My Muse threw another curveball at me the other day. She started tossing around ideas for a post-apocalyptic setting and story. Her idea was to have a global pandemic, sort of like what we went through in 2020, but with a much higher body count, something on the level of a zombie apocalypse scenario.
I really think zombies have been overdone at this point, but I do sort of like the framework for telling a story. Event X happens, which sets off the chain of events leading to the societal collapse. Things start small but soon start escalating out of control. People start dropping like flies in a cloud of Raid. Society falls. Chaos reigns. People have to figure out how to survive in this terrible new world. Often they find hat the worst thing is other people, not whatever monsters have risen due to the cause of the apocalypse.
Then we get to the part that I find interesting in such stories. The rebuilding of society. When the world is rebooted, and you can do whatever you wat to create the world, what do you do? Do you fall back on alpha male domination, or do you pick a better path? Can that better path survive encountering the other societies that decided to go the alpha male domination path?
I started thinking about parameters for this story. I was thinking that for things to be suitably horrifying, and making things difficult for the characters, ninety percent (90%) of the world’s population should be killed off. That would be devastating right? Nine out of ten people just up and dying. Sounds pretty devastating.
But let’s look at the numbers. The current estimated human population of this planet is eight billion, two hundred million (8,200,000,000) people. Wow, killing off nine out of ten people in that would leave hardly anyone left alive to reform society!
So, if we multiply the eight billion, two hundred million by point one to get our total of overall population left to reform society we get
8,200,000,000 X 0.1 = 820,000,000
So, we’d be left with eight hundred and twenty million (820,000,000) people still left. Hardly the horrible lack of people as seen in something like The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later.
That level of population is about the same population the world had around the year 1750. There was certainly a thriving civilization on the planet at that time. And we have more advanced technology now than we had then so I’d think eight hundred and twenty million people wouldn’t really have a problem restarting society after a pandemic wipes away ninety percent of the populace.
On the whole, I still like the idea of writing a post-apocalypse story. I like stories of rebuilding and the struggles involved. I like the idea of a pandemic because you get the zombpocalypse progression without being a zombie story. I’ll make some notes and put it in the ‘to write’ file. I like the idea but it isn’t a priority right now.
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