h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

At what point then does society's veneer of permanence and infallibility crumble? When do the cracks start to really show? And would we notice?

I am personally of the opinion that a society’s veneer begins to crumble when the society’s morals, norms and social mores take a nosedive. It happened with the Romans and the Greeks. Mostly people don’t notice until the Visigoth’s are legging it over the wall so to speak. I suspect it will be the same for our civilisation…if you want to call it that! (But that is probably another talking point!)

It is thought that in this country if we go ten days without oil and petrol anarchy will ensue and so-called civil society will resemble a free for all. Is this right?

I can imagine that it would be right. Think about it. Most people have a car. If you don’t have a car, you commute by train or bus, or tram. All of these need fuel. No fuel equals no work. No work equals no money. No money equals “Oh hell’s teeth, what to we do about food” and then this leads us nicely to looting of shops by rioting civilians. There is an argument that the fabric of society is held together with oil and oil based products so take that away and the warp and weft begin to drift apart.

Have we become so softened by the luxuries of modern life that we're now incapable of surviving without running tap water, central heating and Pot Noodles?

I think you have to give humanity its due. We are adaptable. We have adapted to a situation where there was easy credit by making shopping our main hobby. If there was no running tap water, we would soon work out how to get water or we would die. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that! If there was no central heating there would be more people wearing jumpers, knitting blankets and going to bed early (ahem!) and if there were no Pot Noodles one could argue that is a giant leap forward to the health of humanity!

Could you describe what this country will be like in 500 years' time? Will there be a new world order? What might we look like?

I don’t suppose humans will look that different from what we do now. Aren’t there scientists who believe we have evolved as far as we can? I think any development may be with our mental powers, so perhaps there will be more telepaths, telekinetics etc. As for this Country in 500 years – it will either be entirely under water, or completely concreted over.

So much of modern creative genius has found expression in digital format but will this survive the ravages of time? Will future archaeologists excavate intact hard drives in the year 2508? Perhaps cave-painting and mosaics are a more reliable way of ensuring our cultural legacy survives after all?

Well, one electromagnetic pulse and all our computer-y bits are toast. I guess in 2508 they will be able to read old stuff on hard drives. But what I worry about is the information they will get from them. What do you save on your hard drive? Those funny emails from your friends which make you snort coffee over your keyboard when you first read them and then rapidly get less funny as time goes on. Archaeologists of the future may very well get a warped interpretation of what our life was like. Then again, perhaps they won’t!!

We have always tended to think that the times we live in 'right now' represent man's highest progress to date but is this right? Were the Minoans any less civilised than we are today?

We are more advanced in lots of ways and I suspect we are less advanced in a few as well. Minoans didn’t have supermarkets (I assume?) or cars, but I am willing to bet they could make their own clothes and grow their own food. I would take those latter skills as something more advanced than most of our population was able to do.

If your normal way of life became drastically altered, would you have the skills to carry on? If you had to take to the woods, could you survive? Do you keep a stash of tinned food, blankets, matches, water, just in case...?

The answer to these questions is… well I would hope so. If there was an electromagnetic pulse tonight my first order of business would be to sleep in (need to be well rested in order to respond to a crisis!) and then I would go into the garden and make it into an allotment. One day’s hard digging and I can plant stuff. It would be a mighty lean winter, but I would survive. I could perhaps grow some stuff inside the house, which would be warmer than outside, but I suspect I would lose quite a bit of weight, which is not a bad thing! I do not stash tinned food, but I do make blankets (crocheting, knitting etc) and have spare matches available. I think I could make a go of it, and I quite fancy setting up a barter economy in my local neighbourhood. It would use my skills as an accountant!

I'm reading "Death from the skies," by Philip Plait. which rates the likelihood of different end-of-world scenarios. Surprisingly, your chance of being wiped out by an asteroid impact is actually greater than that of being killed by a terrorist attack. Six billion years from, as the sun expands prior to shrinking to white dwarf status, the Earth will be very hot: "The Earth's surface temperature at that point will be about 2,500 degrees, hot enough to melt nearly every metal and rock on its surface ...The crust of the Earth will melt as well, and that, pretty much, will be that."

The biggest near-term p[roblems will relate to keeping the wolf from the door. Right now, the elderly are going bankrupt at a frightening rate, because they are often living on fixed incomes as inflation eats away at their buying power.

Many may have trouble getting enough to eat. This may get widespread enough that people might have to eat nontraditional things that they can get by foraging in their neighborhoods. In "Oak, the frame of civilization," by William Logan, the author paints a plausible history of mankind in which many early societies used acorns as the staple food in their diets. This would have included societies as diverse as the Koreans, the Portuguese, and some Indian tribes in what is now California. You can still buy acorn jelly in Korean specialty shops. The main advantage here is that acorn-gathering is fairly simple. To rid the nuts of the bitter tannin, you soak them in cold water over night, then throw away the water and add water again. Repeat this about five times, and the acorns should be edible. They have an advantage in that people who eat them report complete satisfaction 9of hunger. Thus, you could use them as a subsistence diet indefinitely, at least until your normal foods become available again.