I mean, I’d rather NOT have to survive an apocalypse, but if I MUST, then I’m glad I’m given a few options to choose from…

This is just a musing of a poll I saw on YouTube about which apocalypse would you try to survive.

All of the options are terrible, and I would probably be one of the first to die regardless of what event would bring the world to its knees.

However, I found the results and the comments really interesting.

It made me ponder the survivability of each apocalyptic situation, and I thought I’d share it for fun!

A lot of people chose the post-nuclear war option, and their reasoning in the comments was: “It’s basically playing Fallout already.”

Unfortunately, that’s not true.

Fallout is a game, which means that it leaves out major aspects to survival.

Radiation damage can either be immediate, or sneak up on you later in life. It should also be noted that radioactive substances can take over a thousand years to decay.

With the air, water, ground, and animals being exposed to radiation, you’re going to end up consuming a certain amount of it.

You could survive the immediate aftermath, but then years later, the cancerous tumors begin to show.

It won’t just be one, either. Extreme radiation exposure can come with multiple tumors in multiple places.

In fact, the population surrounding Chernobyl had crazy high cancer rates for decades. Even now the cancer rate is higher. The image of the father and son are two cancer patients from that area.

The image of the woman with that large tumor was a “radium girl.”

Before digital equipment, glow in the dark equipment was painted with radium-infused paint. It’s a long story that I intend to tell later, but in short: radium girls were factory workers that painted clock dials with radium paint so it would glow in the dark. Years later, they all died of various bone cancers.

In a world without access to doctors or chemotherapy, you’re doomed.

ESPECIALLY if you’ve consumed something contaminated with radium. Your teeth and bones are simply going to fall apart.

Not choosing AI was a personal preference.

I am absolutely terrible with technology. The AI bots would kill me before I could figure out how to send an emoji in this new bizarre world.

That being said, technology does have certain weaknesses.

1.) Hardware is not adaptive like a human brain:

Artificial intelligence is just that, artificial. It can be programmed to a certain point, but it’s not a human brain that changes structure every time something new is learned.

Computer drives are permanent, and have to be manually reprogrammed to include new information. You can use that to your advantage.

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2.) Blunt-force trauma is highly effective

The phone you’re reading this from is capable of many incredible things, but it can easily be reduced to nothing with a hammer.

Sometimes you just have to attack your enemies with a swift silver hammer to the head.

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3.) There’s a reason you never click the extra links on a porn website

It takes one bad virus to completely destroy a computer drive. Since AI relies on software, you could in theory eventually write a virus to overrule it.

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I just personally couldn’t survive it. I’d die almost immediately.

To discuss an alien invasion, we need to have some context:

• The closest star to us is proxima centauri, which is a whopping 4.5 light years away.

• The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest man-made space exploration thingy in the world, traveling at 1% the speed of light.

^ It would take 7,300 years for it to reach Proxima Centauri, by which point it would be dead due to lack of solar energy to fuel it.

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For an alien invasion to work, the aliens would need a few things:

1.) A space shuttle that could sustain life without solar power, as there’s going to be a BIG chunk of empty space with a minimal power source.

2.) A very fast space shuttle that would allow these aliens to still be alive when they reached Earth (or they have crazy long life spans)

3.) They would need to have some high-tech weaponry that is capable of obliterating an asteroid should one get flung their way before they can dodge it

4.) High-tech tools that allow them to breathe different atmospheres, and collect samples, and do whatever the aliens are wanting to do.

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To put it bluntly: aliens that exceed our technological and survival abilities are going to annihilate us. We’d be fucked.

*I just noticed the typo. Correction: If someone bioengineered a virus, they probably created a way for them to be immune to it as well.

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Humans have survived plagues before. That’s not to say that there weren’t devastating damages or that it wasn’t exceedingly difficult.

It’s especially not helpful when you have lunatics that refuse to follow good “avoid sickness protocol.”

But overall as a species, we have experience in surviving illnesses.

It’s also the case that if the virus was man-made, the person that made it probably developed a vaccine of some kind to prevent them from catching it. We just need to find that recipe.

I feel like I stand a better chance in a world that was ravaged by a genetically-engineered pandemic than anywhere else.

I also know to wear a mask and wash my hands, which would probably somewhat improve my chances of surviving.

I hope you had fun reading this post! Most of this was just musing, and not based on real facts.

However, I did do some research on a few things to have a more “educated opinion” on a fictional situation lol.

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Chernobyl Cancer Rates: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/guides/456900/456957/html/nn4page1.stm

Chernobyl Cancer Patient Picture: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/children-born-to-chernobyl-survivors-dont-carry-more-genetic-mutations

Radium Girls (Note: I will be doing a post entirely dedicated to them soon. It’s actually almost done): https://www.afacwa.org/the_forgotten_story_of_the_radium_girls_whose_deaths_saved_thousands_of_workers_lives

Proxima Centauri: https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/nearest_star_info.html

Speed of Spacecrafts: https://astronauttomjones.com/2024/05/17/how-long-would-it-take-to-reach-the-nearest-star/

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As for the brain structure changing when we learn, I actually learned that during my studies when I was pursuing an education in psychology + neuroscience.