I’m working on a scifi story with the premise of something that caused the collapse of civilization. The concept of post-collapse fascinates me, and it could easily happen to us in reality. Just the simple thought experiment of something that we’ve all experienced, a power outage. What does everyone do? You wait a few minutes to see if it’s just temporary. If you still have a way to communicate, you call or text someone maybe. You get a flashlight, or some candles to prepare for a longer wait. Let’s say it’s not a known cause like a storm, but just went out for some unknown reason. How long before people start to get restless and go past the conditioned training of letting someone bring their technology back? What if it never comes back? Seems a ridiculous stretch, but is it? And the problem with collapse is that the higher you are, the longer and harder the fall.
I’m working on a scifi story with the premise of something that caused the collapse of civilization. The concept of post-collapse fascinates me, and it could easily happen to us in reality. Just the simple thought experiment of something that we’ve all experienced, a power outage. What does everyone do? You wait a few minutes to see if it’s just temporary. If you still have a way to communicate, you call or text someone maybe. You get a flashlight, or some candles to prepare for a longer wait. Let’s say it’s not a known cause like a storm, but just went out for some unknown reason. How long before people start to get restless and go past the conditioned training of letting someone bring their technology back? What if it never comes back? Seems a ridiculous stretch, but is it? And the problem with collapse is that the higher you are, the longer and harder the fall.