Executive summary:

By June 2010, scentists are remarking on the puzzling lack of worlwide rainfall, which seems to have fallen fof the charts. Stories buried on page 17 of the mainstream media outlooks. still very much preocuupied with soon-to-be-totally-meaningles economic and global-political hijinks.

Three moths later, the situation is increasingly hard to ignore. 75% of all staple crops, grains and lifestock have died across the globe. A cause is identified: A mutant organic polymer that is a bastard spawn of mutated plankton, decades of synthetic toxins into the ocean, several massive oil spills that occurred in rapid and bewildering succession. Somehow from this hellbroath emerges a self-organizing, self-replecating complex of organic and petrolium molecules. They "reporduce," so to speak, by their electomagnetic attraction and repulsion signatures, which compell similar biomolecules in the area to adopt the same stucture. Borg-like, it speads at a parabolic speed, covering the entire earth's oceanic area within 1500 miles of any coastline. The scrim is invisiable, oxygen permiable, seveal naonometes thick...but allows no evapoation, and hence no rain. Without oceanic evaporation, no rainclouds can make it to landfall from the still-uncovered bluewater zones deep in the atlantic and pacific. The upshot is that 98% of man's rainfall and fresh water supplies have vanished in a matter of monts. Military efforts such as bombing the surface water with "daisy cutters" and the like to disrupt the micron-level membraine prove ineffectual; as soon as the dust settles, the molecular covering moves out to repair he breeaches within an hour or two.

After 6 months of this, society is barely recognizable. All rives and streams are bone-dry. Trees have mosty collapsed or burned, but a few twised, charcoaled stumps point mutely upwards. Landscapes everywhere are sandy and dune-like, totally leached of all water. A few hardy cactai and lichen are the last forms of life to hang on.

Humans are starting to panic. Tinderbox-dry cities burn and burn and burn. Many head on a kind of doomed, quixotic journey to the nearest coasts, where rumor of emergency desalianation plants seems the only vialble solutuin. The millions and millions of human scarecrows that show up at the beach find only sad reflections of themselves in the millions who arrieved earlier. Squablles, rapes and orgies, murder, and even cannibalism become common among the incereasingly panicked migrants. They attack two or three deepwater desalianation rigs discreetly parked a distance from the beach. The "winners" gut the place and then realize they don't have the tech skill to make it happen. In the end, a massive beach cannibalism run is the last gasp of humanity. Eventually the few straggliong survivors of the community dirft off, unable to cohere in any way.

After billions die, a few shellshocked survivors hand on, with thieir tins of food and ancient photos of an impossibly distant "sane" world to save them. Profoundly psychologucally shattered, the general tone of the micro-scocieties of survivors is to sink into a kind of perpetual feaver-dream, full of mystica incantations, visiions of Boschian imagry of pure medieval hysteria and raptue, and grotesquely inapproprite group sensuality. Petty scuffles, murders, and cannibalism take place frequently as the last sources of canned and human meat become harder to come from. Rape becomes nothing more than a way to cement bonds of dubious connectivity and pass the endless days. Those who aren't killed by each other expire of dehydration and starvation with death rattals amid an unfogeiving, moistureless duneworld. Little morned, quicky forgotten, humanity croaks.



[edit on 5/12/10 by silent thunder]

I'm probably bit dumb. Please explain "A mutant organic polymer that is a bastard spawn of mutated plankton ..." statement. What's going on? I'm all for doom'n'gloom but I want to know exact mechanism of my decline.

Originally posted by zeddissad
I'm probably bit dumb. Please explain "A mutant organic polymer that is a bastard spawn of mutated plankton ..." statement. What's going on? I'm all for doom'n'gloom but I want to know exact mechanism of my decline.

Don't worry. I'm sure in this hypothetical scenario you're probably the equivalent to a prison bitch, wasting your life away in the strong grip of a dude named Manny.

Originally posted by zeddissad
I'm probably bit dumb. Please explain "A mutant organic polymer that is a bastard spawn of mutated plankton ..." statement. What's going on? I'm all for doom'n'gloom but I want to know exact mechanism of my decline.

Well, polymers are organic moleules and plankton are simple organic molecules. Since the evolutuonary pressures on both (yes, evolutiuon can impact even non-living polymers) are enormous, structural changes take place over time. Suppose a special, mutant plankton (one of many hundreds of billions) managed to swallow or integrate inside itself a coincidentally congruant polymer that meshed with the higher living creatire's biochemestry to make it more robust, hartier, enhance the chance of its breeding, and pass on its own polymer structure to the offspring. With their superiorty they would radpidly crowd out the more conventional protein, and the superprotien would expand even further in the absence of competion. After death, their corpses and and excretions would quickly fill the ocean with replications of their polymer savior. Just conjecture, mind you. Plus adding to the general hellstew, you have runnoffs containing all sorts of chemicals, drugs, fertilizers, and whatnot, which could serependipitiously speed up the procees or add their own two bits to the emerging self-reproducing polymer-enhanced superplankton.


[edit on 5/12/10 by silent thunder]

I don't know, this all seems quite a bit far-fetched to me. We haven't been able to do any real harm to the environment yet and there certainly has been quite a frightening brew of chemicals and pollutants mixed into the ecosystem. This planet's rather resiliant.

Also, it's been my understanding that a global drought would be all but impossible, because precipitation has to fall somewhere on the planet. If you aren't getting it in one area it's because it is falling in an equal amount elsewhere. It doesn't just disappear into thin air, it comes from the ecosystem and is redistributed in full.

Originally posted by Replicator EYD
I don't know, this all seems quite a bit far-fetched to me. We haven't been able to do any real harm to the environment yet and there certainly has been quite a frightening brew of chemicals and pollutants mixed into the ecosystem. This planet's rather resiliant.

Also, it's been my understanding that a global drought would be all but impossible, because precipitation has to fall somewhere on the planet. If you aren't getting it in one area it's because it is falling in an equal amount elsewhere. It doesn't just disappear into thin air, it comes from the ecosystem and is redistributed in full.

If an invisable, single-molecule-layer, oxygen-permeable polymer coating could cover all coastal areas out to 100 miles, rainclouds would develop in the deep-ocean areas but fall at sea (over the polymerized coastal portions) before the rainclouds made landfall and could moisten the parched earth. Desertification on a global scale would happen in less than a year. Fires would probably destroy every city, forest, and community with wood quite quickly.