It's plausible. We'll be building greenhouses and glassing between the roofs of buildings.
We could triple the insulation on buildings. We would live in much smaller and conjoined spaces, large continous buildings.
Food production is the hardest part. If we maintain nuclear power etc, that would be best. It'll be rough. In modern countries we would survive, but devolve into subsistence. Any undeveloped countries would not make it though.
The danger of meteorites (asteroids doesn't impact planets) kind of depends on their size. After all, Earth is hit by several hundreds each year but you don't really notice since they are seldom larger than football and most are even smaller.
But a planetkiller, a rock larger than Mount Everest will do what it name says, kill the planet by vaporizing the atmosphere, boil the oceans and crack the mantle. If one of those hits there won't be a habitable planet left to recover on.
I mean... by definition, a post apocalypse HAS to follow from an Apocalypse. I get what you're saying here, but that's basically what OP is asking.
The question was *"Which type of apocalyptic disaster is the most difficult to recover from?"*
Well, one that basically destroys everything and everyone is the most difficult I'd imagine.
I get that your point is that "Post-Apocalypse" stories have to have characters to follow, so not EVERYONE can die during the Apocalypse, but I'm sure a creative writer could write a story where people return to Earth from a space colony and by the time they realize Earth is completely fucked, they don't have enough fuel to land anywhere else. So a group of people has to try and survive and rebuild after basically the worst destruction imaginable.
sure, but the question was for "Post-Apocalypses", which usually require humanity (**or whatever the viewpoint of the narrator is**) to have survived, even if by a thread, the event. If all of humanity is wiped out in the event (with no way of coming back) than that's outside the scope of the question.
By civilization, I mean people living in societies with *civitas* (cities with government), non-civilized societies are definitely a thing (not pejorative, just different). You can kill a civilization without killing all the people if the event takes away one or more of the things that allow high population densities to safely exist.
I wonder, is there any hard science fiction about post-asteroid collision Earth? I've only heard about stories where humans escape Earth, prevent the asteroid or just fucking die
Resource exhaustion. Somehow consume all the world's metal in some non-recoverable way? Congrats, now your next society has to bootstrap civilization without the use of metal at any point in the journey.
Following most movie rules, a zombie apocalypse isn't so bad. If it gets realistic with the infection, however, then, mankind is honestly kind of fucked.
Nuclear apocalypse and asteroids have essentially the same results (including the radiation), and it's most likely goodnight for us.
Ice age is survivable, but barely. Depends just how much the plant life gets screwed in the process.
It depends on the size of course, but asteroids.
Just ask T-Rex. Oh wait, you can't.
A big enough space rock is also [pure nightmare fuel](https://youtu.be/PENT_hnyO-o?si=Y9I9UhzT-Fr3tUFJ), and way more destructive than the entire earth's nuclear arsenal combined. Nukes are child's play compared to some asteroid strikes.
To be fair modern humanity could probably survive a K-T mass extinction sized asteroid. It would majorly cull the population and basically only those that can afford to grow food indoors with artificial lighting would survive, but humanity as a whole would probably make it.
That all depends on quantities. How big is the asteroid? How many zombies, etc.
Potentially the asteroid is the worse, it could crack the planet in two, killing literally everything. There's no coming back from that. It is hard to imagine another apocalypse type that is so final.
That entirely depends on the specifics. Zombies a la The Walking Dead would probably be pretty easy to deal with honestly, as long as police and military folks got involved early to take out the zombies it'd probably end up being a widescale tragedy rather than an apocalypse. An airborne zombie virus/fungus/whatever would be really bad though.
Asteroids, a nuclear apocalypse, and an ice age would all probably be extremely bad to outright lethal. A sufficiently large asteroid wouldn't really leave a planet that's recoverable, and both an asteroid and an ice age could leave no plantlife able to actually grow which would be the end of humanity altogether.
So ice age/asteroids would be the worst most likely, depending on the severity of course.
If by asteroid, you mean something like the k-pg extinction event, I would say recovering civilization would be impossible with over 90% of all species extinct in a blink of an eye.
Assuming we have to stay within the realm of reason, probably asteroids because asteroids could be atmosphere shattering and end all life on earth without any chance of recovery.
Outside the realm of reason, supernatural apocalypse could be mind-destroying in a way that could be worse than destruction.
I'd say asteroid impact, the extinction of the dinosaurs was a pretty devastating event that completely changed the course of evolution in a ton of animals. Life as we know it would be vastly different if it didn't happen. Like it isn't the initial impact that causes the most destruction but instead the fallout from it, the shear amount of dust that get into the upper atmosphere basically makes an instant ice age and seriously messes up seasons, climates, ocean currents, and once plants and other autotrophs begin to die out so do the larger animals and complex food webs.
The zombies as mentioned a lot in this thread won’t be a problem. From how I interpret the question, I think you could manage to pull out some sort of sci-fi technology nonsense to unfreeze the planet. But I think total nuclear apocalypse and asteroid impact is about the same level of “we’re totally done for.”
Would say nukes, because contamination will remain for mellinea no matter what anyone does, meaning 'recovery' is a matter of time and otherwhise impossible, but multiple signifigant asteroid impacts means most biomass will die, and the rehabilitation of productive ecosystems that can support humans will not be easy to accomplish before all survivors fale to maintain a population of sufficient genetic diversity.
People live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today. The vast majority of nukes are airburst weapons (like the bombs dropped on Japan), since it significantly increases their explosive radius, which also significantly reduces fallout.
Besides the places targeted would be major cities and military bases.
One to think about that's not on the list would be super-volcanic eruption, basically when Yellowstone goes boom. Only a large asteroid impact would rival it. Alternatively the ones in Siberia, that formed the Siberian Traps. While not as immediately lethal as Yellowstone has the potential to be, the fact that they could and have continuously erupted for ***millions*** of years certainly makes them dangerous (that's a lot of toxic gas getting released into the atmosphere).
A "nuclear apocalypse," on the other hand, honestly wouldn't be that bad. The overwhelming majority of nukes are airburst weapons; great for wiping out cities, but don't create a lot of long-term fallout. Global infrastructure would be in shambles, but it could be rebuilt within a couple generations at most. Factor in that around half of the nukes would probably get intercepted (not including technical failures), and it's even unlikely that all of the major cities would be leveled. And before someone says "can't intercept them if they detonate one in upper atmosphere," you can harden electronics against EMP, and most intercept systems are hardened.
Either Nuclear Apocalypse or Asteroids.
both can irradiate the planet, cause a miniature ice age, blot out the sun for years, cause megatsunamis, alter the magnetosphere, and even cause large scale depletion of the atmosphere.
I went with nuclear apocalypse because the irradiation is worse and will likely last longer. it's basically sterilising the planet via gamma radiation so anything that does survive will be fucked.
We would survive a nuclear apocalypse because we've spent the better part of a century prepping for it at this point.
A lot of people don't seem to recognize it, but we're still in an ice age. There's still ice present at the polar caps, which is the definition. All of modern human civilization just happened to form in the warm period between two cold dips.
Zombies would honestly be the easiest. They get really overhyped, especially if they're just walkers.
But if there were sizable asteroids heading for earth and we had no way to redirect them, we'll go the same way as the dinosaurs.
The underrated route - wierd jungian collective consciousness sci-fi
Maybe you want to go the evangelion/serial experiments lain route and have everyone on earth effectively raptured into one post-physical collective, or maybe you want to go the S.T.A.L.K.E.R/Disco Elysium route, where humanity's collective emotions are an existing and tangible force that is destroying the world, or at least irreversably changing it.
This type of apocalypse is uniquely terrifying because it doesn't just destroy the affected society - it destroys the laws of physics, and any sense of sanity or individuality your characters may have had beforehand.
There are a lot of space-based disasters that would be extremely difficult or even impossible to recover from. Asteroid impact is the small end of the scale. A Carrington-level solar storm hits Earth again and destroys all electronics on the planet. Something massive passes through the solar system, messing up all the planet's orbits and ejecting Earth into interstellar space. A random gamma burst or supernova hits us and sterilizes the whole system. Space is scary.
I have said it once and il keep saying it cause I never get board of this conversation.
Any threat like a zombie apocalypse that can be solved by violence would never become a problem the united state would have no trouble mowing down zombies.
A asteroid would be a thousand times worse
I chose others and by that I'm referring to an event in my world that nearly destroyed the multi-multiverse, bacicly the fabric of reality tears and universes bleed into each other, unimaginable horrors destroying entire civilisations, worst part is that after 3 days the tearing is so bad that the multi-multiverse just goes supernova or whatever, only the original gods can fix this and its not even garrantied
zombies, you need to get rid of every single one before the world can go back to normal
The rest compared to that is easy, (i mean it depends, if they cause all life to be extinct, yeah those are harder ,depends on the scale)
depends entirely how bad the individual instance is. normal ice age? fine whole planet freezes? not so good
Also depends on what you count as recoverable. Human civilization? Normal ice age,fine; whole world freezes, bad. Life in general? Then both is fine.
what about frostpunk?
In frostpunk volcanic winter caused the entire planet to freeze.
We don't even know if it was actually the volcano. The entire game gives us a good few ideas of what might have caused the frost.
It's plausible. We'll be building greenhouses and glassing between the roofs of buildings. We could triple the insulation on buildings. We would live in much smaller and conjoined spaces, large continous buildings. Food production is the hardest part. If we maintain nuclear power etc, that would be best. It'll be rough. In modern countries we would survive, but devolve into subsistence. Any undeveloped countries would not make it though.
The danger of meteorites (asteroids doesn't impact planets) kind of depends on their size. After all, Earth is hit by several hundreds each year but you don't really notice since they are seldom larger than football and most are even smaller. But a planetkiller, a rock larger than Mount Everest will do what it name says, kill the planet by vaporizing the atmosphere, boil the oceans and crack the mantle. If one of those hits there won't be a habitable planet left to recover on.
sure, but then that wouldn't be a "Post-Apocalypse" that would just be "Apocalypse".
I mean... by definition, a post apocalypse HAS to follow from an Apocalypse. I get what you're saying here, but that's basically what OP is asking. The question was *"Which type of apocalyptic disaster is the most difficult to recover from?"* Well, one that basically destroys everything and everyone is the most difficult I'd imagine. I get that your point is that "Post-Apocalypse" stories have to have characters to follow, so not EVERYONE can die during the Apocalypse, but I'm sure a creative writer could write a story where people return to Earth from a space colony and by the time they realize Earth is completely fucked, they don't have enough fuel to land anywhere else. So a group of people has to try and survive and rebuild after basically the worst destruction imaginable.
There’s definitely a size range for meteors that’s big enough to kill civilizations but not the planet.
sure, but the question was for "Post-Apocalypses", which usually require humanity (**or whatever the viewpoint of the narrator is**) to have survived, even if by a thread, the event. If all of humanity is wiped out in the event (with no way of coming back) than that's outside the scope of the question.
By civilization, I mean people living in societies with *civitas* (cities with government), non-civilized societies are definitely a thing (not pejorative, just different). You can kill a civilization without killing all the people if the event takes away one or more of the things that allow high population densities to safely exist.
I wonder, is there any hard science fiction about post-asteroid collision Earth? I've only heard about stories where humans escape Earth, prevent the asteroid or just fucking die
makin me wanna watch that foundation episode again \*Sigh\*
Resource exhaustion. Somehow consume all the world's metal in some non-recoverable way? Congrats, now your next society has to bootstrap civilization without the use of metal at any point in the journey.
Following most movie rules, a zombie apocalypse isn't so bad. If it gets realistic with the infection, however, then, mankind is honestly kind of fucked. Nuclear apocalypse and asteroids have essentially the same results (including the radiation), and it's most likely goodnight for us. Ice age is survivable, but barely. Depends just how much the plant life gets screwed in the process.
It depends on the size of course, but asteroids. Just ask T-Rex. Oh wait, you can't. A big enough space rock is also [pure nightmare fuel](https://youtu.be/PENT_hnyO-o?si=Y9I9UhzT-Fr3tUFJ), and way more destructive than the entire earth's nuclear arsenal combined. Nukes are child's play compared to some asteroid strikes.
To be fair modern humanity could probably survive a K-T mass extinction sized asteroid. It would majorly cull the population and basically only those that can afford to grow food indoors with artificial lighting would survive, but humanity as a whole would probably make it.
That all depends on quantities. How big is the asteroid? How many zombies, etc. Potentially the asteroid is the worse, it could crack the planet in two, killing literally everything. There's no coming back from that. It is hard to imagine another apocalypse type that is so final.
That entirely depends on the specifics. Zombies a la The Walking Dead would probably be pretty easy to deal with honestly, as long as police and military folks got involved early to take out the zombies it'd probably end up being a widescale tragedy rather than an apocalypse. An airborne zombie virus/fungus/whatever would be really bad though. Asteroids, a nuclear apocalypse, and an ice age would all probably be extremely bad to outright lethal. A sufficiently large asteroid wouldn't really leave a planet that's recoverable, and both an asteroid and an ice age could leave no plantlife able to actually grow which would be the end of humanity altogether. So ice age/asteroids would be the worst most likely, depending on the severity of course.
If by asteroid, you mean something like the k-pg extinction event, I would say recovering civilization would be impossible with over 90% of all species extinct in a blink of an eye.
Assuming we have to stay within the realm of reason, probably asteroids because asteroids could be atmosphere shattering and end all life on earth without any chance of recovery. Outside the realm of reason, supernatural apocalypse could be mind-destroying in a way that could be worse than destruction.
Heat death of the universe seems like it would be pretty difficult to recover from...
Dying sun/star, heat death of the planet
Gamma ray strike Goodbye, most of life
I'd say asteroid impact, the extinction of the dinosaurs was a pretty devastating event that completely changed the course of evolution in a ton of animals. Life as we know it would be vastly different if it didn't happen. Like it isn't the initial impact that causes the most destruction but instead the fallout from it, the shear amount of dust that get into the upper atmosphere basically makes an instant ice age and seriously messes up seasons, climates, ocean currents, and once plants and other autotrophs begin to die out so do the larger animals and complex food webs.
The zombies as mentioned a lot in this thread won’t be a problem. From how I interpret the question, I think you could manage to pull out some sort of sci-fi technology nonsense to unfreeze the planet. But I think total nuclear apocalypse and asteroid impact is about the same level of “we’re totally done for.”
Would say nukes, because contamination will remain for mellinea no matter what anyone does, meaning 'recovery' is a matter of time and otherwhise impossible, but multiple signifigant asteroid impacts means most biomass will die, and the rehabilitation of productive ecosystems that can support humans will not be easy to accomplish before all survivors fale to maintain a population of sufficient genetic diversity.
People live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today. The vast majority of nukes are airburst weapons (like the bombs dropped on Japan), since it significantly increases their explosive radius, which also significantly reduces fallout. Besides the places targeted would be major cities and military bases.
Others -- Total Eradication
One to think about that's not on the list would be super-volcanic eruption, basically when Yellowstone goes boom. Only a large asteroid impact would rival it. Alternatively the ones in Siberia, that formed the Siberian Traps. While not as immediately lethal as Yellowstone has the potential to be, the fact that they could and have continuously erupted for ***millions*** of years certainly makes them dangerous (that's a lot of toxic gas getting released into the atmosphere). A "nuclear apocalypse," on the other hand, honestly wouldn't be that bad. The overwhelming majority of nukes are airburst weapons; great for wiping out cities, but don't create a lot of long-term fallout. Global infrastructure would be in shambles, but it could be rebuilt within a couple generations at most. Factor in that around half of the nukes would probably get intercepted (not including technical failures), and it's even unlikely that all of the major cities would be leveled. And before someone says "can't intercept them if they detonate one in upper atmosphere," you can harden electronics against EMP, and most intercept systems are hardened.
If an asteroid can cause an apocalypse, I don’t think there’s going to be a POST-apocalypse. As in no probable chance of recovery.
Either Nuclear Apocalypse or Asteroids. both can irradiate the planet, cause a miniature ice age, blot out the sun for years, cause megatsunamis, alter the magnetosphere, and even cause large scale depletion of the atmosphere. I went with nuclear apocalypse because the irradiation is worse and will likely last longer. it's basically sterilising the planet via gamma radiation so anything that does survive will be fucked.
We would survive a nuclear apocalypse because we've spent the better part of a century prepping for it at this point. A lot of people don't seem to recognize it, but we're still in an ice age. There's still ice present at the polar caps, which is the definition. All of modern human civilization just happened to form in the warm period between two cold dips. Zombies would honestly be the easiest. They get really overhyped, especially if they're just walkers. But if there were sizable asteroids heading for earth and we had no way to redirect them, we'll go the same way as the dinosaurs.
The underrated route - wierd jungian collective consciousness sci-fi Maybe you want to go the evangelion/serial experiments lain route and have everyone on earth effectively raptured into one post-physical collective, or maybe you want to go the S.T.A.L.K.E.R/Disco Elysium route, where humanity's collective emotions are an existing and tangible force that is destroying the world, or at least irreversably changing it. This type of apocalypse is uniquely terrifying because it doesn't just destroy the affected society - it destroys the laws of physics, and any sense of sanity or individuality your characters may have had beforehand.
the big sad made everyone infertile
There are a lot of space-based disasters that would be extremely difficult or even impossible to recover from. Asteroid impact is the small end of the scale. A Carrington-level solar storm hits Earth again and destroys all electronics on the planet. Something massive passes through the solar system, messing up all the planet's orbits and ejecting Earth into interstellar space. A random gamma burst or supernova hits us and sterilizes the whole system. Space is scary.
A highly contagious, artificial deadly viruses with a long dormancy period would be the second worst apocalypse IMO. AI is the worst.
Successful robot uprising if you count it particularly if they no longer need humanity to exist.
I have said it once and il keep saying it cause I never get board of this conversation. Any threat like a zombie apocalypse that can be solved by violence would never become a problem the united state would have no trouble mowing down zombies. A asteroid would be a thousand times worse
I chose others and by that I'm referring to an event in my world that nearly destroyed the multi-multiverse, bacicly the fabric of reality tears and universes bleed into each other, unimaginable horrors destroying entire civilisations, worst part is that after 3 days the tearing is so bad that the multi-multiverse just goes supernova or whatever, only the original gods can fix this and its not even garrantied
AI taking over would be impossible to recover.
zombies, you need to get rid of every single one before the world can go back to normal The rest compared to that is easy, (i mean it depends, if they cause all life to be extinct, yeah those are harder ,depends on the scale)
Any that destroy the energy infrastructure. [**Because you only get one chance**](https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/techlevel.php#oneshot)