Picture this:

You're in a busy shopping centre. Suddenly people start screaming. You 
don't know why... and then you feel dizzy, fall to the ground, and pass out.

When you awake, you find yourself surrounded by dead people. Everybody 
in the place is stone-dead. You are apparently the only person left alive.

You call the emergency services, but nobody answers. You run out to the 
car park. You drive home. Everywhere you see wrecked cars full of dead 
people. Paths and sidewalks littered with corpses. Their horrified faces 
and vacant expressions haunt you.

You drive to your home. Your entire family is dead. You grab your phone 
and try to call every single person you can think of. Nobody answers.

You drive to see your relatives. Every major road is like a train wreck. 
Mangled vehicles everywhere. And dead people. Lots of dead people. Every 
person you go to visit is dead, or their house is simply empty.

You get on the Internet. You check every website you can think of. There 
is no mention of the inexplicable catastrophe which has befallen the 
region. You send emails, you leave messages on forums; nobody replies. 
You call some folks you know who live in another country, but still no 
answer.

Slowly it begins to dawn on you that you are, apparently, the very last 
human alive on this Earth. And now you feel scared. Really scared. 
Society as you know it no longer exists. Your world is over. Everything 
you ever cared about, gone. Forever. Every person you ever met, everyone 
who ever mattered to you. They're all dead. And you never even got to 
say goodbye.

Yesterday you were worried about some stupid computer problem. Today, 
pushing 1s and 0s around inside a computer suddenly seems... irrelevant. 
Pointless. Obsolete. Trivial.

Suddenly you find yourself in dire circumstances, and there is 
absolutely no-one you can turn to. Everybody is dead. And you don't even 
know /why/. Does it even matter? You'll surely be joining them soon. The 
phones and the water and the electricity still seem to be working right 
/now/. But for how much longer? They won't run themselves forever. And 
you won't last long without drinking water, or heating for the winter 
months. With no people around, you can walk into the nearest shop and 
take whatever food you like. But how many months before all that becomes 
inedible?

You always wanted a nicer car. Now you can take any god-damned car you 
like. Go to a warehouse and cart off stackloads of computer gear. Hell, 
you can have your own personal datacenter. Who's going to stop you? And 
you don't even have to /take/ it anywhere. You can live wherever you 
want. It doesn't even have to be a /house/. It can be anything you want. 
In any city, anywhere. You can literally own anything you want.

But what's the point? You're going to be dead very shortly. Sure, you 
can drive over to Google and use their entire datacenter as a giant 
render farm. But why bother? What /use/ is it? You're still going to be 
alone /forever/. And you're still going to die a slow, lingering death 
by starvation, terrified and alone...



Worst.

Dream.

EVER.

 >_<

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Am 21.09.2011 10:54, schrieb Invisible:

> Worst.
>
> Dream.
>
> EVER.
>
>  >_<

Would make an interesting plot for a feature-length movie though.

Oh, wait...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_Earth_%28film%29

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On 21/09/2011 11:20 AM, clipka wrote:
> Am 21.09.2011 10:54, schrieb Invisible:
>
>> Worst.
>>
>> Dream.
>>
>> EVER.
>>
>> >_<
>
> Would make an interesting plot for a feature-length movie though.

Or, a FRIGGING TERRIFYING plot for a movie...

> Oh, wait...

What? Oh yeah - this is the plot for every apocalypse story every 
written. :-P

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Le 21/09/2011 10:54, Invisible a écrit :
> And you're still going to die a slow, lingering death by starvation,
> terrified and alone...
> 

You should have been using more attention to the farming tutorials.

Assuming the electrical system is still working, you can first establish
yourself in a mega-market near some fields.
hunger and thirst would be filled with the frozen & canned foods of the
mega-market. This gives you a few months to start exploiting the nearby
fields the traditional way.

You'd better start cleaning the area around of all corpses, as it will
soon stink a lot. Sanitizing about 1 kilometre radius should keep you
busy while the vegetables are growing in the fields. A great fire is
probably the best disposable way, and it leaves ashes full of potassium,
a great fertilizer for most plants.

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On 9/21/2011 3:54 AM, Invisible wrote:

>
>
> Worst.
>
> Dream.
>
> EVER.
>
>  >_<

Omega man?

Is it bad that when I read this my first thought was ... man, in a few 
days, it's gonna really stink.

-- 
~Mike

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On 21/09/2011 01:05 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Le 21/09/2011 10:54, Invisible a écrit :
>> And you're still going to die a slow, lingering death by starvation,
>> terrified and alone...
>
> You should have been using more attention to the farming tutorials.

As a practical matter, I don't think it's feasible to practise 
one-person agriculture.

In pre-industrial times, it took entire villages to bring in the year's 
crop. Admittedly I don't need to feed an entire village, but all the same...

> Assuming the electrical system is still working, you can first establish
> yourself in a mega-market near some fields.
> hunger and thirst would be filled with the frozen&  canned foods of the
> mega-market. This gives you a few months to start exploiting the nearby
> fields the traditional way.

Shops and other venues with high densities of food would appear the 
logical place to start. Plus, if it turns out that I'm *not* the last 
person alive, this is the place were I am most likely to discover over 
survivors. (Now debate whether this is a good or bad thing...)

The real question is "what happens when the shelves run out?" Given that 
I only eat meat and dairy products, there's going to be kind of a 
problem. Yes, it's probably not /that/ hard to grow lettuce. On the 
other hand, you would have to be *really* hungry to consider eating 
lettuce. I mean, like, you would have to be literally about to *die* of 
hunger... (Plus, I gather that lettuce is 100% water, so the nearest 3 
decimal places anyway.)

> You'd better start cleaning the area around of all corpses, as it will
> soon stink a lot. Sanitizing about 1 kilometre radius should keep you
> busy while the vegetables are growing in the fields.

Do you have any idea how large a 1 km radius is?

Last time I tried it, it took about 8 hours to talk a distance which (we 
were told) was 5 miles. Since that's about 8 km, that makes typical 
walking speed equal to roughly 1 km/hour. Now work out how long it'll 
take to traverse almost one square km. (!)

Now, I don't know if you know this, but adult humans are actually 
/heavy/. Like, *really* heavy. Way heavier than you'd imagine. Even the 
skinny ones. Moving just a few of them would be quite a lot of work.

> A great fire is
> probably the best disposable way, and it leaves ashes full of potassium,
> a great fertilizer for most plants.

There's a few problems with this.

Most of the modern landscape isn't especially flammable. People don't 
live in wooden houses, they live in constructs of brick, glass, concrete 
and steel. None of which is especially flammable.

For this kind of thing to make sense, you'd really need all the bodies 
in one place. That's still a hell of a lot of work.

Try not to kill yourself with the toxic fumes. It may produce a lot of 
ash, but given all the plastics involved, it's probably loaded with 
carcinogens and so forth.

Realistically, it might be better to just find a sparsely-populated 
area. But then there won't be too many shops around...

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Poe really makes an impression on people, huh?

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Am 21.09.2011 14:05, schrieb Le_Forgeron:

> You should have been using more attention to the farming tutorials.
>
> Assuming the electrical system is still working, you can first establish
> yourself in a mega-market near some fields.
> hunger and thirst would be filled with the frozen&  canned foods of the
> mega-market. This gives you a few months to start exploiting the nearby
> fields the traditional way.

If animals are still alive, hunting would be an alternative. Game will 
soon be abundant if you're not picky and don't mind eating rodents or dogs.

But never mind that - chances are you won't need food for long anyway; 
tinned food lasts a few years, and by then the environmental 
catastrophes resulting from unattended chemical, petrochemical, nuclear 
and what-have-you plants might be spoiling all the fun already.

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On 21/09/2011 2:24 PM, Invisible wrote:
> Yes, it's probably not /that/ hard to grow lettuce. On the other hand,
> you would have to be *really* hungry to consider eating lettuce. I mean,
> like, you would have to be literally about to *die* of hunger... (Plus,
> I gather that lettuce is 100% water, so the nearest 3 decimal places
> anyway.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettuce#Nutrition o_O

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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On 21/09/2011 07:08 PM, Stephen wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettuce#Nutrition o_O

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=lettuce

175 MILLIgrams of fat.
1 gram protein.

Looking at the second table, it gives you 93% of your GDA for vitamin A, 
and about 1% of your GDA for everything else. :-P

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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