5 Reasons the Apocalypse Would Suck More Than You Realize

With the way this year has gone, and reflecting on pop culture of the last few years, a ‘let’s burn it all down’ sentiment has been on the rise. Now besides the obvious parts, such as a loss of modern conveniences and not being able to take a day off when the world is on fire, there’s some other reasons why things would, well, suck.

1.) We like the IDEA of it, but the reality?

The world has crumbled. The land is lawless. Sweet. Now it’s time to take out all your pent up stress from now deceased corporate life and smash some shit. So you do, and you have a great time. But now you’re hungry and it’s getting dark. You don’t have any food on you, and dumb as it sounds, you just realized that an hour’s drive to and from work is a pretty far walk. So you think to hit up a convenience store, loot some food.

You arrive, just in time to see 4 heavily armed thugs looting the same place. They spot you and your day went from good to bad with one second of eye contact. You’ll call the cops, you think as you turn to run…but then you remember the word lawless from the first paragraph, and your day goes from bad to worse.

As you can see, the downside of the apocalypse is that you can’t pause it. Maybe we should just stick with the Mad Max movies and the highly underrated Bethesda game RAGE.

2.) Survival is hard

Alright, so the first entry didn’t convince you? Well let’s take things further into the apocalypse. You’re out of the city, with a group of people, struggling to survive. You find a patch of land through some lucky breaks, and decide to set up a farming community. Great! But there’s a problem. To grow enough food for 1 person (climate dependant) it’s estimated you’ll need…17 acres of land. That’s a pretty large plot, and you’re assuming you won’t lose any crops with that. So for your community of 50 people, you’ll need 850 acres of land at minimum. So it’ll take a lot of manpower to farm, but you still need people to make your tools, stay on guard duty, tend to the sick and watch any kids you might have…so you’ll be stretched pretty thin.

But wait! You have machines! You’ve come across some old farming equipment that doesn’t rely on onboard computers, so these machines still work after the Great Solar Storm of 2024. Well, except…

3.) Gasoline expires

Well, it doesn’t exactly expire per se…but it does gel over time. In fact, that’s pretty much what vaseline is: gasoline that got the age like wine treatment. However, gasoline doesn’t need years to become its end stage Cabernet. In proper storage, gasoline at most will last you half a year. So anything after season 3 of the Walking Dead? Yeah, those cars aren’t working except for plot magic. But you can worry about these details later, just like the set team behind those episodes of GoT, because some people just showed up to attack and they’ve got…

4.) Crazy mad science weapons

There’s a lot of scary shit that can be weaponized. One thing that most people don’t think of is lasers. The Geneva conventions banned the use of laser weapons in cpmbat because of their cruel and insidious nature. Styropyro on YouTube does a great job of showcasing what some lasers are capable of. One of the examples that stick out in my mind are the infrared lasers. At a certain point they are powerful enough to destroy your retinas from vast distances and the real kicker is you’d never see it coming. You would just…stop seeing. Forever.

Now that’s just one example. There’s lost of scary things a pyschotic DIYer with no financial bounds and a literal world full of parts could come up with. All sorts of horrible chemical weapons, lasers, poisons, and even biological weapons if they were clever enough. As these thoughts distract you from the lunatic charging your way holding 6 microwave transformers wired to a car battery and an IR module, you remember reading an article telling you that…

5.) Ironically, if humans die the Earth will too

We’ve had a bad rap with ourselves as of late. All the horrible Earth destroying stuff we’ve done has really put a damper on our self esteem. This next bit won’t help much either.

Back in the 20th century there was an operating gold mine in the Canadian Northwest called Giant Mine. Thanks to some lax protocols and shady practices, this mine was abandoned after the gold ran out…and left behind 237,000 tons of arsenic trioxide. Arsenic is odorless, tasteless, and dissolves in water. If this arsenic ever escaped into the water supply, it wouldn’t be enough to kill everything. It would be enough to kill everything several times over. Which means it is awesome for this mine to be located next to the tenth largest lake in the world, Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife.

It’s currently being contained by $100 billion a year program sanctioned by the Canadian government, that uses a refrigeration technology that freezes the arsenic powder deep inside the mine to prevent it from escaping. This program needs to be constantly maintained and staffed to continue to run and unlike nuclear accidents, arsenic won’t be less deadly over time. It will still be able to kill people, plants, and animal in a thousand years.

So let’s assume that this place stays staffed and maintained during the apocalypse. Okay, its plausible. So all good right? Well, no. Because this is just one ongoing environmental disasters and/or maintenance program across the planet. Among the more famous is the Elephant’s Foot in Chernobyl, which if left unchecked will eat its way down to the aquifer underneath the city; the Berkeley Pit in Montana, a mile wide half mile deep bit of sulfuric acid that’s also a result of mining negligence; and of course the other problems that are already in a runaway effect such as soil degradation, the warming climate, acid rain, and others. Even if all harmful human activity ceased as of this moment, these problems would continue to worsen with out any kind of positive intervention.

With these harsh realities in mind, I think I’ll go and make dinner. Nothing major, just some chicken with a glass of clean water. Then I’ll cuddle up to the space heater for a bit, and once I’m good and ready to go to sleep I’ll stand up and get ready to go to my part time night shift job unloading trucks. I’ll drive there warm and well fed, and when actually working I’ll fantasize about never going back in, and think maybe things would be easier if I just moved out to the woods. I’ll drive back home with the help of artificial lights and gasoline, take a lukewarm shower, and got to bed. What privileges they are.

Works Cited

“Freezing 200,000 Tons of Lethal Arsenic Dust - YouTube.” Www.Youtube.com, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4nZDSLdIiM. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020.

“Solved! How Long Does Gasoline Last?” Bob Vila, 3 Sept. 2018, www.bobvila.com/articles/how-long-does-gasoline-last/#:~:text=Though%20it%20naturally%20degrades%20and.

“The Toxic Pit With A $3 Admission Fee - YouTube.” Www.Youtube.com, www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-Ej2EtE744&t=28s. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020.

Vuković, Diane. “How Much Land Do You Need to Be Self-Sufficient?” Primal Survivor, 9 Aug. 2017, www.primalsurvivor.net/much-land-need-self-sufficient/.