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

A post-apocalyptic setting set roughly 40-50 years from present. The world that ended was much like our own. Hence the need for more 'realism.' Their world ended because of many wars, natural disasters, and calamities - a conflagration that no complex civilization could survive. Thus, these people live in a depleted world, though not uniformly hellish in every aspect.

How would people organize themselves? Where would they live? Small settlements built away from the old world civilization? The ruins of said old world civilization? Would they be nomadic, sticking to water and food sources?

What kinds of tech would they have? What could they reasonably salvage and make work with little preserved knowledge? How well could their guns and ammunition hold out given that several decades have passed since The End?

How 'realistic' is it that raiders and other ne'er-do-wells become the dominant type of person in the wasteland? Given their depleted world, would the competition or cooperation be more dominant, especially considering that their long emergency turned into a life in the wastes?

What would be the most common conflicts in this dying, empty world?

By the way, I am new to this forum. I hope to learn and contribute a great deal here. I mostly write sci-fi, often dystopian stories.

 

What prevents the world to just go back to what it was after the wars, natural disasters and calamities? You need something very strong to justify a collapse.

Making ammo is not that hard. It can be done in a post-apoc society. Why is the world "dying"? Normally, after a natural disaster, people just carry on living, planting, building, etc. Why can't it happen?

 

There is a great lack of resources that would make rebuilding up to the complexity of the old world impossible. Fossil fuels are gone, the oceans are dead, the forests are silent. A great number of wars and natural calamities over many years brought this world to its knees, and the population is low. Most of the infrastructure left is bombed out, burned out, or rotting. If this world could once again become what the old world was, it wouldn't be able to happen as soon as the story takes place.

I'll look up ammo production. If it does look easy enough to do in this world, that could add a lot to the story.

This world is dying because the planet is dying, implying that time is limited in the long run no matter what. There are hints of this throughout, such as the wasteland expanding. Imagine a world that is merely fifty years out from World War III, a supervolcano, many massive earthquakes in heavily populated places, post peak oil, the oceans overfished, the topsoil eroded too severely, and other nightmare scenarios that all happened within a short period of time. Whatever rebuilding is possible is going to be tiny and localized and limited.

Thanks for your reply, it has given me food for thought.

 

That doesn't really sound like the planet is dying, that sounds like people are dying and the world is grateful for it. Very similar thing happened during the End Permian Extinction event, minus the major world war (maybe). One of the leading hypotheses on it's cause is massive coal reserves somewhere in the area of Siberia catching fire, poisoning animal life with carbon dioxide and causing a runaway greenhouse effect, which is why the Triassic was so hot and dry with evidence of glaciation at the poles. But 250 million years after the Great Dying, here we are.

 

What would it take in your opinion to make the planet die? The thing is, I need the planet to be dying to fit in with the themes of my story. Or at least, that is how it makes most sense to me. Although I suppose if the planet could recover within 250 million years and isn't truly dead-dead, that wouldn't take away from the story. The story takes place only a few decades after The End.

 

The thing many people forget about some sort of "post apocalyptic" setting is that there's still a bunch of stuff laying around, and there's still knowledge. There are going to be very tiny "Mad Max" type pockets around, but there are going to be many more successful and growing places where people survive because they band together, pool their resources, and figure out how to go forward. Remember that it's hard to un-invent something. If you want some sort of wasteland, you're going to have to go a lot further than the movie (and book, I believe) "The Road" did with its portrayal of a "just after the end" situation. Even there, pockets of growth were found.

 

That's fairly like the world-building I've done. There are pockets of civilized people who farm, build, defend themselves, etc. but they are very localized - not connected to each other. Raiders and other bandits were very common right after The End, but by the time the story starts they are far less common.

There are also factions in this world who want to connect everything again: re-light civilization and expand it, connect it with communications and supply chains, build proper armies, and so on. This is the major driver of conflict. Most of the world is wasteland, however, and just because they try doesn't mean they'll be successful. Plus they are trying to re-build civilization partially through war, slavery, and conquest.

The Road is one of my inspirations in fact, and I wish I could reach the skill of McCarthy's visual world-building. My story, like his, is about family and relationships. The dead world is their struggle, but doesn't take the forefront. And like him, in my story I don't outright state what the cause of The End was. I'm not sure I'd agree there were "pockets of growth" in The Road, unless you mean very tiny growth. Even if the many cannibals and marauders could expand, their way of life wouldn't last long. Cannibalism isn't workable long term. It wouldn't be true growth that could be kept up for any significant length of time. The family at the end could be indicative of something perhaps, but if they are, it isn't stated. They could just be a family that has happened to survive as long as they did, and not members of a new society forming.

But yes, I'm not sure how I can balance the wasteland, dead-world elements with the factions trying to rise up and remake the old world.

 

If your world didn't 'end' with something that poisons it ...like radiation or uncontrollable climate change ...then basically it becomes a world that will center around redistributing resources at first, then finding a sustainable way to move forward.

I am a huge fan of BOTH the Survivors TV series made in the UK. The first one was made back in the 1970s, I think, and there was a loose remake done only a few years ago. Sadly they both were cancelled before they reached any kind of a conclusion.

However, both stories began with a killer virus. The setting for the stories was urban at first, where survivors of the virus often formed gangs, and looting and violence became widespread. So lots of the storylines had to do with other survivors escaping these situations. Then came the 'how to live' part of the process, which the 1970s one took further than the other series did.

The one set in the 1970s took place at a time when we were not quite so reliant on technology as we are now, so it was much easier to rekindle an older lifestyle. People still had fireplaces in their homes, still knew how to cook and preserve and grow food, etc. So some of what they were doing focused on that. Kind of 'The Good Life' morphing into 'The Only Kind of Life.' The series was cancelled too soon to find out how that panned out, but it ended with one of the survivors who had been a pilot in his earlier life managing to get hold of a small airplane, and he planned to fly it as far as he could, to see if anybody else was living differently.

What does seem inescapable (and probably why the UK is gearing up the police and military to cope with the upcoming Brexit chaos) is the gang warfare that will erupt in order to control the resources that are already here. I suspect that will carry on until the resources are used up, even the hoarded ones, and then the gangs will either split up or focus on controlling any attempts people make to create new ones. I'd be very surprised if, 40-50 years down the road, that wouldn't still be the case.

 

BTW, I've given this whole idea (how to deal with a situation where you have a lot of knowledge available, but are entirely lacking resources) a lot of thought. Some time ago, on the Worldbuilding site on StackExchange, I answered a question someone posed regarding how an immortal who started on an empty planet with nothing would achieve spaceflight. The context of my answer can be found at the link, but the core bit is this:

Naked man in a forest can hand-construct a trap that catches a deer.
A found sharp stone butchers the deer and provides a hide, which can
be stretched, dried, tanned, and turned into clothing; meat to feed
him; antlers for tool handles; etc.

Clothed-and-fed man can rub two sticks together to make a fire. If
he's as lucky as you assert, the sharp rock he used to skin the deer
is flint, and he has another piece with which to make sparks, making
it easy to start a fire. But rubbing sticks works too.

Clothed, fed, warm man now has charcoal as an output of the fire.
Gathering some clay, he makes an oven in which to burn the charcoal
to make a very hot situation where he can smelt iron in a crucible
he carved from a rock using a copper chisel he smelted in that
campfire and a hammer made from some heavy stone and the deer
antler.

Some of the iron is used to create a wire draw, through which he
pulls copper until it becomes wire. He finds a lodestone, using a
piece of iron on a stick and waits for a rock to jump up and stick
to it, makes a truss out of some wood, wraps the copper wire around
it, then mounts the lodestone in such a way that, when the truss is
spun, electricity is created in the wire. On to a water wheel,
which he builds out of wood using his fancy new steel saw with a
wooden handle. He mounts the lodestone-and-copper generator to the
water wheel, and he has a power plant.

More copper wire and more lodestones, and he builds an electric
motor. This helps immensely, and the project continues. As you can
see, he's come a long way, but has a long way to go...​

Now imagine starting on a planet where there were a lot of technologically-advanced things lying around. Need ammunition? Gunpowder is easily made, as are bullets, particularly given that you can find a lot of fired bullets and melt them down (easier than mining lead). Casings are a problem to manufacture, as well as primers, but casings, including spent primers, can be found all around a site where people were shooting at each other. Gather them up, pull the primer caps out, re-form them, pack the primer powder you made in there (because you found the knowledge of how to make it somewhere), pack the casing with gunpowder, stick a bullet on the end, and you've got a single round. Repeat as necessary.

Need electricity? The power grid is out? You see in the example above how to create a generator, but there are thousands of them lying around in any developed (and many non-developed) countries. No fuel? No problem. Either create the fuel (woodgas, alcohol, reformed petroleum from plastics, etc.) or use some other sort of mechanical means to turn the thing (wind, water, pedal power).

The point is, knowledge is power. The problem is, a writer's knowledge is limited in ways that s/he wishes their character wasn't.

Cheers.

JD

 

You should have come to the Midwest last couple of days! Polar vortex. Those of us that have lived through much worse our lives were pretty much normal. It was interesting to see those that have not dealt with this before "deal" with the cold.

 

I dunno, being swallowed by the expanding sun?

 

Thank you, this is very helpful and gives me a lot to consider. I think for my next draft I need to consider how leftover knowledge would affect the world. This is already an element in my story but I'm not utilizing it enough. It is already a scavenger world, but you're right in that there would be more production going on, even if to a low level.

 

It happens in two steps.

1. Destroy the Earth.

2. Do a historical documentary about it.

 

When you say the end of the world, you mean to kill the planet. This planet will die like all others when the core stalls and we lose atmosphere. Space X anyone?

 

How are you handling food? If technology is lost, a very large percentage of the population is going to be focused on farming--I would say farming or hunting/gathering, but if the world is this dead, I suspect that hunting/gathering is not going to be all that productive, and that instead humanity will have to figure out what still grows.

And why are the oceans dead?

 

Unrealistic. The people that survive will be cooperative, perhaps even living near cities where some of the old infrastructure could be used to make victory gardens thrive in every small yard and roof top.

Surprisingly things like communications technology might survive while things like damns and bridges fall into disrepair much faster.

Nomadic Mad Max stuff isn't realistic. Nomadic people always followed herds - and those don't exist most places anymore - especially after the initial panic what is left will be gone.

 

If this were my world, my core characters would be working to keep meristem culture capability going, to maintain potato yields.

Edited to add: And every child would learn, from toddlerhood, how to rogue a potato field.

 

Unless you're the Mongols. Or Native Americans, for that matter, a lot of them moved around because staying in one place for more than a couple of years drained soil fertility and they didn't really know a lot about nitrogen fixing crops.

 

Well, the Mongols were herders who moved with their own herds. Agriculture vs hunter/gatherer. The point is that nomadic people follow resources, and there aren't going to be any mobile resources. However, nomadic agriculture would still be possible - but living entirely off cows is going to be awfully tough without being an extension of a non-nomadic settlement.

 

Unless they used a smaller animal to graze, like the Bedouins use sheep and camels. Nomadic lifestyles are really beneficial where natural resources are sparse as I'm assuming they would be in the post-apocalypse.

 

Bedouin eat a lot of food that they trade for, which is what I was getting at earlier. Bread is a large part of their diet.

Contrast that with some groups that subsist almost entirely on reindeer. Which is only really possible because of the kind of milk reindeer produce and the high vitamin content of the meat.

 

I feel like the biggest hurdle, or one of them, is the real world technical know-how you need to get it going. How do you start a car that's been sitting for 30 years? How do you get gas out of an old and rusted gas station? How long until gas goes bad? Where are seeds kept? Are there any usable seeds stored anywhere, and for how many people / much food? Can current farmland even grow anything without nitrogen based fertilizer? How long until a boat sinks on its own? What happens to an untended nuclear reactor? What if it is manned, but not by nuclear engineers? How long do roads last if they aren't in heavy use? Can cars operate in cities with decaying roads? What kind of sedatives can people make or grow once the pills run out? Will survivors have a means of sedating people for surgery, or will they be back to biting leather? How long does a condom last in the case? How long does birth control last in the pack? What's the alternative to commercial baby formula when a baby is losing weight? What do you do when you use up the whole tiny bottle of iodine tablets for water and you have burned everything there is to burn for fire? Are there any large mammals at all still alive after the food ran out and we all went nuts. Monkeys? Dogs?

I mean, there is just so much stuff to think about. It's awesome if you can find ways of avoiding it all, or if mechanics is a passion and you really know about this stuff.

 

I'm going to talk about the gardening/farming issues, because...well, because.

From what I've read:

I would assume that if any population is still alive, that population has been growing food, and has been saving seed, all along--the ones who haven't, have starved to death. Most seeds last several years, so even if nobody geared up for farming for a year or two there would still be some seed--at least whatever seed people hadn't simply eaten as food.

People will have been farming with hand tools, very approximately one acre per person for those who are dedicated to it. In areas with little rain or unreliable rain, they may have to dryfarm, which unfortunately means keeping a much larger area free of weeds.

The technology for things like horse-drawn plows is pretty old--I think that would still be doable, with a larger amount of land worked per person, though of course then you have to feed the horse. (Or ox or whatever is pulling the plow.)

Storage would be an issue. Potatoes, carrots and many other roots, apples, squash, grains, a lot of things can be stored for a fair bit of time. Others can be dried, others fermented into alcohol--all the food storage methods would return.

Fertilizer would be an issue. Every last scrap of everything should be composted. If there is a small enough population, so that there's a ton of unused land, people might strip the soil and then move on, as discussed somewhere above. If they're also raising cattle or other herbivores, the manure will be useful. I remember reading that some herbivores pass viable seeds through their digestive tract, thus reseeding the grazing area, and some herbivores kill the seeds, and is thus useful for clearing an area of particular noxious weeds. I think it's cows that kill the seeds and sheep that pass them through, but I may be mistaken.

Human or other omnivore or carnivore (dogs, say) excrement might be used for fertliizer, though that means taking precautions with the produce--you're not going to be eating it raw, for example, unless someone has enough skill at hot composting to bake out the pathogens.

There are also perennial crops, of course--any neglected bit of land in Oregon will be growing blackberries in time. Fruit trees. Nut trees. Berry bushes.

Most babies would be once again breastfed. For situations where the mother can't breastfeed and no wet nurse is available, the solution would probably be cow's milk and a sweetener such as honey. (Yes, honey is a botulism risk for babies, but.)

 

You should really check out some of the prepper websites out there. A lot of the articles on them are kind of dumb, actually most of them, but every once in a while they have actually useful information like how to extract sugar from sugar beets and read topographical maps and such, and if you're tempted to use any of their natural remedies, double check their research.