are modern agriculturists without the combines and petro-chemical dependency. Examples are the better Nile valley farmers and the Amish. They still get screwed over, but if they can they can harvest a lot of food and horde it and thus survive. A commercial farmer is producing 100s to 1000s of times the food his family can eat. That ought to be enough to get you through the next few years. Your former-customers in the cities are (of cause) royally screwed and are going to starve (even if they resort to 'long pork' - there just isn't enough long pork to go round), but they were stupid buggers anyway for not farming for themselves.

I see a population drop to less than 1 billion and probably as low as 100 million, and negative growth or very small growth in population for quite some time.

Add in war, human stupidity and the inevitable fires that will consume modern cities in the wake of mass starvation and anarchy. A few nukes will royally screw up the local area and add a bit of nuclear autumn into the mix. If even a substantial percent of the total arsenal is used we are (a) mostly all dead already and (B) royalled screwed for a long time afterwards.

Seventy five years later I'm guessing the only successful remaining human settlements will be those in easily defend-able (or concealed) positions, who stockpiled 75 years worth of food, ammo and toothpaste (you'll be amazed at how quickly bad oral hygiene can kill yer).

I can't even begin to imagine what the new world would look like. But here are a few suggestions:

Mass flooding doesn't really happen unless the Antarctic ice shelves collapse almost completely. Current indicators are that (apparently anthromorphically driven) global warming is growing those shelves. Swinging the planet 8 degrees out of line means that 8000 of that ice might now be in a summer melting latitude. But there is a lot of ice. It is three kilometers thick in places. It will take a lot of days of sunshine to melt that ice cube day.

Unless of cause the mass flooding is induced by a very rapid (24 hours) change in the earth's alignment (in which case we're all so @#$%ing screwed we won't even have time to think about hording our tins of beans). 8000 km in 24 hours would move all sorts of water in all sorts of unnatural and very disturbing ways. At an outside guess I'd humbly suggest that you bid half of Holland and all of Venice a fond farewell. If Holland gets in the neck the Thames part of London gets it straight in the throat. The place was marsh before humans settle it. It will be marsh again.

Narrow sea passages like Suez and Gibrator might suffer some serious erosive flooding. It might get me the flooding of the Qattara Depression (my all time favorite low tech home-terraforming job). Picture Gibraltor and the African coast receding froom each other a few miles in a couple of years, not from plate tectonics for a change, but due to sheer massive erosion. People on both sides might be happier if there are any people left to be happy.

Any extra pressure on major fault lines is bound to trigger some earth quakes. If you move Earth 8000 km extra in a short period of time expect lots of Earth quakes and potentially a cascading effect along the 'circle of fire' fault lines.

Bye-bye Los Angeles. Adios Tokyo. Anywhere in Indonesia that isn't the top of a decent volcano cone is going to have a bad day or week or month.

The resulting tsunamis or (pardon the pun) wave of tsunamis will make the Christmas Day tsunamis look like a piker, a little piker. It might even make the post-Krakatoa explosion tsunamis look gentle. The east coast of Africa is heavily depopulated immediately because they had very little history of dealing with tsunamis.

AHHHH #$^@. damn you Derek, you've made me think about reshaping the world (again).

Orc needs to go find mindless distraction....

Regards
Orc

(and kiddies, Uncle Orc is NOT @#%#ing kidding. Don't do it. Ever. It's not worth it. EVER.

(So far at least until cheap cloning and consciousness uploads become a public service) you only get one body EVER. Don't screw it up with stupid crap like booze and drugs that won't make you any happier long term, won't make people like you better, and will probably make you very sick in the morning. Don't do anything you will regret in the morning. Ever. That includes Karaoke and tequila shooters, especially the Karaoke. Reckless behavior is not cool, even when you are a teenager. It is just stupid, even when you're not a teenager anymore. And just because your 'friends' or people you might want to be your friends are doing it doesn't make it cool. It's still stupid not matter who is doing it.

Now get of the Internet and go play outside (away from the railway tracks), and PUT ON your SPF-100 and put on your hat, and don't throw the ball in the house).

I want a cataclysm that will change the face of the planet without relying on nukes. I will think about another idea but want to say this:

Exactly- I meant by the sloshing of the oceans and other large bodies of water. If the 8 degrees are added in a few hours, there will be a lot of land that is cleaned down to the bedrock, including the majority of the world's cities.

Good. That is the point of threads like this one.

Though it might take me a bit to find something that isn't an asteroid impact or atomic war to base a hard science setting around.

(The film 2012) - ("microwave-inos") + (Derek's scenario) = accurate scale model of events.

The smoothness of the Earth's surface makes a billiard ball look like a cube. You put some motion in the ocean (heh) and nothing will stop it from scouring the land down to bedrock. You'd be left with barren rock surrounded by a planet-sized mud puddle.

I would only expect to see microbial life after such an event. You need something a hair less titanic if you want survivors.

I had the idea once of using a spectacular failure of an FTL experiment that forced the Moon to "jump" to a position further away from Earth (never had the math skills to figure out the details). Since the Moon still had its velocity when it popped back into existence, it manged to settle into a highly elliptical orbit rather than being pulled straight into the Earth*. So although both Earth and Moon were still in two pieces, like they are supposed to be, the tides on Earth began rising hundreds of meters every 200 days (or whatever).

Now look at a topographical map of the Earth and trace just how far inland you have to go before stopping at the new high tide mark. For this discussion, let's assume a high tide mark of 250 meters. At that height, the difference between high and low tide would be visible from Mars with the help of a hand-held telescope. Which, actually, was part of the story I created this for, but that's another tale for another time.

* Yeah, I know, doesn't exactly work like that. I was 12, for crying out loud, what do you want?

Anyway, like it, hate it, love it, take it, change it, toss it, whatever.

So, this is the devious plan you've been gathering intel on for the past month, hmm? Finally had enough of us, have you? Decided to go back to formula, as it were? You are a wrathful, unforgiving deity, oh mighty Holland...might not some of us be spared to serve you?

K.

This post has been edited by Kzinwarrior on Feb 24 2010, 19:54

Well, I have a few questions for clarification.

1: Are we talking moving just the crust, or are you actually realigning the axis?

2: Time frame is very important, as Orc mentioned. What do you have in mind?

3: How would a rapid shift in the axis of Terra affect Luna?

I believe #3 is may be largely unaffected, if not totally moot. As long as the center of mass doesn't move (it can spin around, yeah, I mean move in relation to the Moon's center of mass), Luna should be unaffected.

I also believe I may full of bovine scat.

Pick one.

K.

EDIT: "is may be"? Is that like "was will be" from Fantastic Planet? Man, haven't seen that in a long time....



This post has been edited by Kzinwarrior on Feb 24 2010, 21:27

I think you're consuming the wrong extruded cow product, kitty. Milk or the red semi-solid stuff. ;)

Putting the moon at a different point in comparison to our axial equator should have some effect, on both orbs.

1) The whole planet moves on its axis.

2) However long it would take if a Jupiter sized mass moved through the system and is far enough away not to pull Earth out of orbit badly.

3) I forgot about the moon. Even if Earth moving wouldn't affect it, the mass would.

That would be interesting to model- instead of changing Earth's axis, change the orbit of the moon from equatorial to something else (8 degrees?).

remeber the last posts in Cosmos 2?
maybe an asteroid or something else smashes on Mars or Venus and the planet is cracked open in a disperse belt / deorbits into the sun / is slingshot away.

Why all of this violence on another innocent planet?

Because the loss of a planet will severely screw up the other's orbits. If it is a smaller planet it will not screw them so much as the loss of a Jovian world. I hope.

I just wanted to move the Earth's orbit a little closer to the Sun. With obvious "desert wasteland" effects. (not so close to boil off the seas but enough to screw the ecosystem, say 60 C° or 140 F in sunny summers)

Or getting a more eccentric orbit with bigger differences between seasons.
Or more orbital speed, so that all seasons duration decreases dramatically.

Also, another cool extremely more realistic scenario usually ovelooked:
Sun becomes angry and powerful Coronal Mass Ejections (bucketloads of charged particles) score a direct hit on Earth (they did somewhere in the1859 Carrington Event on wikipedia and less powerful while still frightening events after it March 1989 geomagnetic storm).

All technology relying on computers worldwide (the flare lasts enough to let the Earth rotate) dies. All tech is destroyed, all comm systems fail, no more fast transportation of goods. In Third world contries this will not be a big deal by itself, but they will be left alone and noone will pay them for resources, crashing their frail economy.
Us, the "rich ones" will be stranded without much resources (because we mostly rely on imported goods for food and tech) and will begin to starve.
Mayhem for food and what is left of tech will begin. :yes

derek_holland wrote on Feb 25 2010, 11:09

This is bad for so many reasons. Even a 1 or 2 degree shift in a human life time would drastically alter life on Earth as we know it. Observe the effect of teh current 2.4 degrees shifting every 40K years. From glaciers covering most of Europe to continental swamp to grass land or forest every 40K is a pretty brutal cycle already

The further away you are from the Earth-moon system the more it looks and behaves like a single object (at least in orbital mechanics terms).

Keeping in mind that something Jupiter sized moving through the solar system even making a 'glancing blow' across the outer system is going to upset the whole apple cart and put everything out of sync. The solar system is built the way it is because it has taken something like 10 to 15 BILLION years to 'stabilize' into the current configuration.

If you have Neptune sharing gravitational space with a Jupiter sized object, its orbit will go wonky (or wonkier - the outer outer planets are all a little odd that way). If Neptune goes wonky, Uranus might too. Next orbit around (admittedly we're talking 200 year orbits here) the wonky Uranus destabilizes Pluto, sending Charon careening off into space or hurtling into the inner solar system.

If you start doing the same sort of stuff in the inner Solar System you are going to see Saturn moving places and probably losing some moons. Which could be catastrophic for Earth if one of them heads on in instead of out.

Moving the moon is probably as hard as moving any of the objects in the Solar system. It is slowly drifting away from us at some astronomical snails pace. Adjusting its apogee and perigee would change how the tide work, which would be very bad for life as we know it. At a new 'further away' apogee we'd have much smaller tides, and at a 'closer perigee' they'd be more severe. How bad I'm not bright enough to work out. Bad enough that coastal marine life is seriously confused and all sorts of boat-type people are going to be plenty upset.

An answer to your needs Derek might be Nemesis, a largely discredited theory about the Sun's possible extremely distant, very dark binary partner.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_%28star%29

According to the theory Nemesis reaches it perigee with Sol every 26 million years, never getting close than 50,000 AU (AU= Astronomical Unit, a fairly arbitery number invented to define the average distance between the Sun and the earth)

It is supposed to be a dark, brown dwarf or some such, something undetectable by astronomers relying on light

Nemesis is never close enough to actually affect the planets (though it accounts for some of Pluto's extreme eccentricity) but it does accelerate a whole chunk of the Oort cloud toward the inner solar system.

Jupiter reliably soaks up the bulk of the higher than usual number of comets. Saturn does its best but being the third heaviest in a solar system where Sol is king just sucks.

Earth almost always, quite by chance, will catch one or two. The Earth-Moon system doesn't really have enough mass to actually attract the damn thing in.

A cometary impact is fairly grim. It is probably what did in the dinosaurs.

The actual impact site (assuming there is only one) is instantly remodeled. The adjacent hemisphere gets a bit of new decorating as big chunks of ex-comet and rock that was occupying the comet landing zone rain down for a few hours.

The other hemisphere gets a few stray, energetic rocks, some global atmospheric heating (that'll get us) and gets to live with the nuclear winter that follows. Glaciers reshape landscapes. Retreating oceans reveal new shore lines. Fault lines disturbed by the cometary impact get a sturdy jolt and snap a lot. Associated volcanoes empty out their available loads of energy, molten rock and poison gas.

You don't get to change the actual continents that much (that's continental drift's job) but you can sure do some interesting re-decorating on the edges.

The poor miserable sods who crawl out of that wreckage are going to probably not happy to have survive.

Run with it.

REgards
Orc