If The Beatles are indeed right and ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’, then nuclear war must be a slumber party with a full squad of sex-addicted cheerleaders. Thanks to the Cold War, mankind has a lot of nuclear weapons. Not just a lot of nuclear weapons, but a shitload of nuclear weapons. We have enough bombs and missiles to turn the sun into an inter-dimensional wormhole to unleash Yog-Sothoth and it’s basically inevitable this will happen, the first punch thrown when we elect George Bush III and he goes postal on Belgium.

And just what happens if Chuck Norris can’t roundhouse kick their entire retaliatory response from orbit and a few dozen warheads actually explode? Or if some other world-ending event happens to occur? Well, if you watch post-apocalyptic movies, you might fancy yourself some kind of a survival expert, a real John Connor or Bear Grylls even. But you’d be wrong, because all of those movies are loaded with pop culture, common consensus that in reality is nothing but fabrication.

Or as the great Confucius once said, “that’s bullshit, sucka”.

Here’s ten movie myths about the Apocalypse…

 

#10 – Fuel

In nearly all post-apocalyptic movies, the stuff that makes things go is valuable. I’m talking about gasoline, petrol, fuel. This is true in The Road (2009), the Mad Max series (1979, 1981, & 1985), Waterworld (1995), and more. Gas is the new currency. He who controls the fuel, controls the universe.

Here’s a common scene – Our itinerant hero wanders the wasted highways of the blasted earth, searching for the scraps necessary to survive. He comes across the scenes of an ancient road battle with overturned, rusted cars amid the windswept carnage. Said hero wisely checks each car for gas, squeezing out the last few drops into his jerry can. Eureka, the Road Warrior has a few pints of petrol that will get his GTO zooming down the asphalt once again!

Stop right there.

Here’s the big problem with all of these scenarios. The fuel that powers your car has a shelf life, an expiry date. Its not the gasoline itself that will go bad. Pure disilate or crude is stable. Its all of the additives put into the fuel that will ruin it – the stuff that is chemically engineered to make the gas as efficient as possible (i.e. making it volatile for best burning) degrades only after a few months. To make matters even worse, any exposure to oxygen will cause these additives to deconstruct into varnish after about 6 months, which surprisingly isn’t great for an internal combustion engine.

That’s why if you store your car for a year or more, you need to drain the tank … else you won’t be starting your car. Anything pulled from those cars is basically tree sap … and those cars would be undrivable until that bad fuel is flushed out of the system.

So the idea of a civilization that has lasted far beyond the Doomsday Event scraping together that last few†milliliters†of gasoline is as fake as a Hollywood Hooters. Unless those survivors start manufacturing their own fuel, gasoline is going to be worthless after a few years in any quantity.

But The Road Warrior isn’t as exciting with a bunch of crazies chasing Mel in a peloton of 10-speeds. Or … is it?

#9 – Religion

Another notion of the fractured, post-futuristic human society is that we will inevitably turn to religion en masse for our emotional well being. And not the hot chocolate & Christmas Carols type of religion, but that olde tyme religion of brimstone, hell, damnation, and Dick Cheney. Overnight, we’ll all become Salem witch hunters again.

Sounds fun!

Well, historical events actually might lead us in another direction all together. During WWI, when man’s insatiable blood thirst encountered for the first time modern weaponry (i.e. machine guns, mustard gas, Gary Busey, etc), and then during WWII, which displayed the very worst of leaders and their foot soldiers with the collision of the -ism’s, there was a profound sociological effect on Europe as it struggled to come to some type of understanding as to what just the Hell happened.

It was a complete rewrite of the religious demographic across all of the countries that saw the very worst of the war. Go read some of the poetry from that era – a stark contrast to the eternal optimism in man’s future from the Age of Enlightenment. Okay, then, don’t read the poetry – but take my word for it.

In 1900, the percentage of Atheists in Europe was only 0.4%. After the wars, that same number jumped up to 21.3%. Look at areas where the fighting was among the worst: Currently in Germany, only 47% of people believe in a God (Rammstein?). In France, a mere 34% believe in God (and France was a country so desperate to be more religious at one time, they actually invented their own pope).

Damn Frenchies. Jesus is gonna be so pissed when he hears about this …

The idea that people will flock to religion as a means of hope in the post-modernist world is perhaps naive. Yeah, the crazies will worship re-discovered DVDs of Carrot Top, but the rest of mankind is just as likely to not believe in anything.

I know what you’re thinking … Carrot Top has DVDs?

 

#8 – Sanctuary

Utopia. Eden. Shangra-la. Or as I like to call it … Tir Asleen. In most movies, sanctuary has something to do with water … either the coast such as Book of Eli (2010) or The Road or an island in Children of Men (2006) or Waterworld and sometimes even at a fun park, Zombieland (2009). Yes, the world around us right here, right now, sucks ass … but somewhere not too far from here is a veritable wonderland of awesomeness.

Its an easy way to give the plot and story some movement by giving the heroes a quest. But …

Funny thing about radiation. It doesn’t sit in one place like an obedient dog. It spreads with the wind and infects everything. Obviously, ground zero is going to be super irradiated and produce 75 foot tall man-eating ants, but the rest of the world is kinda screwed, too.

And this is because in nuclear explosions, radioactive material is thrown up into the stratosphere and it could take weeks, months, and even years for it to settle back down to earth. Which means that entire time it is riding the winds, waiting like a postuous ulcer to f**k somebody’s day.

Whatever a post nuclear world looks like … its a fate that we’re all going to share no matter where we live. Except for the moon base, of course. They’re safe … until the aliens come.

 

#7 – The Wasteland

Part and parcel with #8 above is how an ass load of atomic weapons is going to affect our planet. And the popular consensus is that nuclear war is going to 1) evaporate all of the water and 2) make it really hot. Again … movie myth … not science. And there’s probably good reasons for this. First, the most famous post apocalypse movies (Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Beyond Thunderdome) were set in Australia. I live here and I can assure you that its hot and barren for most of the year.

Those images though were probably indelibly printed in the minds and expectations of movie audiences and, quite frankly, it fits a neat political agenda against global warming. The suits probably love it because shooting in Southern California is much easier than in … say … northern Finland.

Most theorists believe that the huge amounts of ash from flammable targets (such as cities) and earth will be thrown up into the atmosphere that it will block out the sun’s rays and lead the exact opposite of the parched wasteland above. Nuclear winter. It is the same concept for what theoretically happened to the dinosaurs. A huge meteor hit, throwing up billions of tons of earth into the atmosphere and it immediately started an Ice Age.

Thankfully, this time around, Ray Romano won’t be voicing acting.

 

#6 – Food

Everyone stocks their bomb shelters, extremist camps, and cult lairs with canned goods. Because they last a long time. And quite honestly, frank and beans is a meal I could eat everyday for the rest of my life. Mmm hmm. But do they last long enough to provide a reliable food source for post-apocalyptic survivors years into the future?

The answer is a bit complicated. It varies. If you walk down into a food cellar after fighting a cannibal mutant with a chainsaw to claim your prize, there are three types of things you should consider. First, the jars of pickled items are normally peak for a year. So avoid the home-canned goods. Second, find the high-acidic foods – such as tomatoes – they pass their best quality after 2 years. Finally, low-acidic food – such as meat – are supposedly peak flavor and safety up to 5 years.

Bingo! Now consider this – if the ash cloud filling our skies actually does precipitate a nuclear winter then the risk of food spoiling goes down considerably. We’ll basically be living in a walk-in freezer. The cold will reduce the numbers of other scavengers (insects, rats, Kardashians), leaving the prime pickings for the human wielding a Swiss army knife.

And when you consider that a nuclear war will drastically reduce the human population (50+% live in urban areas) combined with the over production of food (half of the food produced in the USA is not even eaten), there is a distinct possibility that the post-apocalyptic world will be a veritable smorgasbord of delights.

So the idea of people fighting with spiked cricket bats over a can of SPAM might not be so accurate. Rather, in our distress over lack of basic television programming, we might all turn to food to numb our emotional pain and end up a bunch of surviving lard asses.

But while we’re here. What … about .. the … twinkie?

Unfortunately, the common understanding that Twinkies will last years and years and years … is actually folklore and urban myth. Their shelf life in the grocery store is a mere 25 days. They do last much longer than that because Twinkies are not made with any dairy products, but from my research all of the sugar and fat in a Twinkie eventually congeals together into something more like brittle hard candy. Ew.

If you’re struggling with a sweet tooth, your best bet is honey. Apparently, that shit never goes bad.

 

#5 – Survivors

Let me first say that jumping into a refrigerator at ground zero will 1) result in incineration, 2) will not freakishly be thrown 6 miles clear of the devastation while all other debris is consumed in the mushroom cloud, 3) old refrigerators did not have an internal release lever so said moron would be trapped, 4) getting out of the fridge would be stepping into a wave of super-heated air that would vaporize your lungs, 5) looking at the nuclear bomb would blind you, and 6) you’d still be bombarded with lethal doses of radiation. Fuck you, George Lucas.

Ahem.

The movie myth about the survivors is that they will wander as lone individuals (“Mad” Max Rockatansky), gather into ravenous criminal gangs (The Humungus et al), or turtle around essential resources (Pappagallo). This model is replicated in other post-apocalypse movies, such as the Postman, Waterworld, and others.

The basic split seems to be at best 50/50 cowardly hiders vs. motorcycle gangs. In some cases, its more like 30/70 in favor of the crazies.

But I disagree with this sociological construct. Consider a natural ecology. The losers in white hiding behind a wall of ruined cars are the herbivores and the bikies are the wolves. The happy-happy commune can support a much larger population because they are farming, mining, refining, or whatever is their base industry. They also gain the advantage because any neutral aligned person in the area will trade basic commodities with them.

The bandits on the other hand must prey upon the weak and like wolves must cover a huge territory. There is a finite amount of prey that they can cull before starving themselves out. That model does not support a large population, but rather a hardy, small group of hunters. For instance (in movie terms), if a pack of wolves finds a den of rabbits, they would spend weeks circling, making threats, shooting their wolf guns in the air, before any pay-off.

This means that they are wasting huge resources in this display of strength and … at the same time … not eating. If they do manage to get in there, they’ll quickly exhaust the reserves of the rabbit den. Without their own level of knowledge to sustain that resource, they’re screwed.

And the other thing that modern world has shown us … people with resources or money are not afraid to be ruthless to protect it. †So a more accurate guess is that these communes would grow quickly as more and more stragglers find safety AND they would boast a professional fighting force against a necessarily smaller, but opportunistic niche of bandits.

 

#4 – The Cockroach

Will the world be overrun by cockroaches with the Big Boom? They certainly have several evolutionary advantages – such as the ability to quickly mutate and adapt with their fast breeding cycle including resistances to poison, the ability to survive without food for over a month, and even survive underwater for up to 30 minutes.

Surprisingly, one study showed that cockroaches are communal and team-oriented. They congregate together to share resources and labor. Even more importantly, roaches can withstand radiation levels up to x15 more potent than a human. Yet they’re not even the most potent insect when it comes to shrugging off atomic mojo. There is a type of wasp that can sustain more than 150 times the dose of a human.

And by undying wasp I of course mean any of the hoes from†Real Housewives.

Yet the big challenge to the wasp, the cockroach, and their insect cousins is not so much radiation or food. Afterall, the streets will be littered with a buffet of human carcasses. What’d I say?

No, their real challenge would be the cold.†Insects are unable to produce heat metabolically. And most of their survival techniques involve skirting around freezing weather – migration, freeze tolerance (waiting for the sun), or freeze avoidance (habitat & supercooling). That means that whatever insects do manage to survive will likely live as closely knit parasites on human culture, requiring the heat humans also need to survive.

Without us, surprisingly, the insect outlook is grim. And for us, they provide a renewable source of protein. Again, what did I say? What?

 

#3 – Sports Equipment

Huge explosion. Packs of wasteland survivors form into gangs. And these gangs equip themselves with … sports equipment? As seen above from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior†(1981), our Aussie, mohawk villain is wearing a black set of gridiron pads and, apparently, in immaculate condition. Where did he get them? Or the other 50 guys in the caravan of muscle car henchmen?

Of course, he added extra pieces of flare here and there, because what says†cannibalistic†rapist more than a coif of bird feathers. Or the accessorized wrist crossbow? Divine.

The likelihood that the outlaws, bandits, and soccer hooligans will adorn themselves in scavenged sporting equipment is wildly unlikely. After all, how many .50 caliber rounds do you think a pair of shoulder pads could stop?

And while we’re on the subject – how about the guy wearing the hockey mask? Not just a hockey mask but one fabricated from steel. †Can you imagine the Humongous’ ire when his lackeys come back with the Jason Vorhoos replica: “Dammnit. I wanted the Brodeur mask! Now no one is going to take me seriously.”

Why the mask at all? To cover his disfigurement or radiation burns? Did he look at the motley assortment of butt uglies forming his crew? Just be yourself and they will love you no matter what you look like. If that doesn’t work, chain them behind your battle wagon and drag them for a few miles.

 

#2 – Ecological Gap

With humans largely wiped out and no longer the globally dominant species (for whatever reason), it apparently opens up the food chain for a new dictator. Movies have made several postulations as to what that new supreme, apex predator might look like, including talking apes, talking frogs (see above), giant radiation-breathing dinosaur-dragons†(including normal dinosaurs and normal dragons), zombies, zoo animals, mindless vampires, cyborgs, evil robots, scientologists, Cthulhu monsters, and most scary THIS THING.

And this is assuming that most other types of aliens politely decide to leave us alone, such as the Xenomorphs, Predators, and ETs. Whatever it is, movie-land is certain that the earth cannot end up a barren, desolate wasteland largely uninhabited with only a few lingering candlelights of civilization on the brink of disappearing.

Nope.

Mutant turtles will learn kung-fu and ally with horse-riding monkeys!

We’ve already covered that the planet will be an irradiated, deep freezer of well defended cities of sporting good aethesists. What will be our primary challenge?

All of the above. †And I pray to Moses that I survive the Holocaust just so I can charge into war with a spear gun and scream out: “Long live the New Flesh!”

#1 – Mutants

Finally, and this is a big one, human beings will mutate because of the radiation cutting through our genetic code like an Asian woman in traffic. The careful helix concoction will splice into new strands and inevitably create … super powers!

Homo Superior.

This is a common theme in most movies and has been since the 1950s when the Western World had their panties in a bunch worrying about the Red Army rather than trying to assassinate Chubby Checker. Exhibit A: the X-Men. While I’d love to have superpowers as much as anyone (ability to see through women’s clothing would be near the top of the list), again this is fictional wishful thinking.

Problem with radiation is that while it does cut through genetic code, it doesn’t reattach them somewhere else, making new links. Or whatever. (I’m not a doctor, I just read wikipedia)

Rather, getting hit with a dose of radiation does not enable you project your inner anger into a half-ton, green monster but rather makes you look like this. Radiation sickness is a very slow and very painful way to die.

And honestly that’s how 99% of us (and the cock roaches) would end up should the entire nuclear arsenal explode. Problem with humans is that we breed slowly and have exceptionally long lifespans. Our rate of mutation would NEVER keep up with ecological or nuclear disasters.

That is unless …

There are already mutants among us (or the latent mutant gene) and its just waiting for a surge of 1,000,000 rads to unleash its awesome potential. You know what, I was wrong. Long live the mutants!

(Please let me have the gene, please let me have the gene, please let me have the gene)

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