fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2739 ]

[ SECRET POST #2739 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2739 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I have no idea what this is.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I've never seen it, but it's a notoriously grim "post-apocalyptic" novel and film. I know enough about biology that the premise sounds unbelievable and annoying to me, but the movie had a huge media push five years ago.

Science major here. What is unbelievable and annoying about the premise?

Admittedly, a situation where basically all life on the planet is dead except for humans (and a few pets?) isn't especially likely.

Even the mass extinctions of the past haven't managed that.

It never explicitly says that it's all dead or dying though; just the overwhelming majority of human food plants. A cooling, cloudy earth (which has happened in the past due to meteor impacts, eruptions from mega volcanoes - also possible as a result of nuclear winter) has killed off much of the plant life and that is in the process of killing everything up the food chain as the surviving humans scavenge what's left, including consuming the other animals, whatever (dead) plants they can find, and then move on to stored goods and one another.

This has actually happened before, as I'm sure you know, and while we don't see whether or not smaller mammals (such as the ones that survived mass extinctions in the past) have survived better than humans in the book because they would not be where the protagonists could find them, and wouldn't provide an adequate food source even if they could, large terrestrial animals such as ourselves are almost invariably screwed.

Point! I was just going off the Wikipedia entry since I only saw the movie once and never read the book. However, if that's the 'premise' the original anon was talking about, I can only guess that's along the lines of what they might have been thinking.

I don't remember being particularly bothered by the setting, but then I'm used to accepting things like 'generic post-apocalyptic wasteland' setting.

I'm not sure what their other biology-related complaints would have been. Groups of humans living primarily off eating other (malnourished) humans? That does seem like a recipe for rapid descent into malnourishment.

(Ack, I'm so embarrassed, I replied with my new RP journal! I'm so used to being anon. XD)

Hahah well yeah, the book pretty much describes a rapid descent into malnourishment. It's not a fun happy party time ;p

Makes sense! XD I guess anon was judging a book by its cover.

OK, I see what you're saying. The reviews made it sound like, "everything but humans is dead," and the biosphere really doesn't work that way, and can't.

And McCarthy pretty much said he didn't have any clear idea what caused the famine, nor care. But that means there's no possibility for analysis, nor any solution; it's just wallowing in horror, instead of scientific speculative fiction that might tell us something useful about actual famines which will happen. I don't care to spend my time or money on that, personally. I can imagine horrors just fine all by myself.

But you have a point, maybe. Maybe we could get close to something a little like that in a localized way if there were some kind of plague that hit cereals? Maybe?

Or both pollinator extinction and collapse of high-yield agriculture due to a failure to develop sustainable phosphate recycling (both of which are possible). Problem is, I see those as specific problems that have specific solutions. And McCarthy didn't want to talk about that, he wanted misery porn or something?

I just found the way it was described absurd-sounding.

In any case, I'd be yelling at the screen.

No no, his apocalypse in this case resulted in sudden collapse, and didn't give mankind the opportunity to adapt (at least not yet) or develop new technologies. It's possible that they will eventually, depending on how you read the ending. If you read the books it sounds more like meteor impact, nuclear winter, or a megalithic eruption - rapid climate change (cooling) and constantly overcast, which is killing off organisms dependent on photosynthesis. These are all plausible scenarios discussed widely by scientists, and this it more or less what would happen; all but the nuclear option have happened before and have resulted in mass extinctions among large fauna, like us.

So why would you be yelling at the screen?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2739 ]

no subject

"The Road"

Re: "The Road"

Re: "The Road"

Re: "The Road"

Re: "The Road"

Re: "The Road"

Re: "The Road"

SA

SA again

Re: SA again