Famous Disaster

I re-watched Waterworld recently and, I thought about it. It’s widely regarded as a failure of a movie. But is it really so bad? It does some have qualities that appeal. A post apocalyptic world where communities are separated by large bodies of water and dry land is mythical. It’s a vision.

Society and Economics of Post-apocalyptic Settings and Waterworld in Particular

Hollywood movies focus on spectacle and include things for a moment of action or humor, even if it clashes with the setting. But it’s fun to think about the details and imagine the fictional place as if it were real.

Bret Devereaux has a bit about post-apocalyptic societies. Their development would be shaped by the knowledge possessed by survivors. The second time through the Iron Age will be different from the first time around. Not all knowledge will be lost. When people know that gunpowder is in the possibility space, they can go looking for it.

Post-Post-Apocalypse

Waterworld is post-post-apocalyptic. The people have forgotten the world before. No one remembers what was lost. There are no cultures which survived the apocalypse. It’s fun to imagine what could arise in a new world. But what we see is a little implausible.

Waterworld seems to be a world of castaways. People drift by on small craft, passing salvage between them. There’s one atoll, and a whole ship full of Smokers. A farm where a every jar of dirt is highly valued isn’t going to feed anyone.

But What do they Drink?

There’s just not enough to support the raiders and traders. There’s plenty of (giant) fish in the sea, but we scarcely see anywhere making fresh water. How have these post-post-apocalyptic groups stayed around so long? It would all make more sense if everyone had been only a few months at sea and gone varying shades of feral.

Material Culture of Scavengers

Everything must be made or scavenged. And they haven’t come from a culture that is used to making things for themselves, but from a modern consumer culture. In the post-post-apocalypse they’ve learned anew, from a rough start.

What objects survive sea water? Metals rust, wood rots. It’s nasty stuff. Plastic actually resists quite well, I’m told, but it does break down eventually. While the great garbage patches are growing, they mostly contain small bits of debris. Glass would be good as well.

What can’t be retained must be rebuilt. What materials can be replenished? From living things: shells, scales, and bones. Fish leather seems pretty fragile, but sealskins make good clothing and there are surely others. At the poles, perhaps there is ice. Few sources of fuel might remain. Almost all ships would be converted to sails or oars.

What can be recovered? What salvage could survive the drowning, be recovered, and remain useful? What would be worth diving deep, or constructing caissons to excavate? Surely not crayons.

Ecology of a Drowned Earth

What really happened in Waterworld? The opening narration mentions the ice caps melting, but… that isn’t nearly enough water for the amount of flooding we see on screen. The Northern arctic ice is already floating in the ocean, so its melting wouldn’t raise levels much. Antarctic and Greenland ice are mostly on land and would be good for a few feet of rise, at least.

But Waterworld has sunken skyscrapers and a sea level that reaches somewhere near Everest. That’s thousands of feet at least. There’s not that much water on Earth. Was the world bombarded with iceteroids? Did the continents sinks somehow instead?

Blue Planet

Maybe a better approach would be to take the good water world, Blue Planet and just muss it up a bit. That one’s set on an alien planet and has some hard science backing. It also has a diverse variety of alien creatures, uplifted Earth animals, and gene-modified humans.

Less Water

Let’s tone it down a little. According to floodmap, 4000 or more meters of flooding would leave just one point of dry land on Earth (as seems to be the case in Waterworld). If we cut it down to 500 meters, we see many of the most populated parts of the world undersea. The deepest conventional oil platform is around 400m, so one of those could reach what is now dry land.

What does a smaller (but still ludicrously implausible) amount of flooding get us? Well, there’s still some dry land from every continent. Many previously inhabited regions might still be within diving distance. Dry land isn’t mythically rare, and the past isn’t inaccessibly buried.

Ideally, the version of Waterworld in my mind would have very few places in the world with land masses denser than Micronesia, or Polynesia. We know people can survive on those islands (unlike the tiny or artificial atoll in Waterworld), yet the distances between are great and the voyages are epic.

More Time

How fast did the water rise? Possibilities for survival increase if it is a gradual, forseeable process. People can plan ahead, move, build more boats and platforms. On the other hand, this is less of an apocalypse, I suppose. But an apocalypse with no survivors won’t have any “post-”.

If the sea rise is gradual, people will move. Newly built structures, moveable goods, newly cultivated lands

Sea-steading has a history of grand and implausible visions, and little being done. If the water world was coming I think a lot more would be tried, with varying success.

In Waterworld, the Mariner is a mutant. They’re common enough that everyone has heard of them, but rare enough that he’s the only one we see. To make things a little more Blue Planet, we could have genetically modified humans or uplifted animals. Better still, we could see genegineered crops and livestock for aquaculture.

The Sum of These Parts

A watery-earth, with drastically shifted coastlines and much less dry land. Survivng humans in newly re-settled, formerly high-altitude regions or scattered in new islands, travelling in crash-built or re-purposed vehicles, or weathering it all in built seasteads and platforms.