How to make a post-apocalyptic setting more 'realistic'?

More practical from wood.

 

But is the soil destroyed? I don't feel at all as if I have an understanding of what went wrong in this world.

If there's no plant growth, then everybody's dead. Period. Oh, there might be a few dozen people eating from deteriorating cans in missile silos, but otherwise everything's dead. The food pyramid starts with plants.

And that's why I'm assuming that there's plant growth.

So I guess I'm agreeing with you, I'm just going to the opposite conclusion--OP says that there are humans, so to me that means that there is plant growth. And I'm moderately sure it also means that the seas can't actually be dead.

 

Well he mentioned a supervolcano, eroded soil and worldwide bombing. So i assumed triple plant killer combo.

 

Yeah, I'm curious as to what "eroded soil" means in this context. The planet is a closed system; the topsoil goes somewhere.

 

The sea?

 

Possibly but not necessarily. Moving all the topsoil in all the world to the sea seems implausible.

 

If there is no ground cover, that is what wind and rivers do over time. What's left is sand, which is how deserts get larger.

 

There are two pieces that don't go together:

- People alive.
- No plants alive.

Those don't go together. And the original poster clearly wants a story with some people, and I don't have the impression that he's talking about just a few people hiding in missile silos eating canned food.

Therefore we HAVE to have plants and soil they can grow in. We just do. I don't really care that the OP specified otherwise--he also specified people, therefore we do. If I have to throw out something he specified, I'm going to throw out the universally dead soil rather than the living people. I'm probably also going to throw out the universally dead ocean.

The soil may be lousy, and it may be somewhere other than it used to be, but there has to be soil that can grow plants. Otherwise, there are no people and there is no story.

Returning to add a quote:

A world with not one single plant, anywhere, is indeed hellish.

 

I have a sense that we’ve given the situation more thought than the OP, which is not so much a dig against the OP as maybe against us.

 

It is really up to the OP how he wants to program it, but increasing temps would make the green creep north/south and the middle latitudes go brown then the soil blow away. A lot of people would die, but intensive farming in the sub polar temperate zones along with greenhouses and aquaculture could sustain a pretty large population. The only reason people currently starve anywhere is politics and capitalism - a tremendous amount of prime farmland in America sits fallow.

So I could see a world with very little soil, a lot of people and exactly enough food to feed everyone with perfect rationing. I realize that seems like a stretch because we have always assumed that a catechism will result only in barbarism, but I think it possible that inescapable evidence that no group can "win" might bring about the kind of world cooperation that we usually hear about in alien invasion stories.

 

Isn't there also an oxygen issue? Without plants, we wouldn't just starve, we'd also suffocate?

 

Oceans.

 

But... the plants in the oceans, right? Not just the water...

 

There's an estimate somewhere online that takes into account the current world population, oxygen use per person, and amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and comes up with an approximate 500,000 years before it would become a problem. I can't remember if it takes into account other oxygen breathing animals, but based on that, I would imagine we'd have a couple of generations to figure something out.

 

Oh, yeah. Good point.

Re the ocean question, one hurried Google brings me to

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-breathe-freely/

"...rainforests are responsible for roughly one-third (28%) of the Earth’s oxygen but most (70%) of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by marine plants. The remaining 2 percent of Earth’s oxygen comes from other sources. The ocean produces oxygen through the plants (phytoplankton, kelp, and algal plankton) that live in it."

I knew there was a reason why a dead ocean wasn't an option.

 

Not sure what you're asking. The ocean is full of plants like kelp that produce oxygen, and it comes out of concentration into the atmosphere.

 

Yes, and we're discussing the fact that an Earth without plants, and with a dead ocean, is a problem. An ocean with plants is not a dead ocean.

 

So my original point stands... without plants (whether terrestrial or aquatic) there'd be problems with oxygen. If there are no plants on the planet there'd be an oxygen shortage.

(This may be inaccurate, based on @The Dapper Hooligan's post, but I'd really like to see the original article on that, because the numbers seem strange to me...)

 

I have a feeling the estimate I was referring to was from this Quora answer, which I wouldn't be inclined to hold as gold, but there are a couple of other places like this article on New Scientist, a site I don't know much about, that gives a couple of estimates that range from over 52,000 and 370 years, and this article on Scienceline that give estimates between 100 and 1000 years. However, everyone is pretty much of the consensus that it really wouldn't matter because we would have all starved to death way before then.

 

But no hayfever though.

 

But otherwise, the key to any apocalypse is specificity. Reading the original post it just seems like a hodgepodge "the world is over for reasons", because a lot of apocalyses work against each other. A blistering hot, dried out earth doesn't work in a nuclear winter and vice versa. Pick a cause or set of causes, and research how they'd interact with each other.

 

Would multiple apocalypses be "apocalypti"? Asking for a friend...

 

I propose that we follow the goose/geese rule and have apocalyseese instead. Apocaltyi sounds like a fantasy goddess that's totally not a misunderstanding of Shiva.

 

You're right. But I do appreciate it. This is why I started the thread in the first place! I'm a bit surprised that this modest thread blew up though...pun intended, I guess, given the topic.

What exactly ended the world isn't the focus of my story, and I really hadn't written any science of why/what/how into the story either. It was background, vague on purpose even. Kind of like how most people in our world know whatever's in the world today came from the past and its progression of events, scientific discoveries, etc. but don't usually "section off" one era from another, especially if it's within one's lifetime. I'm probably not explaining that well.

Anyway, this all is probably not good since I just recently finished my third draft. Now I'm not sure it will be ready within five drafts. And I do want to get this published, but I'll get it right before even shooting for that. Even if it takes ten drafts, and ten more threads exposing my lack of consideration for the scientific accuracy of my backstory.

I hadn't even considered that most oxygen comes from marine plants. And I had plenty of plants still remaining in my world, but they were just...dying off gradually. It was more about imagery than science. I'm really not going for a world that has any hope of recovery, so the world needs to be dying. Perhaps I could make it so humanity has no hope of recovery, but the rest of the natural world could given eons.

Well, back to the drawing board. Er, outlining board.

Main two things:
1. Be scientific.
2. Don't be unscientific.

 

You’ll find a lot of resources for this sort of information at worldbuilding.stackexchange.com. A lot of really smart people over there who are wild about this sort of question.