11 replies to this topic

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Yesterday I saw the movie "2012." Now, I'm a sucker for a Big Disaster Movie, so I liked it. And I realize that it was not meant to be serious, Academy Award-winning filmmaking (except maybe for special effects). But it made me think about a couple of things that came up in the plot. I just thought they'd make an interesting topic for conversation.

SPOILER ALERT. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM AND DO NOT WANT TO KNOW PLOT DETAILS READ NO FURTHER.

The first thing that came to mind was that the character who is meant to be the more-or-less "villain" of the piece, White House Chief of Staff Anheuser (played by Oliver Platt) was actually right. He is kind of made to look like a jerk for keeping the impending disaster a secret for so long, silencing people who tried to blow the whistle, selling tickets on the Arks to the fabulously wealthy, and placing limits on who could board. But if the end of the world as depicted in the film were a real-life scenario, all those things are exactly what you would need to do to ensure the continuation of the human race. If it was publicly known what was coming there would be chaos. And, as he says in the movie, there is no way the Arks could have been built without the money that the super-rich paid to secure passage. And in a doomsday scenario, not everyone gets to live. You would need to make very tough choices and stick by them. In the end, when the hero convinces the commanders of the last 3 Arks to open the doors and admit all the crowds outside, that was an amazingly foolhardy decision. It jeopardized the lives of everyone on all three Arks and -- by extension -- the entire human race.

Also, the people depicted as having been chosen to go on the Arks struck me as fairly unrealistic. There were lots of children in the crowds, for example, but if that were a RL situation you would probably not want to include children. Why? Because if you only can save 400,000 people, and they have to rebuild civilization after the disaster is over, you would want mostly young, healthy adults. Children would not be able to contribute to the difficult work of rebuilding, they would only be a burden. Similarly you would not want to include anyone sick or handicapped or elderly. In fact, while you would need to include some middle-aged and older people who had specialized training or experience that would be useful, for the most part you would want only viable breeding stock.

I also don't think you would bother saving species like Giraffes and Rhinoceroses, as depicted in the film. With limited space available the only animals you could afford to bring would be livestock.

Finally, there is a scene in which the Queen of England is seen boarding one of the Arks with her Corgis. While admittedly a cute joke, that would never happen. This is a woman who refused to be evacuated to Canada in WW2, instead driving an ambulance around London while the bombs fell. She would not leave her people.

Discuss! (And yes, I am aware that I am a nerd.)

[Beaudene]

the ending was too happy, when i go to see a disaster movie i want to see disaster, not happy survivors.

also, the mass water polution that would occur from that kind of flooding andwould leave almost no fresh drinking water...

plus the main character should have died back near the middle of the movie, no way would they have escaped the pyroclastic flow from that caldera erupting and anyone that was exposed to the volcanic ash would have severe lung problems without the proper protection.

[m3g4tr0n]

I was disappointed with the film.

It was totally necessary to keep everything a secret for as long as possible, especially here in America. The public outcry would be insane. The entire plan would end up being politicized, and bogged down because everyone would assume that they should survive.

As morbid as it sounds, there will be some people that have nothing to offer a society that is rebuilding. That goes for the wealthy too. Obviously a few “captains of industry” should be included, but children and elderly women would be useless. I’d stick with men and women in their 20’s through early 40’s. Engineers, carpenters, scientists, spiritual people, agriculture specialists, etc.

My question is this: What type of religions should be saved or allowed to die off? Would it be possible to save all of them?

[Invicta]

I'll be that guy who says that in a small population trying to rebuild the human race you wouldn't WANT all religions to be represented. That many religions in a small population would be bound to cause schism and hurt rebuilding efforts. In a population that size everyone most work together to rebuild, you can't have individualism. Quite frankly in any real-world scenario close to that one you would have an autocratic government of sorts overseeing the rebuilding population; anything like religion, democracy, capitalism etc. would only cause problems until the population was substantially larger. You could conscievably save a handful of major religions, but even that might be dangerous. More likely you'd either see one or none.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

One of my friends had an excellent point: You would need some children because otherwise there would be a generation gap in the new society. I hadn't thought of that.

I agree about the religions. In fact, if I were in charge of choosing the people to survive, I would specifically not want people with strong religious beliefs. For one thing, they are a source of potential strife. And for another, those beliefs could conflict with some of the real-life steps that would need to be taken.

As misogynistic as it sounds, I do not believe you would include any women of non-reproductive age. And in order to ensure a diversified gene pool, it might be necessary for people to have children with more than one partner.

You would obviously not include anyone with handicaps or physical limitations. And ideally you would try to screen potential candidates for family histories of hereditary illnesses or conditions. I think you would include a small number of people (males) over the age of 50 if they had specialized technical, medical or scientific knowledge or other skills that would be useful. But unless there was an extreme example of someone with abilities so valuable that they could not be done without, I do not believe you would include anyone over the age of 60.

I do not believe you would include any "captains of industry." They would be useless. Capitalism and commerce would be the least of your problems. In fact, I suspect that the new society would be basically have to be an authoritarian communist state for quite some time.

[Invicta]

As misogynistic as it sounds, I do not believe you would include any women of non-reproductive age. And in order to ensure a diversified gene pool, it might be necessary for people to have children with more than one partner.

Most real-world models for this sort of thing I've seen include roughly eight quality breeding age females to one male, with the idea being that each man would have a "harem" of sorts that he was responsible for impregnating. That ratio being necessary to achieve a sufficiently diverse population. You would not want to mix assignments of women to men, if you will, (so I've been told) because in order to create a stable society you need to be able to positively identify paternity. Both for the scientific task of identifying possible hidden genetic defects the father is responsible for, but also to create eventual strong family structures, which are necessary for social advancement. So you would essentially have a family with one father overseeing eight wives and their myriad children. In that scenario due to space each male would need to have some additional attribute that would be helpful, though one such would simply be unusual physical strength and stamina; you need workers, and you need to be able to breed them. As much as I would like to think so in that situation mental acuity would not necessarily be the primary "attribute" needed. If you were being REALLY pragmatic you would actually screen the "parent" candidates for fertility, liklihood of genetic birth problems, and compatability of the parents (for instance, one could be a carrier of a given resesive defect but not both). Autocracy would be absolutely necessary, and sex would essentially become regulated by government. Nobody could be allowed to abstain in the initial stages. More disturbing for us in our current society would be the likelihood that by the second generation people may be obliged to mate with their half brothers or sisters, and by the third likely first cousins. After that relations would start branching and you could likely maintain a prohibition against siblings or first-cousins pairing off, but who knows if it would stick? After three generations of state mandated un-restrained sexuality people may actually become part of a culture permissive to a certain amount of incest. Hopefully not due to the genetic implications of multi-generatonal incest, but you never know. Obviously a lot of that assumes a relatively small initial population, probably under a thousand. I haven't seen the movie so I don't know what their working with.

[Imperial Sparta]

I just don't see why they didn't launch into space... Easy solution there... Sure, I understand that space shuttles can fit only so many people, but hey it adds more to the surviving list... While the Arks would be the biggest part of containing people, space shuttles and other things that can launch into space would be helpful as well. People could have built space and moon habitats until everything calmed down on Earth...

That was just one of my biggest questions while watching the movie, because I quickly learned, "Well if they're up in the air away from where the ground used to be, they're fine..."

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Because they were assuming a level of technology roughly like that of real life, Psych21.

Remember, in the film they saved 400,000 people. And they intended to save more -- probably closer to a million -- but were unable to do so because the disaster came more quickly than they anticipated and not all the Arks were ready.

The logistics of launching enough people to create a viable gene pool into space, and keeping them there until the world was habitable again, would be impossible. And how would you get them back? Any landing facilities would have been destroyed.

I think under most ELE (Extinction Level Event) scenarios you wouldn't build giant, mobile Arks like they did in the movie. I think you'd construct large, strong "bunker" type facilities in places you had reason to believe would be less affected by the coming disaster. The problem with that from the point of view of the film's plot was that no one knew what the effects of the "Earth crust displacement" would be, so there was no way to predict where would be safe. But remember, if you saw the film, they themselves acknowledged that in all likelihood some people would survive the calamity. "Nature will decide." Humanity had already experienced this once before. So their plan was part fail-safe and part attempt to make sure that that humanity didn't have to start from absolutely nothing, in terms of technology, culture, etc., like they had the last time.

Shakes, I'm not entirely sure that the 8-to-1 ratio or the "harem" culture would be necessary. Neither do I think that knowledge of paternity or family units as we understand them would be the only way to go. To ensure a truly diversified gene pool, the best solution might be for humans to mate non-exclusively, so both men and women would produce offspring with many different partners. A number of different options for how that would evolve in societal terms are possible. One is that maybe maternity would become more important than paternity in determining identity. In other words, maybe your lineage and sense of family would take a more matriarchal bent. Another possibility is that children would be raised communally.

I do agree, however, that the sexual mores of this new civilization would seem quite alien to us! And yes, for the first few generations people would almost by necessity be reproducing with people related to them much more closely than we would consider proper today.

I don't know enough about genetics to know what population number would constitute a viable gene pool. 400,000 people were saved in the film, but of course not all of them were "breeding stock." Some were children, some were past reproductive age, etc. But let's say half of them -- 200,000 -- were reproductively viable. I suspect that might be enough even with a "standard" nuclear family model. I would assume that the fertility rate in a society like we are describing would be similar to current Third World rates (after all, what else would they have for recreation!), which is something on the order of 5 children per woman. That's half a million people in the first generation! At rates like that, the new society might actually have to restrict births -- you wouldn't want the population to increase faster than the society could provide for them.

Which brings me to another point. At the end of the movie the survivors were heading for the Cape of Good Hope, which had survived more or less intact. But if it were reality, I don't think you'd want everyone in the same place. I think you'd want to have several colonies, scattered around the world in various places, to maximize the chances that some would survive.

There is talk of a TV series called "2013" that would follow the progress of the survivors. If done right that could be a very interesting show.

[Invicta]

I was thinking in terms of much smaller numbers; obviously if you've got 400k people things change. I think you're dead on, in that case, about not wanting everyone in the same place. Who knows how long it will be until the earth is truly stable? If something screws over one group you don't want that to be the end of humanity. Also, that changes the issues on population growth.

The eight to one model assumes a small number, under a thousand, possibly under 500, In that case you need as much of a population boom as possible. Since each woman can only get pregnant once every nine-months, and probably less frequently than that, but each man can impregnate dozens of women in the same time, it makes sense to bring much more women than men because you increase the rate of population growth and the odds of survival. If you art starting with a population as large as 400,000 I think you would have an EMMEDIATE food shortage problem. You would have to split those populations up, so things change.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

I agree with you on the "harem society" if you are starting with a smaller base number, like 500 or 1000. Frankly even then that might not represent a viable gene pool. I'll have to look into that.

I think in the film they made a passing reference to the fact that they had squirreled away food and seeds, etc., in preparation. I don't think it ever said explicitly how large the Arks were, but they seemed enormous. On the order of several thousand feet long at least and much, much bigger than any current seagoing vessels. So storage space did not seem to be an issue. They were also saving examples of the Earth's fauna, which as I mentioned above seems silly to me. You wouldn't be worried about Giraffes and Rhinos -- any space you had for animals would have to be dedicated to livestock and work animals like horses.

[Invicta]

Something that just occured to me, but what about information storage? Digital media takes very little room, but is very fragile and only useful as long as you have electricity. Realistically, moving "from scratch" in modern days, you wouldn't be able to maintain electric energy indefinitely and any information would need to be available in book form, which takes TONS of space. You're faced with either loosing the bulk of scientific and historical knowledge or using a lot of space for that that probably should be dedicated to something else. I don't know, any thoughts on this? The intellectual in me would hate to see another "Great Library of Alexandria" type of moment where most of the world's knowledge is lost.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

I think they were going to have electricity. Although there is a scene in which they "fire up" the Ark's engines and it emits black smoke (suggesting diesel power) realistically the only way to power a vessel that large would be with nuclear reactors. In that case they would have a nearly limitless supply of energy for the foreseeable future. Although I don't recall them specifically saying so, I would assume that they had also taken with them sufficient materiel to construct modern power-generating facilities, etc. The Arks appeared to have a lot of computers. (And they still had access to satellite data and telemetry, the satellites, of course, having been unaffected. That would be an enormous advantage in selecting settlement sites.)