Plausible Original Concept For High-Fidelity Apocalypse?
Some of you have commented here: "How Do I Supplement Oxygen Intake?." I mentioned confidentiality, but that is no longer going to be a concern. We just want to do this right.
The original concept for the show was 'Bombs dropped for some reason' and the story was a mess, so I was brought on to fix it. Only a small piece of that proposal is introduced in the above-mentioned thread, but that small piece was broken enough for me to take the entire idea off the shelf.
So I turn to you guys. I want something possible (almost LIKELY) enough to be scary. And I don't want something cliche. It is a tall order, I know. Feel free to science the crap out of this, since no amount of detail is unacceptable. Only chains of coincidence and implausibility are ruled out.
WHAT IS ALREADY WRITTEN IN: Mankind is mostly exterminated, big cities become uninhabitable, and food/clean water is hard to come by so that violent theft of food and even cannibalism occur. Funded by a French-German tech-and-pharms company, important world figures are evacuated to an underground shelter in Moab, UT to ride out the disaster. Meanwhile, the people above ground are either killed or contaminated (by some means). The healthy survivors to prioritize the 'fidelity' of the bloodline, as if breeding with the 'contaminated' can lead to the final extinction of the human race (Something incurable and potentially fatal, and likely to be passed down as a dominant genetic trait?). The layman needs to be able to survive the climate outside, but it should be haaaaard.
POSSIBILITIES: Biological warfare, manual climate adjustments, humans vs Earth, etc... are all on the table. Straight-up 'bombs drop' is overdone and Zombies are unacceptable. I would also try to rule out aliens, GMO conspiracies, and specific political leaders.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/64407. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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So I think a two prong attack.
First prong is to remove all the defenses, and an easy way to do that is with EMP's. Launch nukes on SCUDS from container ships 25 miles up over the continents and set them off. No radiation, no one dies right away (for a few minutes until the planes fall out of the sky). But civilization is effectively over.
If some multinational had an idea that it was going to happen (or maybe the CEO has read One Second After by William R. Forstchen and is now a paranoid person), and they have shielded hangers to store aircraft, which they then generously agree to use to evacuate people they see fit. They see it as their way of shaping the future.
Across the globe there is mass hysteria and a breakdown of civilization as everyone goes back to the middle ages, except that now there are to many people and no infrastructure to move things from one place to another.
In a few months a third of humanity is dead, there is no sanitation, disease runs rampant, and thousands of people are roaming from place to place to try to find what they need to survive. And then the second prong hits, when bio weapons are released and something airborne and deadly begins to spread. The ones that don't die from it become carriers as the disease lies low until it is triggered by stress caused by too many people in one area, and one of it's reservoirs within the body are the reproductive cells. This also renders them sterile.
Now 80% of humanity is either dead or infected, and so finding the healthy ones and keeping them healthy so they can reproduce is pretty important.
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