What would you do if you were the last person alive on Earth?
I’m interested by doomsday scenarios, which is why I’ve started watching the BBC’s new series, Survivors, starring Max Beesley.
I liked it. The writers were clearly far more interested in what happens to the survivors of a global catastrophe, rather than the cause and initial effects of the disaster itself, which is why the flu epidemic depicted on screen seemed to wipe out the whole planet in a day.
But I can forgive them that, because I’m more interested in how the survivors would cope too. And a flu pandemic destroying man kind isn’t so unbelievable. After all, the Spanish influenza epidemic killed more people than the First World War and all of us can remember the recent panic over bird flu.
It makes for a great scenario. The world is still intact, but everyone, bar a handful of survivors are dead. What would you do?
In Stoke-on-Trent, the city is divided into six towns: http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/hanley, Fenton, Stoke, Tunstall, Longton, and Burslem. They’ve always been a bit of rivalry between them and its fair to assume that the survivors of each (using the logic applied to Survivor) would become even more tribal. That could see raiding parties from Fenton charging Sainsbury’s in Hanley looking for supplies.
Port Vale and Stoke fans already hate each other. With no police, no laws, no boundaries, could we see pitch battles fought over Vale Park and the Britannia Stadium? Or with no players left alive, maybe the fans would bury the hatchet.
How would religion and race effect the survivors and their ability (or lack of it) to cooperate and rebuild society? Particularly in a place like Stoke-on-Trent, where racial tensions have been inflamed by immigration and the BNP.
The numbers of unburied dead bodies lying around the city would mean disease, rats and carrion. Survivors would have to carry out a mass clean-up of each town, or leave pretty quickly.
There would be plenty of cars to choose from, and you could use a syphon to get petrol from the petrol stations. But, when the mass panic of so many people dying so quickly set in, the D-Road, or A500 and the A50, the two main links out of the city, would have clogged up pretty quickly. Then as they got stuck in traffic, people would have become more ill and died. The infection could have spread from car to car as the last humans curled up and died.
The survivors would likely leave the six towns, on foot, motorbike or cycle, and head for the Staffordshire Moorlands, where there is plenty of good farming land where they could start again, making a living from the land as their ancestors did.
It would be years, centuries even, before there was a ‘Great Britain’. With no government, civilisation would return in pockets. Perhaps, when nature had done its work in cleaning the five towns (after all, human remains are as biodegradable as anything else), perhaps settlers would return. The towns would each develop at a different pace. Competition for survival in the new world would be high, and it is easy to imagine a settlement at Stoke nervously preparing for invasion from a Burslem, jealous of its new natural resources.
As the years went by, trading links would open up. Friendships would develop as transport links were reopened and the paranoia of the early fight to survive began to let up.
Until one day, invaders from Crewe in Cheshire came to conquer….
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