Poll

What do you think the state of things is beyond Scandinavia?

More of the Silent World: Trolls, beasts and giants everywhere
7 (16.7%)
A few groups of humans, but mostly wilderness
14 (33.3%)
USA and other superpowers are relatively intact
0 (0%)
Scorched Earth: nothing, not even grosslings, is alive
0 (0%)
Plenty of places like Scandinavia, but isolated
21 (50%)

Total Members Voted: 37

Voting closed: July 03, 2015, 03:28:37 PM

Author Topic: Survivor communities outside the known world  (Read 257670 times)

Sunflower

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #870 on: October 21, 2015, 02:43:00 AM »
hey, new to the comic & forum so im not sure if this has been said yet but:

i sure hope that there are other surviving communities because the idea that only white people will survive the end of the world is well... terrifying.


im from latin america, and i know cold is a factor (and well you have patagonia, plenty of mountain ranges, half of bolivia, chile, etc..), but so is isolation. And the geography of latin america allows for the existence of many remote communities of campesino and indigenous peoples in areas of very low population density, isolated by mountains, forests, and/or deserts.

My guess also ventures to the thousands of small populated islands in the pacific and southeast asia.

At the risk of re-opening a can of worms, the issue of ethnic/racial diversity in SSSS, and whether it adequately mirrors an increasingly diverse modern Scandinavia, got discussed here:  https://ssssforum.com/index.php?topic=453.0

Warning:  These are complex and emotionally fraught issues at the best of times, so I'm trusting all of you to be mature about them.

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Stefan

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #871 on: October 22, 2015, 02:29:18 PM »
hey, new to the comic & forum so im not sure if this has been said yet but:

i sure hope that there are other surviving communities because the idea that only white people will survive the end of the world is well... terrifying.


im from latin america, and i know cold is a factor (and well you have patagonia, plenty of mountain ranges, half of bolivia, chile, etc..), but so is isolation. And the geography of latin america allows for the existence of many remote communities of campesino and indigenous peoples in areas of very low population density, isolated by mountains, forests, and/or deserts.

My guess also ventures to the thousands of small populated islands in the pacific and southeast asia.

First of all, I want to welcome you on the board Esme.
I am not entirely sure, but I think we covered most if not all possible areas for surviving communities during the first 200-300 post on this thread. At least those who offer protection through cold and isolation. Those included several parts of the Cordilleras(the large mountain range running from Cap Horn in the south to Alaska in the north), and I think also Patagonia. Also included were Madagascar and Japan, since these Nations closed their borders right after Iceland(possibly just a few hours later). There were also several brief discussion in this thread concerning the question if the trolls are susceptible to hot and/or arid climates and what this means for the possibility of survivor communities in the tropical and subtropical zones. Those additional areas include several deserts like the Atacama, Namib and Sahara, but also steppes like the Pampas and Kazakhstan. The tropical forests were excluded because those don't get nearly as hot as the deserts, also because they are probably too humid. Alas since we lack any word from Mina on whether or not Trolls are susceptible to heat these possibilities remain as unfounded guesses.
Anyway if you think you know a possible location for survivors that was missed in this thread let us know. I myself would like to read some new ideas here.

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #872 on: October 24, 2015, 10:02:00 PM »
EDITED: I've concluded that bats must be immune to the Illness, even if nobody has realized it, because otherwise Iceland would be full of shambling goo monsters.  Bats don't breed in Iceland (as far as I can tell), but they do visit regularly from the south.
They need to be able to fly to do that, and Word of God is that the deformations caused by an infection up-end the aerodynamics.
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Jenny Islander

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #873 on: October 24, 2015, 10:19:40 PM »
Ohhhhh.

So basically, if you see a bat in flight, it's prooooobably safe to leave it alone.

(Whole caves full of hibernating bats probably got infected over the winter, and the survivors woke up as meat moss...Poor batties.)

Anyway, thinking about islands got me thinking about oases, which are basically islands of water in a sea of sand.  Being way the heck and gone out there, with permanent water, cropland, and the ability to see everybody and everything headed your way--if they got the news in time, many of the 24 oases of the Sahara might make it.  A lot would depend on how much water was being pulled directly from the underlying aquifer.  Al Kufra, for example, has irrigated fields so big that the crew on the Space Station uses them as an orientation point.  If most of the food produced in this way is being eaten locally, the population may be too big to feed if/when the pumps quit.  Maybe wind power could replace mechanical pumps.

If trolls, beasts, and giants are vulnerable to desiccation and/or extreme environmental heat, then the entire central Sahara could be relatively safe.  Caravans of daring explorers would set out to secure valuable salvage from the infected zones all around or dig for salt.  If they aren't, then there would be a big wall around every oasis town, with cannons mounted on top.  Just in case an elephant showed up one day...

ETA: An army riding in rubber-tired vehicles with futuristic solar power, known affectionately as Camels, are being mustered for the final push to retake Timbuktu as Our Heroes are making camp in the plaza...
« Last Edit: October 24, 2015, 11:17:21 PM by Jenny Islander »
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Mayabird

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #874 on: October 25, 2015, 09:06:09 PM »
I think someone mentioned North Sentinel Island before.  I don't know how realistic it would be since I don't know about what kinds of mammalian life live in the seas around the Andaman Islands and if they would be able to handle the dangerous reefs around, but they could possibly stay isolated during the early stages of infection due to the difficulty of getting to the island and the legendarily inhospitable natives, who shoot first and often.  After that, if they can avoid infection being brought on (maybe with the aid of magical means?), well, they've been happily and healthily mostly isolated for hundreds if not thousands of years, so I'm sure they could continue just fine. 

Jenny Islander

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #875 on: October 29, 2015, 03:33:28 AM »
Here's one I don't think anybody has thought of yet: the Kerguelen Archipelago in the far south of the Indian Ocean.  It has a climate comparable to the Aleutian Islands, which supported sizeable local populations once upon a time.  It also has deposits of low-quality but burnable coal, excellent peat, and volcanic sulfur, lots of guano for saltpeter, and piles and piles of useful scrap metal from past ventures in the islands.  Besides edible native animals and plants, it has tasty and useful introduced animals, such as reindeer (and lots of cats!); if Year 0 was in 2011 or earlier, it would also have hardy sheep and a working greenhouse (both have since been removed).  Many of the local marine mammals never leave the Southern Ocean and the ones that do migrate wouldn't be heading out for months.  This would give the local people time to figure out what to do about sea monsters when they did show up, presuming that they got that information before communications went down. 

Kerguelen is arranged in a loose rhombus with two other subantarctic island groups, the Crozets and Amsterdam-St. Paul, plus heavily populated and much warmer Reunion Island.  The three subantarctic groups support scientific bases and there is also a small French military base on Kerguelen.  I happen to know that a large, well-equipped supply ship makes a regular circuit of just under a month from Reunion to the Crozets to Kerguelen to Amsterdam-St. Paul and back to Reunion again at that time of the year.  This ship can stay at sea for 60 days.  If Madagascar, which has jet flights to Reunion, closes its borders while the ship is in port for refueling, the crew might smell trouble and decide to go pick up everybody early.  This would be more than 100 people.  There would be up to 110 passengers already, mostly scientists headed to the bases to replace outgoing personnel, but also a few tourists, plus up to 50 crew depending on operations; a lot of them might choose to head out, hot-bunking as necessary, because they weren't planning to stay on Reunion that long.  Or they might decide that it's got to be safer out there than on Reunion, which has too many people to feed with local resources, being largely a tourist destination.  In any case, they're at sea when the satellite link goes down and the radio starts to scream.  The captain gets everybody to Kerguelen, as the largest and best supplied base, and then steams around for as long as he can before returning with the news that there's nowhere to go.  For all they know, the 250 or so people on Kerguelen are all that remains of the human race.  Luckily there are 43 women able and willing to bear children, which is just enough to keep inbreeding at bay.  With masses of data about the islands at their fingertips, they begin to plan.

In Year 90, the population has grown to about 650 in several settlements around the islands.  The new settlements are composed of long, narrow houses made entirely from dry-laid local stone and surrounded by networks of high and low stone walls.  The walls are used to create microclimates where hardy vegetables may be grown, keep the wind off tiny plantations of conifers nurtured from the only two trees in the islands during Year 0, and also keep out any stray seal-beasts and sea-lion-beasts.  Luckily these are just as slow and clumsy on land as uninfected pinnipeds.  Between the hunters who shot meat for the scientific base and the personnel at the military base, there were plenty of guns in the early years.  The military established regular patrols, shooting all beached beasts before they could infect anything on land.  They are rare these days and the cats provide plenty of warning if they come ashore.  Sea monsters were a tougher foe, but black-powder cannons are just feasible using local resources, so they also get shot on a regular basis if they approach the shore too closely.  The weather is more of a hazard than beasts these days.

The people live plain but fairly comfortable lives with coal and peat fires heating their new stone homes.  (The original wooden and metal buildings were largely unusable after imported fuel ran out and are used for raw materials, as is the hulk of the cargo ship that rescued so many people.)  They make kayaks and coracles from leather with frames of driftwood or carefully rationed conifer wood, and they dress in penguin skins and wool, sleeping between wool blankets on leather mattresses stuffed with sweet herbs.  Between gardening, hunting, fishing, and livestock, they eat quite well.  They are experimenting with both parchment and quipu (from the Inca Empire, a way of encoding  information using knotted cords--which can be made without killing livestock) to preserve their knowledge before the original books crumble away.  Besides the precious monster-killing cannons and a few muzzle-loaders, they don't have any high-energy technology anymore, but they do remember important things like germ theory and condoms made of animal gut.  They estimate that with care, they can grow their population to just over 2,000 people. 

In Year 90, a ship flying the Malagasy flag heaves to just off the main settlement and begins to signal...
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Róisín

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #876 on: October 29, 2015, 04:12:11 AM »
I like that idea. They would also have fish (if they can manage around the seabeasts), seaweed, a bit of driftwood, lichens for dyes, poisons and medicines (lichens suitable for all those purposes grow there). Also birds in good plenty.

When do you plan on writing these ideas into a fanfic?

Edit: two big advantages I forgot to mention: the kelp forests and Kerguelen Cabbage!
« Last Edit: October 29, 2015, 09:14:40 PM by Róisín »
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Jenny Islander

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #877 on: October 29, 2015, 12:50:17 PM »
I am apparently such a bad fanfic writer that betas never contact me after I send them my stuff and sites that take every fic in a particular fandom won't post mine.  So probably not.

Anyway, I had some thoughts about Madagascar.  On the plus side, they are an island nation with more armed patrol boats and planes than Iceland and they do close their borders early.  On the minus side, they have a much bigger coastline to defend for the number of boats and planes available, they're very close to a thickly populated part of Africa, and from what I can tell there is no defensible and sustainable enclave on the main island.  I think the only way for the Malagasy military to save some people would be to make some brutal choices.  Instead of trying to defend all of Madagascar, they would have to pick an island and shoot everybody who approached, even from Madagascar itself.  Nosy Be, off the northeast coast, looks defensible and small enough to thoroughly inspect and burn as needed.  Best-case scenario, the surviving tourists and residents on Nosy Be build a multi-cultural republic.  When the fuel runs out, they start building iron-clad wooden ships to go and shoot sea monsters.  When enough sea monsters have been shot to make travel relatively safe, they retake other smallish islands, such as the Comoros, Ile Ste.-Marie on the other side of Madagascar, maybe even Zanzibar.  Eventually they turn their thoughts to Reunion and Mauritius and figure, what the heck, as long as we're heading out that far let's check out the old French bases in case they have stuff we can use.  That's when they discover that Kerguelen is clean.
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Róisín

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #878 on: October 29, 2015, 09:17:38 PM »
Why not try fanfic anyway? We have a Scriptorium here in the forum, and there's always Archive of Our Own.
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Jenny Islander

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #879 on: October 29, 2015, 10:41:13 PM »
Thanks for the invitation!

On to Japan: This archipelago is huge and thickly populated, but it has an excellent self-defense force and a lot of defensible and farmable islands and peninsulas.  It also has huge numbers of cats.  I think that at least one group, possibly unaware of other groups doing the same thing elsewhere in Japan, could successfully take and hold a small island or part of one of the large islands.  From there they could launch salvage expeditions into the Silent Land and maybe even retake some of it.

BUT.  Let us not forget the kami kaze, the Divine Wind.  Remember that for many centuries, every time somebody tried to invade Japan, a typhoon came along and put an end to that!  Consider Typhoon Tip, the largest and strongest typhoon ever recorded, which churned along the full length of the Japanese Islands over several days.  This thing was the size of Finnoscandia.  As far as I can tell, Year 0 begins at the tail end of typhoon season in Japan if not later, but wouldn't a massive, out-of-season typhoon with historical religious resonance that just happened to preserve all of Japan from the Rash fit in with Minna's storyline?

Life for the survivors would still be tough.  There would be famines, plagues, unrest, etc., etc.  But by Year 90, ships of the Japan Exploration and Sea Monster Elimination Fleet could be traveling all over the Pacific, burning off and replanting infected islands.  With a much bigger population even after the awful starvation of the first years, more farmland, and all that infrastructure to scavenge, they might be able to maintain even more high-energy technology than the people in the Known World of our protagonists.

ETA: Imagine life as a sea monster spotter on a JAPEX oil platform...
« Last Edit: October 30, 2015, 03:19:07 PM by Jenny Islander »
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Jenny Islander

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #880 on: November 09, 2015, 02:34:03 AM »
Polar bears.  As I posted in the "Other Means of Infection" thread, polar bears rely heavily on seals for food, and seals tend to haul out together, breathing each other's air.  Even if they are of a relatively solitary Arctic species, they tend to use the same breathing holes in the ice.  So polar bears are probably very widely infected. 

Polar bears show up in Iceland now and then--about every other year, according to what I've read.  They generally arrive aboard icebergs from Greenland.  There are a lot of fjords along the west coast of Greenland where an iceberg might approach closely enough in foul weather to let anything riding it slip into the water and make for shore.  And yet, Iceland apparently has never had an outbreak of the Rash.

There are several possible explanations for this.  One is that maybe the behavior of a polar-bear-beast changes to "wander around somewhat randomly and kill whatever is near," so that the complex behavior of traveling over sea ice to look for seals stops happening.  Maybe polar bears never got infected in the Greenland area because their prey populations didn't get infected--or haven't been infected yet. 

Or maybe the Greenlanders are still alive and kicking and shoot any infected animal they see.  How would the Icelanders know?  Their map ends well short of the Greenland coast.

I imagine that southern Greenland, where global climate change has made it possible to grow vegetable gardens and keep some livestock, would be the clean zone.  The far north would be extremely dangerous because people would have to rely entirely on the sea for food.  Reindeer herding and sheep herding could be carried on as they are today in the south, from Isortoq on the east coast around past Nanortalik in the furthest south and perhaps as far as Nuuk on the west coast.  In the Qinngua Valley they would be practicing a little forestry, coaxing the native birch and willow forest to grow as tall as possible to provide the frames for their leather boats.  They would have lost nearly all of their high-energy technology, but have kept a lot of passive solar going--gathering in as much heat as possible with dark surfaces, recycled glass, and such.  For fuel, they would mine deposits of low-quality coal that were not worth working commercially in the old days; but this coal would go mostly to forges and glassworks besides heating homes.  The one piece of high-energy technology they must have held onto would be firearms.  Cats would have a tough life in the killing cold of Greenland; except in the short summertime, their job would be guarding homes and barns, where they could stay warm.  Highly trained hunters, shamans preferably, would go out in pairs to scout for any beasts that might have migrated from North America or the Atlantic Ocean.  This would be a follow-up campaign to a wholesale killing of every wild animal that acted sick back in Year 0.  Although criticized as overkill back then, this campaign was the saving of Greenland, and possibly, although they had no way to know this, of Iceland as well.  By Year 90, ordinary beasts would be rare.  Whale-beasts would be extremely rare and targeted by exploding harpoons as soon as they were spotted.  As a result, it would be possible for the Inuit of Greenland to hunt and fish for food in the old way, if they were very careful and never went anywhere alone. 

Population: about 30,000--descendants of those who were not in the northern settlements that went under, or starved in the first years after the Rash, or dead of the flu ditto.  Population pressure is increasing; recolonizing some of the islands off Newfoundland or Labrador is currently on the table.
« Last Edit: November 09, 2015, 02:43:10 AM by Jenny Islander »
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Laufey

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #881 on: November 09, 2015, 02:58:02 AM »
On polar bear beasts, things that would hinder them making their way to Iceland:

- Sunlight. Beasts have a weakness to it, and an iceberg in the middle of the sea provides very little shade.
- Weather in general. North Atlantic has severe storms, especially during the winter season, they might not exactly kill a beast but they would sweep it off a piece of ice easily.
- Water. Minna has at least suggested that water protects people from non-aquatic beasts. I'm going by the Finnish lake system apparently providing enough protection even though the lakes there are comparatively small, narrow at places and shallow (polar bears swim well but so do brown bears and moose and many other animals found in Finland).
- Icelanders. My guess is that the coast is much more heavily patrolled in Y90 just to make sure nothing like this ever happens, plus Minna did mark on one map that the whole coastline of Iceland is off limits to non-immune people.
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Róisín

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #882 on: November 09, 2015, 05:16:47 AM »
Jenny: a plus for Greenland: in our time, Greenland was losing its ice cover, just as it did before that little ice age in the Middle Ages, when it froze up again. At present the ice has cleared enough to permit archeologists to investigate some of the ruins that have been buried for hundreds of years. And the ice is still melting. The ice sheets are dumping a new load of ground rock as they melt, so soil fertility could be restored to the polnt where barley could be grown as it was by early settlers. Certainly a possibility!
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Jenny Islander

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #883 on: November 09, 2015, 06:24:38 PM »
Ooh, didn't notice that the shading along the Iceland coast means something.  Very sensible.

Regarding Greenland melting: From what I've read, if humanity simply vanished right this second, global warming would slow, but continue, leveling out after several centuries.  Then the Earth would slowly cool again over another few centuries, after which there would probably be another glacial period.
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Fauna

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Re: Survivor communities outside the known world
« Reply #884 on: November 09, 2015, 08:00:53 PM »
Anybody mentioned mountain ranges yet? Those could certainly house survivor communities - the Alps, Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateu, Maybe the Altai, the Taurus Mountains, definitely the Andes.. maybe more I don't know about.

It would be a harsh life for sure, with major survivor communities probably being confined to the cold of the glaciers and the very highest altitudes. But it would be possible - such places have very little in the way of vermin, it's still possible to keep some hardy types of livestock, and such places are very scarcely populated, thus limiting the Rash. That adds possible communities to South America at least, despite its southern altitude.