i noticed that almost everyone's conjecture is that the earth goes to shit in an instant, and the following one everyone is pulling their socks. no one considers disorders, anarchy, complete and total loss of infrastructure, full out worldwide civil war, the moment you lose communications the nations crumble to nothing, logistics disappear, transports vanish, and 99% of what we have depends on something on the other side of the world.
Those 99% of things you're referring to are mostly high tech and luxury items (and batches upon batches of Chinese-made T-shirts).
Not sure why you think communications and logistics will collapse that easily and irrevocably. The majority of beneficiaries take these things for granted,
but there are folks devoted to keep this shit running with the know-how and contingencies.
Sure, there is going to be some chaos initially until everyone figures out what's what, but there are ham radios and older trucks and vehicles which don't rely on electronics (if stuff was hit by EMP along the way).
If there's an upside to most of the population buying the farm, it's that the rest won't need as many supplies, so setting up some rudimentary network will be this much easier.
Say you've got two tractors running on biofuel in a barn, hitch-em up and they might run a few supply runs. You'd have to think really hard to justify why such resources are unavailable.
I get what you're saying, and a lot depends on the exact post-apocalyptic scenario and different places wil be affected differently. City dwellers will probably resort to looting because more often than not
they don't possess any suitable skills for this situation. How it plays out eventually depends on the ability of local governments to keep their resources and structure intact
(it's funny how everyone assumes that once you hit the capital, the rest of the country will become headless chickens - a lot of places would actually welcome such a turn of events).
Rural areas already tend to have quite a lot of essential survival gear already on hand together with the know-how, so things will be different in the country.
There are villages where every other house is riddled with photovoltaics, there are biofuel installations, etc. I think a more serious threat to such communities would be the lack of
medical supplies and healthcare.
The tl;dr here is this: big cities will probably be the first to go - the intricate networks to sustain them might collapse, or they will be the prime targets for nuking.
Let's not forget the global urbanization rate is 50% - ish, which means we still have the other half of global population to work with.
What I'm also getting at is: you'll probably see a wholly different flavor of the apocalypse of you compare, say, California, Switzerland, Australia and subsaharan Africa.
Some places will go to hell immediately, others might barely notice the end times.
I think a lot depends on the type of apocalypse we're dealing with.
Even in the event of nucler war there will be places nobody thought were worth hitting.
We toyed with a global pandemic quite recently, turned out a bit unspectacular.
I have a sneaking suspiction climate change might not live up to the hype either.
Not sure what happens exactly if we're getting hit by another celestial body. Depends on size and point of impact, I guess.
You should give more credit to mankind's survivability, considering the genre we're discussing is basically an apotheosis of the theme.
Even with 99% of global population gone, that leaves us with 80 million souls which, according to some online guesstimate, would be almost 1,5x the earth's population in 1000BC.
Yeah, we're fucking roaches.
Jenkem will become the drug of choice because it can be made anywhere by anyone.
Hey man, at least do it properly:
Jenkem will become the drug of choice.