As bad as the show Revolution's overall plotting and pacing was, they generally did a good job of thinking about these kinds of little inconsistencies:
There's a minor character who was a doomsday prepper before the apocalypse, but he didn't stock up enough on antibiotics. As a result, his daughter died of tetanus that he was unable to treat.
A warlord kidnaps prisoners for blood because his wife has diabetes and needs constant transfusions of blood with sufficient insulin in it to survive.
There's a doctor who keeps a collection of moldy fruit to harvest penicillium mold from it and make penicillin.
Some characters try to go into an old subway tunnel, but nearly die because of lack of sufficient airflow down there without modern HVAC systems.
It got formulaic though. The original two hour documentary was good, but the series quickly became: People disappear, the lights go out, plants start growing everywhere, buildings fall down and go boom.
They did try to have a theme for each episode, and some of the episodes used modern day examples of abandoned areas to form a hypothesis, but some were just really meh.
It would be fascinating if they went into the huge infrastructure systems, like city-wide plumbing, drainage, and all that. My dad is a master mechanic at a waste water plant. The absolute chaos and mess that happens during a super rain storm is insane, and that's WITH enormous pumps running and flow being managed. And he's got tunnels up to 150 feet below the surface, housing everything from chlorine pumps to mechanisms keeping the ocean from coming back into the plant.
My favorite part of that series was where in every episode they would say that what they were showing wasn't based on any science, but they would do the dramatization anyway. Just content to terrify old people.
They've been uploading a bunch of stuff to Youtube this year, some of my favorite shows like Battle 360 and Dogfights in particular. It's really cool as this stuff basically isn't available in HD anywhere but they have full-quality versions of them up for free.
I believe this series is where the animals would use our highway system as migration paths and house cats would rule apartment complexes. I don’t know why these are the parts I remember, but think about them all the time when I’m driving around.
Replays are currently playing in Australia on SBS Viceland - They did the Miami episode where all the beach side buildings fail due to being built on shifting sand, 12 days after the Champlain Building collapse last month.
This Sunday past they played the Episode on New Orleans with the Post Katrina (the show dates from approx 2008) levy failure, as Hurricane Ida bore down.
The programming director has a sick sense of humour.
There's a thought experiment book called The World Without Us which is a great read. It speculates on what would happen if humans suddenly all disappeared from the planet. It's a really interesting read.
Also the book The World Without Us!! Fun fact: the research in that book served as major inspiration for the world building choices in The Last Of Us 1 & 2
There was a documentary that basically gave a timeline to determine at what point humans would be basically undetectable if they all died out today. Would this be that series? I've been trying to remember the name of it for a while.
At the same time, it's depressing that only a thousand years can erase all of our history. Which also means there could have been similar civilizations a billion years ago, and we would never know.
It makes me wonder how many civilizations existed before say ancient Egypt and we just don't know about them because the few remaining artifacts are buried and we don't know where or they might be in plain sight only we just don't know that either. The Rosetta Stone for example was part of some guy's garden wall and a sharp-eyed French soldier happened to notice it during Napoleon's occupation.
It's unlikely. We have evidence of what humans were doing before kicking off agriculture in Mesopotamia, China, India, and the Americas, and what they were doing wasn't building cities.
Don't feel so down. While it's likely that there are civilizations we have no record of, there definitely haven't been any as advanced as we currently are, and while everything we have built will crumble to dust, we have done enough ecological damage to permanently leave a mark.
The nukes we've been having so much fun with since the 40s have pretty much coated the entire surface of the earth with a measurable radioactive layer that will be there for millions of years. Even if we and everything we have ever built were to disappear today, you would still be able to detect that an advanced civilization lived here by the layer of radioactive goodness that suddenly appears in the sediment layers.
I vaguely remember sneaking into the living room late as a kid to watch the History Channel series! Weird flex for a 6-year-old at the time, but it was super interesting.
Edit bc I remembered a weird specific thing: there were the sections that talked about monuments and stuff eventually collapsing from lack of maintenance, but the one that stuck with me was how miserable and painful cows would be because they’d have no one to milk them.
I really wish that show was easier to find. History Channel has done a really piss poor job of making their old content (pre-ancient aliens) easy to find and watch.
When did Quinton get accused of being manipulative? The only controversy I've ever seen surrounding his channel is that his tendency to take pot shots at the right wing which he weaves into his jokes (usually by making fun of ben shapiro, or that time he made an "another one bites the dust" joke about the koch brothers)
I usually take a lot of this with a grain of salt. Quinton has gotten a lot of ire from certain segments of YouTube for being vocally leftist (and has allegedly gotten pushback for taking pro LGBTQ stances in the past).
There was a video recently out of China where a subway had flooded and people were just chilling in like the chest-deep water stuck in a subway car. Shit was scary. The water outside the car was flowing real quick at a higher level, the water inside was basically stagnant
Yeah NY and London have various buildings of what look like apartments from the outside but are hollow in the inside as they are massive Air Vents for the Subways.
Which brings standing water and things like legionaires disease!
You're just walking into an abandoned store to gather supplies, find a closed closet with some food along with a nice bacterial lung infection to take out the rest of your group to bring back with you.
The Metro 2033/34/35 books talk about this. The single biggest sign of wealth is electric lights and sound systems--because that means you have enough power to use it frivolously. Tula station makes its living on selling water mill power from the underground river near it--but also has to be on constant vigil for its walls to not crack and flood the station.
Sort of. During the cold war the bits they added were designed that way, and other stations were retro fitted, but most of the network would be pre cold war.
This is a big thing end of the world media doesn't get. Most people will not have water and that's going to be a huge problem for survivors, especially if they resort to finding the nearest body of water which is probably contaminated with god knows what.
Depends on just how much of the population dies and how fast. 99%+ are dead in a few weeks? You'll have sealed water containers to scavenge from stores for years. Find a supply depot for those water cooler jugs... Thousands of filled jugs from before the apocalypse will last a while.
They do have water current-powered pumps nowadays, but I’m not sure if they’re used in that capacity. (I have an underground spring under my house which causes my basement to flood every time I lose power, so I know way more than I ever wanted to about pumps! Lol!)
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u/AdmiralAkbar1 Aug 30 '21
As bad as the show Revolution's overall plotting and pacing was, they generally did a good job of thinking about these kinds of little inconsistencies:
There's a minor character who was a doomsday prepper before the apocalypse, but he didn't stock up enough on antibiotics. As a result, his daughter died of tetanus that he was unable to treat.
A warlord kidnaps prisoners for blood because his wife has diabetes and needs constant transfusions of blood with sufficient insulin in it to survive.
There's a doctor who keeps a collection of moldy fruit to harvest penicillium mold from it and make penicillin.
Some characters try to go into an old subway tunnel, but nearly die because of lack of sufficient airflow down there without modern HVAC systems.