Fridays tend to be boring days on the BBS for some reason, so here's something... maybe this will turn into an interesting thread...
I don't know how this came up, but a friend and I started talking about this bizarre rhetorical situation.
It's like this...
The alarm clock goes off tomorrow morning. You wake up, get showered, changed, chug a coffee and head out the door on your way to work. But something's off... there's no traffic.
The street lights are working, electricity is running and everything appears to be functioning as normal. As well, birds are flying and dogs are barking. But you don't encounter a single human being tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or the day after that. You have no idea why, but everybody's gone and they don't appear to be coming back. Ever.
So that's the scenario, and it raises a bunch of interesting questions.
What do you imagine you'd do tomorrow? Would you head down to the Porsche dealership and go nuts in a traffic-less city? Break into the music store and shred on the vintage Les Pauls? Back a Humvee into the front of the local video store and drive away with a year's supply of porn? Make your way to a military base and jump in a tank, fire off some rockets, shoot some guns? I mean, who is going to stop you?
It goes without saying that you'd probably be pretty freaked out by the whole thing. Eventually though, you'd just have to settle into it... to come to terms with it, and go about surviving.
But how long would the world's city's basic infrastructures such as electricity and clean water function without being maintained by people? Would the food in people's houses and grocery stores rot such that everywhere became overrun by rats? With the lack of people, would wildlife begin to encroach on and eventually overrun the cities?
Would you go looking for other people? You could drive across the continent, exchanging cars as you went. Exploring anything you wanted. It's not outside the realm of possibility that you could, if you really wanted, learn how to pilot a 747 and fly it to Europe, or Australia or anywhere with a large enough runway. Even if it took you two years at your flight school's simulator to teach yourself, you have the time. Or you could take a boat instead.
Would you make it your entire life's quest to try and find other people? Do you think you'd eventually give up?
Maybe you'd resign yourself to living simply. Setting up your life in a nice area, and spending your days painting and gardenning.
Do you think, on a physical level, that basic existence would become miserable as everything around you started to decay? Would you drift into insanity? Would the loneliness eventually drive you to suicide? How long until then, do you think?
