Comments on: Cannibals Die Fast

By: Accelerating Future » Hungry Cannibals and Soft Apocalypses

Accelerating Future » Hungry Cannibals and Soft Apocalypses — Fri, 28 May 2010 22:02:48 +0000

[...] Hanson recently posted about The Road and cannibals, which is great, because I think about this stuff all the time, and [...]

By: Funky J

Funky J — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:42:58 +0000

I dispute the cannibalism claims you make.

Human beings are very, very stubborn.

We’ve had over 600 years of people proving the Church completely wrong about, well, everything, including the existence of any kind of deity, and people still believe in that crap.

So, for it to take only a year to convince people that cannibalism isn’t “wrong” and it won’t actually harm them seems far too short, even with human beings being extremely hungry with no other source of food about.

By: Faré

Faré — Fri, 28 May 2010 01:27:36 +0000

I made a similar calculation about Soylent Green, with a similar order of magnitude in days of human sustenance per human victim (~100 days). http://fare.livejournal.com/135967.html

Even doubling or quadrupling the yield, we’re far from anything sustainable.

By: Krutz

Krutz — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:02:26 +0000

I don’t think the book says what the world population was following the disaster. If the disaster wiped out enough of the population, the remainder could have survived on the stored/canned foodstuffs for a considerable time. Heck, the population could have dwindled even further due to desperate consumption of rancid foodstuffs. The time that the Man and the Boy are in could be the tail end of humanity’s epoch for all we know.

For his book to be “impossible” requires more data than he presents. We could spend all day figuring out how it “could have happened.”

By: Alexei Turchin

Alexei Turchin — Thu, 27 May 2010 22:21:54 +0000

Remember that where will be many dead and freased animals on the cattle farms. 2 billion cows live on Earth.

By: anna

anna — Thu, 27 May 2010 21:32:25 +0000

who cares?? it was a good book. it hasn’t happened, so we can’t completely know what would happen. why knock cormac mccarthy?

By: Rocky

Rocky — Thu, 27 May 2010 19:02:57 +0000

This is a horrible thought, but, wouldn’t the strongest coalitions enforce property rights as to the weaker humans as food stores? Wouldn’t this greatly increase the 5 years of survival? Maybe even leading to sustainability?

By: Zac Gochenour

Zac Gochenour — Thu, 27 May 2010 18:40:46 +0000

I admit to being no biochemist Tomasz. The vitamin C issue didn’t even occur to me at first. If what you say is true (which I do not doubt), scurvy will kill off the cannibal population long before starvation became even slightly an issue.

Once the food (and vitamin) stores were gone, almost everyone would be dead in a month or so in a world with no vegetation.

By: ChrisB

ChrisB — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:49:09 +0000

“What would a far-real western or cop movie look like?”

Like Barney Miller.

By: Les Cargill

Les Cargill — Thu, 27 May 2010 14:57:34 +0000

Both novels and film are narrative. Narrative is *un*reality. People suspend disbelief willingly and are rewarded with a shot of endorphins when the suspension is resolved.

Even S.M. Stirling’s “Dies The Fire” suites (which are still being written) gives you a wink-wink, nudge-nudge about the premise. It’s kinda like the answer to the question “How do the Heisenberg Compensators work?” of a Star Trek insider – answer: “Very well, thank you.”

What’s more interesting to me is how it is that we have such a taste for apocalypse as narrative in general. SFAIK, the origins of apocalypse were with the Zoroastrians of the Persian Empire, but we still see it carried forward.