Author: John

“Yeah.  That’s right.  Infiltrators came up illegal from Mexico.  Cubans mostly.  They managed to infiltrate SAC bases in the Midwest, several down in Texas and wreaked a helluva lot of havoc, I’m here to tell you.” – Red Dawn

Tough times.  Oh, sure, they make you strong, but I’d much rather have donuts.

This is part eight of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You, Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo,  TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold, and TEOTWAWKI Part VII: Laws of Survival, Mad Dogs, and The Most Interesting Man in the World )

The story to date:  Our resourceful protagonist was far from home the night in February when an EMP hit, taking with it all of the society and the plentiful PEZ® it has provided.  He’s bicycled and walked until he’s on the final stretch home, 20 miles away, 83 hours after the EMP.  He’s already lost six pounds.  So if you were looking for an upside for the end of the world?  Your pants won’t be so tight.

The Highway Outside of Yona, 1;30PM

As I got to the stop sign at the main highway, I found myself for the third time in three days staring down the barrel of a gun.  This time an AR variant.  And as I looked to the left I saw another man pointing a deer rifle at me.  The rush of adrenaline didn’t stop me from noticing that both men had their fingers on the triggers of their rifles.  And that there was a dead body off to my right.

“Where you headed, spear-boy?”

“Millerville.”

“Not this way, you ain’t.”

In a movie he would have spit on the highway to make his point – a huge wad of tobacco juice.  He didn’t.  In fact, he didn’t look happy about being here at all.  He looked like an accountant.

But I looked over at the makeshift barricade that they’d thrown together – several cars with sandbags out in front.  They’d arranged them so they completely blocked off the highway, but it looked like they could move two of them to open it up, if they had to.

And the man who spoke wasn’t anything special – he was my age, a full three days’ worth of beard, dressing what looked like bowhunting camouflage, a bit too tight, as if he’d bought it a few years ago and hadn’t used it.  As I took in the barricade in front of me I counted about a dozen people who were pointing their rifles at me, not just the two I’d first seen.  Even though I’d come around a blind corner where they’d been concealed by the trees, they obviously had someone continuously watching that approach.

“Hands up, and drop the spear.”

I complied.

“Alright.  Good.  I’m tired of shooting people who won’t listen.  Now what you’re going to do is to turn left and head due north.  We’ll sit and watch you.  And then you’re never going to come back this way again.  Do we understand each other?”

“Listen, I just need to get to Millerville.  I wouldn’t even have to go through Yona to get there.  I’m from Millerville.”  I hated pleading.  But family was that way, and going north?  They could see me walking away for miles, which is probably why they picked this spot to cut off the main highway into town.  And once I crossed over the little hill, I had no idea how to get home – the rivers, creeks, ranches and small hills weren’t impassible, but the chances of me getting turned around or blundering into the rifle sights of a farmer who’d rather be left alone were pretty high.

“I don’t really care.  This is not my problem, and I’m not letting you be a danger to my family.  Nothing personal, bub, but I know nothing about you.”

One of the rifleman, this one an older gentleman with a real beard and a lever action adjusted his glasses.  “Phil, I do.  That’s the Scoutmaster from Millerville.  We don’t want to go shooting up Scoutmasters, do we?  We just might need some of what they teach.”

I looked, and under that retirement beard I recognized the face of another Boy Scout leader.  It had been two years since I’d been the Scoutmaster – I’d turned over that badge to a younger father, but I wasn’t about to correct  . . . what was his name . . . Ted?  Yes.  Ted.  I wasn’t about to correct Ted now.

“Ted, is that you?”

“It is.  Guys, put your guns down.”  He looked back at me.  “You armed?”

I nodded.

“Please take it out, very slowly.  Two fingers.”  I remembered that Ted was retired Highway Patrol.  Made sense that he was out here.  Very slowly, almost geologically slowly, I pulled the pistol out of my the small of my back where I had pushed it down into my pants.

I held it out to my side – two fingers.  Ted slung his rifle over his shoulder, walked up and gently took the pistol from me.  He ejected the magazine, and then worked the action to extract the bullet in the chamber, and put all of it in a voluminous coat pocket.

“Is that everything?”

“I also have a multitool.”

“Where is that?”

“In my backpack.”

“Leave it there.”

He turned back to the rest of the men.  “We’re good.  We’ll keep him here until shift change, then I’ll walk him through to the south barricade and see him on his way.”

Phil looked at Ted, ignoring me.  “Why don’t we send him up the road like everyone else?  He’s not from Yona.  We don’t owe him anything.  We have to protect ourselves.”

“Phil, Yona isn’t suddenly going to move.  A week from now, two weeks from now, next year Millerville is going to be there.  How would we look if we started treating people we know like the enemy?  Also, keep in mind, if I know him, people in Millerville know him, he isn’t just another face in the crowd.  We need to be on peaceful relations with Millerville.”

Yona was just up the road, and the Yona Wildcats were regular losers against the Millerville Pirates on the gridiron every fall.  The rivalry was there, but it had never been worse than a logo burned into an opposing field or a team name spray painted on the water tower.  They motioned me behind the barricade.  In a friendly manner, Ted asked me to recount what I’d seen out there.  I did.  After we had talked for a bit, he motioned to one of the barricade vehicles.  “No reason not to sit down a spell – you’ve done a lot of walking.”

I sat in the bed of an older F150 pickup and waited.  Half an hour later, a group of people came walking down the road towards the barricade – there were probably forty of them.  Having two miles to watch their approach made it almost painful.  Finally, they were about half a mile out.

“Positions, gentlemen.”

When the group got to 100 yards out, one of the Yona defenders fired a single warning shot.

“That’s close enough,” Phil yelled.  “Send one man up.  One only.”

One man walked forward from the group.

When he was 20 yards out, Phil said, “Close enough.  Hands up.”  He was standing next to the dead body on the road that I’d seen first.

“Hey, you don’t know how good it is to see you.  We’ve been walking for three days, from Albany.  I have children with us.  And we have sick people.  You have to help us.”  Albany was just outside of the big city.

“How many are there?”

“Thirty.”

“Any doctors, engineers, builders?”  This was from Ted.

“Nah, man, we’ve got a car dealer, a banker – he’s really rich, two sales clerks, I own a steam cleaning company.  Couple of guys who were truck drivers.”

Ted replied, “Sorry.  You’ll have to go back the way you came.”

The man got irate.  “You can’t treat us like that!  We have rights!  We need your help!  You can’t make us leave!”  His hands dropped and he began digging in his jacket and produced a revolver.  Before he could swing the revolver towards the Phil, three shots from three different rifles hit him.  His body crumpled to the pavement.

A woman from the group started screaming “Noooo,” and started running toward us.  A single warning shot rang out, and she was tackled from behind by one of the group.

They carried her back up the road, away from the barricade, and started moving back the way they had come from.  The message had been clear.

The body was pulled off to the side of the road, by one of the defenders.  Jacob?  He had played football for Yona and was a former Scout.  He picked up the pistol and checked it.

“Ted, why did you turn him away?”

Ted turned to me.  “I hate this.  I hate it so much.  But not 24 hours after this all happened, a group came in on this very road in an older car.  They shot up downtown.  They forced their way into homes.  They did despicable things.  They killed 20 people before we killed them.  And there were only six of them!  And that was the first day.  We’ve had more every day since then.  Some seemingly innocent like this group.  Some obviously not.  We’ve got to protect ourselves.  And we can’t afford to feed the entire state.  I’m expecting that you’ll see the same at Millerville.”

“But, Ted, what about compassion?  These folks weren’t a threat.”

“Maybe.  Maybe not.  What did you know about them?  Would they have been trouble?  What did they have to do to get here?  I’d love to help them, I swear to God I would.  But over a million people lived over there.  We have a town of five thousand.  There’s no way we can help them all.  Are we our brother’s keeper?  Sure.  But will die if we try to help them all.”

Nothing else happened until the end of the shift, at 6PM.  Ted mentioned that they liked to change the shifts in daylight – that way they didn’t shoot each other.

Ted and the group walked me on the highway to the southern checkpoint.  Now I was fifteen miles from home, but exhausted, and it was dark.  Ted kept my pistol and said I could come back for it sometime.  We shook hands.  The squad manning the barricades indicated I would be welcome staying with them.  I slept in the passenger seat of an old Nissan Xterra with my blanket pulled tightly around me.  It was the best sleep I’d had in three days.

I woke up when the bullet smashed through the rear window of the Xterra and out the window where I was sleeping.

Fort Custer, EMP +3

The morning of day three, a corporal in 1^st Platoon, Charlie Company asked a simple question.

“They’ve forgotten us.  Who wants to get out?”

Pretty soon the men began planning.  None of them were local.  They had argued about where to go, but the Corporal, Walt Davis, said “Why don’t we go, well, where it is we go.  We’ve been training for years for this crap.  Now we’re in it.  And we’re not too far from the sort of equipment that could make us kings around here!”

“Let’s plan for the basics, like we’ve been trained – transport.  Weapons.  Supplies.  Communication.  Anything that will give us a tactical advantage.  Then let’s find a nice farm town with nice curvy farm girls and take over.  No offense, Valdez.”

She grinned, “I might like a curvy farm girl myself, Walt.”

The platoon laughed.  Valdez wasn’t picky.

By noon they had managed to scrape together two transport trucks that were still working, and functioned on diesel.  Manny, a private from Alabama, maintained that if it was diesel, he could keep it running forever.  Weapons were a different matter.  Liberating their fully automatic M-4s, several crates of ammo and grenades hadn’t been all that hard.  The soldiers guarding that armory were long gone, and getting it required persistence, but little else.

The heavy artillery – the anti-personnel mines, the mortars and other crew-served weapons were tightly locked up, and those soldiers were dug in and gung-ho.  Getting them would be more trouble than it was worth.  Davis reasoned that the automatic weapons and grenades they had would be enough to melt almost anything the platoon would see outside.

Corporal Davis looked at the loaded trucks and 1^st Platoon, Charlie Company.  “Let’s go!  I’m hungry, the world’s gone, and we might as well take what we want!”  Only about half the platoon was following Walt.  The rest had decided to stay and wait for orders, but weren’t willing to try to stop Walt.  That made Walt happy – he didn’t need anyone slowing him down.  Or anyone competing to give orders.

When the trucks hit the chain link gates at noon, they were going forty miles an hour.  The gates didn’t even slow them down.

### (for now)

How will society react after a world-changing catastrophe?  In the large cities, as we’ve discussed, order is only thinly maintained, and at the cost of a constant battle between the police and the barely attached members of society that view gang violence as a good day.  Lost in that is the respect for civil rights, but enshrined in that is that good behavior is like a two year old with a cookie jar – it’s reserved for when someone is looking.

I’m Tony Montana.  You killed my doughnut.  Prepare to diet.

Power off, lights out, police gone?  Quickly any and all red lines or blue lines break down into chaos and fire and bloodshed.  If there weren’t ample evidence of this in the history of large cities in the United States, I’d think the previous sentence was overly dramatic and probably an exaggeration.  But after the Los Angeles riots of the 1990’s and the New York riots of “whenever the power goes off” and the constant bloodshed of a Chicago, it should be clear that we’re only keeping civilization in place through a pretty significant effort, combined with a curtailment of civil liberties.

That’s the problem Yona has.  Yona is Cherokee for “bear” and it’s likely that the last bear was killed in Yona in 1890.  But Yona’s problem isn’t bears – Yona is a city in the direct line of drift from the Big City.  As people abandon the criminal killing machine that Big City has become, they spread out, and are becoming less concentrated.  But a group, even a small group, showing up unexpectedly in Yona armed, drunk and without any trappings of society?  That made Yona make hard decisions, quickly.

And the hard decisions will show up like they always have in history.  Blood first.  Are they your kin?  Even a crappy cousin is better than a stranger.  Are they from your town?  The citizens from small towns will band to protect each other first.  Every able bodied man (and woman?) will quickly be deputized.  Arms, generally in surplus in small towns, will be common.

Here’s a map of what an EMP might look like.  Yeouch.  The plus side?  It looks like a smiley-faced cyclops clown.  (Source- Doomstead Diner)

As our protagonist learned, ties to other small towns will help – whatever they are.  Family and cousins and bankers and other prominent folks who have connections across the lines, even football coaches, will help keep conflict at bay.  The Boy Scout relationship is just one I picked that would be unusual enough to help our protagonist, but one that would really happen.  Again, blood first, but if you’ve been in the same organization?  You’re closer than a stranger, you often know something about the values of the person involved.

Well, you can pick your nose, but not your family.

If you’re not kin or related to the town in some way?  You’ll be turned away.  I think the people in the small towns will learn to be comfortable with violence to protect themselves quickly, especially after they’ve been attacked by bad guys (or just scared guys) drifting their way.

The people in the biggest difficulty will be the people from the big city who don’t have skills that are needed in small towns in a newly technology-free world.  Does the small town need city planners or lawyers after TEOTWAWKI?  Nope.  Doctors?  Sure.  People who know steam cleaning?  No.  People who know how steam power works?  Yes.  Your value is determined by whatever tangible value you can provide, not your existence, or your ability to create a great presentation to the board of directors. Your rights will be a thing of the past.

And 1^st Platoon, Charlie Company?

They have a story to tell, too.

“Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.” – Jurassic Park

Ah, the future.  I, for one, welcome our new canine overlords!

I know I’ve mentioned before that when I start out some of my posts that I have a preconceived idea that just turns out to be wrong.  Well, this is one of those posts.  Honestly, I love that.  It feels almost better than vindicating my original thought – there’s a moment of clarity when I understand the universe a bit better.  And there’s no better gift than that.  Except for money.  I like money.

I read an article this week (10/16/18) about how it will require 3,000,000 to 7,000,000 years to replace biodiversity to pre-human levels.  I’ll link to just one, but this was one of those “blood in the water” stories where every fresh journalism school graduate jumped on it and there were about a 4,372 articles that all dropped about the same time with minor variations in headline.  This one (LINK) is particularly breathless and clueless – but not more than the average article on this subject.  The article indicates we’ve lost 2.5 billion years of evolution in the last 130,000 years.  Why the last 130,000 years?  They want to blame it on humanity, so when you read the article you can get your guilt going early in the morning with that first cup of coffee.  It didn’t surprise me when I found out the author works (in addition to being a freelance journalist) at a far-left environmental advocacy group.  Huh.  So, in other words, dad pays for everything?

However, almost all of this “slaughter of biodiversity” has occurred way before I was born.  And way before you were born.  But we must be made to feel guilty!  Action must be taken!  I’m fairly certain we owe reparations to the species we made extinct.  Oh . . . wait.

I believe that if you were to look a bit deeper into this story that the 2.5 billion years of evolutionary diversity “lost” was counted about 458 times.  As in – if it took 10,000 years for one bird species to develop a red feather on the top of its head, and 10,000 years for another bird species to develop a blue feather on top of its head and both species went extinct then you’d be out 20,000 years even though we still had a bird with a yellow feather on top of its head.   It actually must to be that methodology – since life on Earth 2.5 billion years ago was nothing but single celled organisms and journalism students.  And my mother.

I’m not going to lose much sleep over this.  I’m glad the sabretooth tiger is extinct.  I wish it would take all the mosquitos with it.  I’m not sad that the wolf is extinct over most of the lower 48 states – I’d prefer that rather than reintroducing the wolf, they gave little bronze plaques to the ranchers that shot them and exterminated them in the first place and then, if they have to reintroduce wolves, reintroduce them to New York City at about 1,000 per block while doing a documentary about how wonderful nature is.

Ahh, the beauty of nature.

But this article did made me ask the question – how long can Earth support life?

The Sun is growing hotter – increasing output at about 1% every 110,000,000 years, which means that it will have increased output by 10% by the time The Simpsons® is cancelled.  The reason Sun gets hotter is because of human activity that as time goes along, the Sun starts to fuse not only hydrogen, but also helium.  This helium fusion produces more output energy than the hydrogen, and also makes the Sun talk with a really funny voice.  It’s also why the Sun floats in space.  Without the helium the Sun would fall straight to the galactic floor!

According to some estimates, that probably gives us 1.75 billion years of time until the Earth is no longer habitable, and longer if we leave the window open to let the heat out.  Also?  I’d get your air conditioning looked at so you’ll know that it will run then.  Stock up on extra filters.

The other good news?  There’s no evidence that the molten part of the Earth that keeps the magnetic field going will freeze anytime in the next few billion years, so, we’ve got that going for us, too.  The magnetic field is important because it protects us from radiation streaming at the Earth, and also makes it look like we’re home so that aliens from Zontar-B don’t try to break in and steal our stuff.

So, according to the generally accepted chronology and geologic evidence:

• cells showed up four billion years ago,
• bugs 400 million years ago,
• dinosaurs 300 million years ago,
• flowers 130 million years ago, and
• my mom 50 million years ago.

Given that, we have plenty of time in 1.75 billion years for two or three more intelligent species to show up again.  And if there was a span of 100 million years or so, they’d never know that we even existed.  As I pointed out in this post (The Silurian Hypothesis, or, I’ve Got Lizards in Low Places), no part of the Earth’s surface that’s exposed is older than about 4 million years.  And there would be plenty of time for new oil for our hypothetical civilization to form, since that only takes 70 to 200 million years to cook new oil.  New people to feel guilty about using oil?  That might take longer.

And that’s what surprised me.  There is plenty of time for new civilizations created by new species to form on Earth and attempt to go to the stars.  I had (for whatever reason) thought that only humanity had that shot.  Nope.  There’s plenty of time.  I’ve even seen intrepid science fiction writers pen stories about intelligent crows in the far distant future, or calamari squid developed into sentient spaceship pilots, or even a vastly evolved set of dogs that play a lot of poker.

This picture is  . . . foreshadowing.  More on this next Friday in what may well be my most original and creative post.  I may have to take Friday off because it might take that long to get the awesome written! 

But I like people.  I am a people.  And we are the only species to have developed art, music, poetry, Twinkies® and PEZ™.   People have passed the age of no return – we have one shot at building a galactic empire.  We’ve used the easy oil, we’ve mined the easy resources.  Now?  We’re on the treadmill.  We can’t stay at this level of technological progress.  We either advance, or we regress.  It’s like the Red Queen said in Alice in Wonderland:

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”

Our technological progress has to increase just to support the billions living on Earth today.  To support more people?  To give more benefits and luxuries (like health care)?  We have to get smarter, faster still.

So how long do we have as a civilization?

This is why civilization is awesome.  Girls and beer.* 

*This post is really a continuation of the Silurian post, and it had Oktoberfest girls, so . . .

I remember reading a description of a mathematical technique that, given a few assumptions, would allow you to extrapolate the lifetime of, say, the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, or humanity.  It was in a novel.  I remembered reading it in the year 2000 or 2001.  I was going to spend ludicrous amounts of time searching it out, trying to remember a novel I read 18 years ago.  I think I would have gotten there . . . but the original source material dropped into my lap tonight!

It’s Nature, May 27, 1993 on page 315.  In it, a guy named J. Richard Gott III put together a theory, well, I’ll let Wikipedia explain it:

Gott first thought of his “Copernicus method” of lifetime estimation in 1969 when stopping at the Berlin Wall and wondering how long it would stand. Gott postulated that the Copernican principle is applicable in cases where nothing is known; unless there was something special about his visit (which he didn’t think there was) this gave a 75% chance that he was seeing the wall after the first quarter of its life. Based on its age in 1969 (8 years), Gott left the wall with 75% confidence that it wouldn’t be there in 1993 (1961 + (8/0.25)).

In fact, the wall was brought down in 1989, and 1993 was the year in which Gott applied his “Copernicus method” to the lifetime of the human race. His paper in Nature was the first to apply the Copernican principle to the survival of humanity; His original prediction gave 95% confidence that the human race would last for between 5100 and 7.8 million years.

You can find his paper here (LINK) on a German website in an obviously photocopied PDF with a hair or something on the third page.  Seems legit.  But it does have calculus, so that’s a plus.

So what does this tell me?  I will sleep better tonight.  Life will find a way.  Global warming?  It won’t stop the world.  Plastic straws?  Although they are currently the greatest threat to mankind, even more than nuclear weapons or the Kardashians, plastic straws won’t end the world.

Life will find a way.  Oh, wait.

Please tell me the Kardashians aren’t considered living things.

No!  The Kardashians lay eggs!