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THE HUMANS WERE HERE: THE POST-APOCALYPTIC (R)EVOLUTION

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IT COULD BE ONLY ONE

THE WORLD AFTER APOCALYPSE

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“Keisuke: “It’s alright for you to kill someone?”
Akira: “As long as they have tags. According to the rules, if there’s three people present, it’s an official battle. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to start it, though.”
Keisuke: “So killing people is just a game, huh?”
Akira: “It’s the only way to survive.”

-Siguro Chayamachi, Togainu No Chi Volume 1

The killing of people is still a game for some radical terrorist group nowadays. They have moved their virtual appetite for death into the real world, they have changed the lives of all of us. We do not live in the dimension of peace but rather in the parallel universe of war. No matter who we are, where we are located and what we do, it seems that we all shape the spider web of failed expectations and disordered hopes for the future. The humanity has died long time ago, everything we have now is simply survival instinct.

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There are so many fictional books and movies that describe the atmosphere of the end of the days, the coming kingdom of darkness. Many of them have basic core in the religious stuff so it is so easy to blame Satan for all bad deeds of humans. Some focus on the human nature and accept the responsibility for the transformation process from the human beings into the beast with the naked purpose to survive. It is very rare to find those who are aware of the fragile humanity within all of us and that try to search for a deeper sources of broken society when the hard times come. No, I am not talking about zombies, vampire diaries, werewolves or aliens. I am talking here about the humans after humans.

If you are not Robert Neville in “I am a Legend” who stated once :”The people who are trying to make the world worse are not taking a day off.”, then you must be ready to consider all elements of the potential threats and to be enough mature to know when it is the right moment to embrace the chance to play the final chess game. The holy books have their own theories what will happen and when but aside from it, they pretend that people are innocent and only abused by demonic powers. I think we all should be realistic and aware that there are no innocence in us today and that we have chosen the road of ultimate existence instead of coexistence. No, God won’t send us punishments because we will dig out our own graves. The political hatred, the economic greed, the ecological blindness, the militarization of science….all of them are indicators of future collapse of the system we live in and so called rules we are under.

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The evolution expert believe that after the natural disasters hit the Earth and bring us the wave of pain, tears,  blood and death, the competition and the race  for life will be so strong and powerful that will cause the breakdown of  all social bonds. Professor Mark Pagel, a leading evolutionary biologist does not really  think that anything could be so destructive for a human race as an asteroid. It would definitely wipe out the whole civilization but the silent  and slow waves of extinction could be happened through the nuclear conflicts, antibiotic resistance or a pandemic virus,the failure of computer service worldwide, the lack of food and water, caused by the climate changes. Each of the mentioned problems has capacity to accelerate the final shutdown of the world we know but the global dying would come along with the accumulated international common issues.First of all, the governments could not be able to  coordinate the violence. Once the real nature is unleashed, and the free guns of the survivors open all  doors, the idea about peaceful solutions is a past. Everyone is responsible for his own life and the life of his family. Everything is allowed. Killing is necessary. People will form the gangs, because they are aware that pack culture will ensure more  chances for a life. One gang against another one. Sometimes, one family against another. Simplistic predator modus operandi but also very much human when the humanity is gone.

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Our professor Mark Pagel writes in some of his articles:“Life would become stone age-like but some remnants of humanity would survive. Under some scenarios, the more humans that die, the easier it becomes for the remainder to survive because food will become more plentiful, energy will become less scarce, there will be less strife and the rates of disease transmission will be lower.On the other hand, the pool of shared knowledge will dwindle as more humans perish and this will make it more difficult for the survivors.” According to him, we must keep on so called cumulative cultural evolution to reshape the environment but before that all happens and we rise from the ash of total destruction, the chaos couldn’t be escaped.

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However, the strategies depend on the reason of mass extinction. If that is a terrible pandemic, people will survive only if they are isolated. There is no doubt that at some point, the virus killer will stop killing and those who survived will form a special immune system against it. Not to mention that their own offsprings will have modified genetic maps. It is very possible, just after the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, some people became resistant to that dangerous virus. From one generation to another, the evolution skeleton would  definitely be different as well as the genom.

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The nuclear winter could not be anything better for the human race on the menu of apocalyptic events. The abnormal cold and darkness would follow the nuclear war and keep sun’s rays away from the Earth. The lack of solar energy would hit the agriculture and life itself. Radioactivity would cause the genetic changes in the targeted population and even if they survive it, the coming generations will be shaped on the other organic  formula of existence. As Charles Darwin said, the only species that will survive is one that is capable to adapt to the new demands of life. That is exactly how  many small ancestral mammals, and some birds managed to survive the K-T extinction, including alligators and crocodiles.

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What is making me really worried is that no matter what kind of cataclysm comes, the lack of food or its production and delivery will be under question. The absence of food and water will bring out the worst in people. As cannibalism is ethically questionable, the dark ages will erase the human values and convince people that there is something worse than eating human meat, watching your own children die from hunger. The moment when one human eats another is the moment when the post-apocalypse survival logic has made its own cruel rules. You can be killer and you will survive or you will be killed as a prey. I am afraid that the awaken and accepted post-apocalyptic cannibalism is something we must count on.

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The another important chapter is a weapon. There is no possibility that anyone is going to survive without having ammunition. Even if the first  group of survivors is peaceful, the second will be aggressive. Weapon’s support will be crucial as well as the primary shelters, enough separated from the hot zones.

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The all ideas about the apocalypse and even more important, about the post-apocalyptic environment and humans are just free thoughts of writer’s imagination and colored by the hopes that nature of the homo sapiens is better than predictions and Hobbes’ state of nature and natural liberty. We must save the world we have now because we have invested a lot in the civilization progress and it would be devastating for all of us to see how our castle in sand is being collapsed just because we haven’t saved it when we had chance.  The strength of numbers, we must cooperate for common good and not for common evil.Everything else in the meantime is just a waste of precious time that is given to us as the thinking animals.

 

 

 

212 thoughts on “THE HUMANS WERE HERE: THE POST-APOCALYPTIC (R)EVOLUTION”

  2. Thank you so much, Sarah, for this wonderful article ! I say “wonderful” because there is a profound message of hope as indicated in your closing argument!

    For years, we have been witnessing the degeneration and the disintegration of humanity ! It is very well seen through the way “humans” have been treating animals and one another !

    There has been a mind-boggling decline in human values and virtues, which has been happening at a staggering celerity !

    It is time for humans to mend their ways before it’s too late, and that’s what you, Sarah, are urging humans to do. It’s as if you were their “Conscience” telling them to rectify their path of self-destruction !

    The current trajectory humans are on would lead to that apocalyptic stage as you mentioned. This is tantamount for humans to degenerate into becoming “cavemen” yet again !

    It is time for humans to stop being driven by greed and power, as these are the two main ingredients behind the current path of self-destruction !

    We, as humans, have enough hurdles to face without the addition of the possibility of a nuclear war ! As you stated, Sarah, we are facing the cataclysmic potential from viruses, lack of water and food, global computer system failure, and antibiotics resistance ! So, let’s not add the nuclear annihilation to the already-exacerbated situation !

    In closing, I invoke your beautiful message of hope, Sarah, namely “We must save the world we have now because we have invested a lot in the civilization progress and it would be devastating for all of us to see how our castle in sand is being collapsed just because we haven’t saved it when we had chance. The strength of numbers, we must cooperate for common good and not for common evil.Everything else in the meantime is just a waste of precious time that is given to us as the thinking animals.”

    I would also like to thank you for your amazing and intriguing illustrations that accompany your article ! It’s such a pleasure to read your articles !

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  3. Sarah’s insightful and well-written article reminded me of the novel entitled ‘The Last Man’ (1826), by Mary Shelley (1797-1851). Some literary scholars discern the book to be the inceptive work and progenitor of contemporaneous apocalyptic literature.

    The narrative follows a group of people from England as they struggle to survive plague-infested regions. The main protagonist, a young man with a wife and children, endeavours to protect and guide his family, but becomes the last man alive, ultimately, as the plague, exhaustion and other factors overwhelm his family members.

    The novel itself demonstrates a profound comprehension by the authoress of the documented history of disease and instituted medicine; specifically, the smallpox vaccine and various 19th-century theories about the structure and spread of contagion.

    Interestingly, most literary critics denounced the novel: they had supported Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), by Mary Shelley, but The Last Man was misconstrued by most critics, who did not understand the implications. Nevertheless, Mary Shelley herself perceived The Last Man as her preferred novel; even though it would not be published again until 1965.

    The First-Person narrative commences around the end of the 21st century and closes in the year 2100. Several of the anecdotes are relative to cataclysmic events that have occurred since 1826; such as major earthquakes and pandemics.

    The first cholera pandemic (1817-24) began near Calcutta (then, British India) and spread throughout South East Asia to The Middle East, Eastern Africa and The Mediterranean Sea regions. While cholera had spread across India many times previously, this outbreak went further: it reached as far as China and The Mediterranean Sea before receding. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of this pandemic; including many British soldiers, which attracted European attention. This was the first of several cholera pandemics to sweep through Asia and Europe, during the 19th and 20th centuries. This first pandemic spread over an unprecedented range of territory, affecting almost every country in Asia.

    In 2016, Cholera affected an estimated 6 million people worldwide and caused around 700,000 deaths, according to The World Health Organization (WHO). Historical descriptions of cholera are found as early as the 5th century BCE, in Sanskrit. The study of cholera by the English physician Dr John Snow (1813-1858), between 1849 and 1854, led to significant advances in the field of epidemiology. His work in tracing the source of a cholera outbreak in Soho, London, in 1854, was intrinsic to this. He had to struggle against the noxious ignorance of the politicians of his day; just as we now struggle against the noxious ignorance of climate change deniers among the elite and their political minions…

    If the apparent cataclysmic occurrence is to be borne of microorganisms, then nobody will survive; at least, no humans. The evidence of this being in the Mediaeval bubonic plague occurrences in Europe (1346-53): approximately, 60% of all Europeans perished. The only reason the pandemic ended was because the rodent population (i.e. the initial host of the infectious disease) was unable to sustain its numbers for lack of food, and thus the fleas (i.e. the original carrier on the rodents) died out.

    Arguably, Homo sapiens are living in the most dangerous period of their history on Earth; specifically, because of their interference in Nature (e.g. industrial pollution and biodiversity loss). Already, we are making the surface of the Earth inhabitable. In the aftermath of an apocalypse, there is little likelihood of any organism being able to survive. In all probability, the Earth will shut down and require millions of years to return to a state of habitability. This may not happen, because planets go through many diverse phases, and the right conditions to support organic life might not ever come again on Earth… If the Ozone Layer is further depleted, the solar winds will scorch and strip the surface of the planet of all life forms.

    So, the issue concerns not how to survive a cataclysm, but why bother to…

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  4. Thank you, Sarah, for such an excellent article. Every concern, worry, and point you have in the article is valid and possible. Regardless of the cause, when the Earth’s technological civilization collapses, it’s hard to predict the outcome of such disaster, especially when it comes to humans. Human is the most intelligent creature on this planet and has proven to be a good survivor when a disaster occurs. As humans, we get so emotional during a calamity or hard time, so during that time, I expect that people would be helping and not eliminating each other. I expect them to be kind and nice to what is left of the animals and nature. They would need to do so to survive. As of how the human physical changes, it depends on how far or close people are from the center of the disaster location.

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About Sarahowlgirl1982

I am a master of Political Sciences, with special focus on Security Studies, Islamic Counter Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction. I enjoy discovering and commenting things which are " in the air" but still not spoken.I also do like science writing and planing to move myself into the pure science journalism !