In the novels Flood and Ark Stephen Baxter describes a natural disaster that leads to the complete inundation of the earth by a massive flood. This flood is not a global warming horror story, but a completely new disaster in which oceans of water leak out of fault lines in the earth’s crust, submerging the continents and ultimately all land on earth. The first novel ends with a gathering at the peak of Everest, as it finally sinks below the waves. Ultimately the new oceans stop about 7 or 8 km above the old sea level, and the earth has officially become a water world. I reviewed the first of these novels here.
The survivors of this flood are mostly trapped on rafts and boats, bereft of any natural resources that might enable them to retain a civilized existence, and over the generations of the flood these survivors slowly change to a new and more primitive form of humanity, eking a subsistence existence from the sea and slowly forgetting all that they had been. The only remnants of civilization are a few arks, which Baxter envisages maintaining some semblance of the pre-flood societies. We only see three such arks in the novels: a replica of the Queen Mary cruise liner, an inter-stellar colony ship, and a deep-sea arcology.
I think that these arks Baxter envisaged are interesting, and the deep-sea arcology essential to continuing survival of the human species, at least in the short term, but I think there would be other, better ways of surviving such a catastrophe, and the world that resulted from human efforts to survive would make an excellent setting for a post-apocalyptic water world campaign, perhaps played with d20 modern or some version of Stars Without Number. Particularly, I imagine that the post-flood world would be dotted with what I think of as pelagic kingdoms, remnants of pre-flood societies that had taken to arcologies floating on the ocean, but linked to deep-sea arcologies that serve as industrial and resource extraction centres. The effort of building these arcologies in the two generations over which the flood submerged the land would mean that they were tiny compared to their pre-flood societies, and many people in attempting to escape the flood would make their own societies – on rafts and ships and old oil rigs and all manner of makeshift homes – and in the eras after the flood these societies would slowly drift across the globe, creating whole new settings and strange encounters. Furthermore, the strange weather and new ecologies of a submerged earth, and unexpected remnants of the old world, would create mysterious and intriguing adventure scenarios and settings. In the next few posts I will describe what I think would be some of the more interesting elements of this world, but starting today I will describe the main remnants of modern civilization in the post-flood world: the Pelagic Kingdoms.
Pelagic Kingdoms
These central kingdoms of the flooded earth would be the lynchpins of human survival in the post-apocalyptic world, because they would have solved the three problems that inevitably beset any attempt to create a sustainable human society in a world without land. These three problems are access to natural resources, energy, and diversity of food supply. In Baxter’s novels human society fails to solve these problems fully, instead fleeing to a new world where they can find the resources they need or settling into a remnant city on the sea floor, where they can survive but never prosper.
I think that in the era leading up to the flood the biggest societies on earth would solve these problems, though the pressing time scale and the challenges of adaptation mean they would not do it well and only a tiny percentage of their population would escape the flood into these official post-flood kingdoms. To rescue one’s society in such an era of social, economic and ecological collapse, with rapidly diminishing physical territory and resources, would only be possible for the largest, wealthiest and technologically advanced societies. This is because to do so they would need to simultaneously create floating arcologies and a functioning deep-sea city, capable of existing permanently at 4-6 km beneath the surface, but able to extract resources from the sea bed and ship them to the surface to exchange for food with the arcologies. The result of this would be the new, pelagic kingdoms of the US, Europe and China/India – kingdoms composed not so much of physical territory as of a large number of scattered, floating islands orbiting just one or two seabed mining communities.
The Arcologies of the Pelagic Kingdoms
As society realized that the flood was going to consume the earth, they would move to desperate measures. Old ships would be turned into floating apartment blocks and set free to drift, dependent on the diminishing land for food and increasingly needing to grow their own in rooftop gardens or fish for their sustenance; some of these arcologies would be set up as research centres or industrial towns, to continue producing the needs of a rapidly shrinking population base. As the situation became more desperate, governments would realize the need to build specialized arcologies rather than converting ships – with increasing numbers of their own internally displaced populations needing to be accommodated in a shrinking territory, they would realize that they needed to start building land on top of the sea. Thus would begin the project of building real arcologies, purpose-designed to float like oil rigs but cover the area of small towns. Whatever size technology enabled, they would begin to build, far enough away from the encroaching flood to be completed in time to rise with the sea waters when they came. These arcologies would be designed to be at least partially self-contained, proof against storms and the ocean salt but containing in their centre at least some small farms, intensive agriculture of some kind, power plants, and even manufactories. These arcologies, once they floated, would be populated with the elite of the old world and left to drift amongst the converted hulks and jury-rigged floating hamlets of a previous generation. They would trade with each other, try their best to feed themselves and their fellows, as they circled the diminishing landscape of their old nation. Perhaps some, equipped with deep sea salvage equipment, would mine the abandoned cities of the old world for ever scarcer resources.
The Deep-Sea Manufactories
Once it became obvious that the land was going to be forever extinguished, the problem of sustaining these arcologies beyond the next two generations would obviously present itself. How can one repair a solar panel without sand? How can one supply a nuclear fission plant without uranium? Obviously the only realistic solution is to build a deep-sea mining base, somewhere with resources that can be harvested. Such a base would perhaps be built entirely underground, with just a few carefully-constructed entranceways to allow ships in and out. It might be built in the last high points of the nation – the Rocky Mountains or the Himalayas or the Alps – with docks carved into mountain sides and deep mine shafts stretching far enough down to give access to the key requirements of industrial society. These undersea bases would be designed to include manufacturies, so that crucial engineering equipment could be built, ore smelted, and perhaps even ships repaired. Robotic machines would travel far into the old world under the sea, scavenging the remaining organic detritus of the old earth, or digging up mud from the new seabeds to transport to the surface as soil for the arcologies. Perhaps they would build huge wave-power generators in the valleys of their old mountain ranges, entirely robotically made and controlled, to ensure that the world would have energy even after the uranium ran out.
Society and Survival in the Pelagic Kingdoms
The social order in the pelagic kingdoms would be harsh, built around keeping strict authoritarian control over population growth and resource use. Those people who floated out to sea in the first hulks, crammed together like prisoners in apartment blocks that offer little better opportunity than survival, would soon come to be judged as an expendable burden on the dwindling resources of their nation; even once the purpose-built arcologies floated and the undersea manufactories began to function, these people would be seen as a burden, first to suffer calorie restrictions as arable land disappeared, last to be allowed to breed, always required to do the hardest and nastiest work. They would spend much of their lives without energy, would be moved from hulk to hulk as the need arose and treated as a slave population in a world of harsh demands. These would be the slums of the floating world, where everyone vied for a chance to get out to one of the arcologies or to a specialist dormitory ship – one that sat near a resource zone or had some industrial or defense or cultural function. Otherwise the only work on these ships would be security, fishing, and farming shellfish or seaweed in the area around the ship.
On the arcologies, life would be better, but still tough. Some arcologies might have a specialized industrial or farming purpose, others might play a mixed role providing energy, education and housing. These arcologies, being purpose built, would also be able to host proper docks and shipping, perhaps enabling them to trade between countries and with occasional visitors and develop a little real wealth. But even the largest arcology using the most advanced genetically engineered crops would only be able to grow a small amount of food, of which the entire surplus would be needed to keep the dormitory ships alive and functioning; life here might be better but it would still be harsh, and some of the chemical or industrial arcologies could be hellish indeed. In the world after the flood, no one would be allowed to rebel against their lot – find a way out, or be ground under.
Despite the harsh life in the arcologies, these would be the wealthiest and the best places on the planet, and through their combination of resource extraction, limited agriculture, and energy production, the Pelagic Kingdoms would form the central component of the human race’s recovery from its near-extinction. Everyone else living outside of these kingdoms would view them with only three goals in mind: to live in them, to trade with them, or to raid them. In such a world the Kingdoms would always be seeking adventurers – as would their enemies. It would be this world that player characters would interact with – performing dubious missions for the masters of the arcologies, fighting raiders, or raiding them for specialized goods that make the difference between death and survival for the less fortunate peoples of the flood. These Pelagic Kingdoms would also hire adventurers to scour the ocean world hunting out old resources and finding new trade opportunities. In my future posts I will describe some of the other communities that live on the world ocean, how they survive and the adventuring opportunities they might offer.
August 15, 2012 at 11:32 am
I’d suggest that the underseas mines would be where the really wealth is. Those would be like dwarven kingdoms – the only possible source of scarce resources, weathly in things that the sailors could never have but crushing their lack of the underappreciated.
An undersea mine would have minerals, technology/manufacturing, undersea transport/subs and probably even access to nutrients from recovered soil. They’d also have effectively limitless tidal power. That makes them insanely wealthy. The downsides are they have no space, limited air and light and a constant fear of being crushed into a paste by the massive weight above them.
Finally, undersea mines would be vastly more conformity enforcing than being on a boat. On a boat, if you screw up we’ll throw you overboard. If you screw up underwater then we all drown/are crushed, so expect us to tear you to pieces at the first hint you were thinking about opening a pressure door without checking the safeties.
August 15, 2012 at 11:37 am
On a related note, some limited or rushed countries may focus more on undersea living than boats. Australia for example is very low lying and has a strong mining sector. It’s options are evacuate (probably what would happen as it’d be very early in the disaster) or dig. Given the wealth we get from digging I expect someone would try that. Such a settlement may not be designed for the full crush weight that would occur, meaning they either fail or are trapped underground forever.
Other nations like South Africa have a strong mining sector and more height. They may also investigate this option given the extra time they have.
August 15, 2012 at 1:24 pm
I imagine that only the richest countries with the largest populations could construct the necessary undersea arcologies, and doing so would require a massive undertaking – at the same time as doing this they are relocating farmland, managing huge refugee flows, and attempting to develop technology that has never before been used. I also imagine that they don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket – imagine if you moved your entire post-flood survival population into an undersea hideout and it flooded the first day. Also they wouldn’t be able to build anything even remotely large enough in the time (about 30 years in the book, I think) and so they would be scrabbling around doing multiple solutions – building an undersea city sophisticated enough to expand by itself after the flood, and simultaneously cobbling together multiple desperate sea surface arcologies to try and fit as many people onto as possible. Plus of course, stockpiling food and resources in case their work isn’t fully completed in time.
Other countries would not have any chance of such an undertaking – places like Indonesia would have to use lower-tech solutions. So I imagine a few powerful post-flood societies that have these undersea bases, and a large number of societies that are dependent on trade with them, and possibly also raiding them.
In the book I think Baxter imagines that the world doesn’t react fast enough to save the low-lying countries and Australia is one of the first to go. Following this, I imagine they don’t have time to do much more than set some of their natural resources adrift on boats and move a tiny portion of their population onto offshore rigs, to become dependent (at least at first) on other countries (which is why they set the resources adrift). Of course one could imagine differently – that they construct a very hasty and desperate underground community, perhaps emerging to the surface 50 years later as barely recognizably human due to the strains and trials of making that community work.
Yes, the undersea mines would be rigidly authoritarian – especially considering that until some redundancy can be built in, destroying a mine means possible extinction for all the floating cities depending on it. But if they could expand enough and gain stability then they would also be the most powerful and wealthiest places. I imagine that the ocean world would be a bit like many images of a space opera universe – a few tightly controlled and very wealthy inner planets and a vast unexplored expanse beyond, where one is free to make one’s own future, but that future mostly ends quickly and horribly. The adventuring party, of course, would be doing the hard scrabble on the fringe – about which I’ll have more to say in subsequent posts.
August 15, 2012 at 4:21 pm
I agree the technology to build an underground (and underwater) city is highly advanced if you want to do things like ever get out again, but I suspect you’re gold plating the solution. Building long tunnels and equipping them with hydroponics and bunks is much easier (you can even convert existing mines). If you’re willing to accept that the sealing process is more or less permanent it’s not even hard to waterproof the place – just collapse the first mile of tunnel.
This sort of thing would led to horrid conditions, but could save tens of thousands (at least) for fairly minimal work. The biggest problem they face is energy, but nuclear would be a suitable choice for somewhere like Oz. If you’ve got enough power and water then you’ve got all the oxygen you want (and probably far more hydrogen then you want [1]).
The real question is “Would anyone be desperate enough to do this while it was still an option?” I suspect that most people would prefer to spend another decade with their eyes closed till the possibility is long gone.
[1] It’s not like the hydrogen can be used as a power source – that’d take oxygen that you’re constantly short of. It would make a valid trade good, but storing and moving it would be painful and dangerous without much better fuel cell technology.
August 15, 2012 at 9:03 pm
The hydrogen could be vented, or used in other ways I’m sure. The big problem is food – I have done a little searching (because this flood world is taking waaay too much of my time and imagination at the moment) and I can’t find any evidence of the existence of a hydroponic carbohydrate crop. So unless the pre-flood societies could come up with a bioengineered hydroponic crop that doesn’t need sunlight within about 20 years, they’d be stuffed. Also if they can’t get out to go fishing, or trade with fishermen, then protein is going to be a big issue (cows &c requiring vast amounts of arable land to feed). Fake meat is currently about $125000 a burger (or will be in November) so it’s possible that it wouldn’t be a viable food either even in 20 years. Given these challenges, designing an accessible underground bunker is probably easier than reconfiguring society to live in the dark. As you say, the sheer horror of the prospect of spending the rest of eternity underground would surely cause people to delay essential decisions – imagine the Australian government that went to an election on the basis of “you all have to live in darkness for the rest of eternity,” they’d have popularity ratings almost as low as the current government! So I can see a 10 year delay there, which makes the bioengineering task all the harder. I guess once Uluru disappeared underwater the rest of the world would sit up and take notice, but by then a lot of years of preparation (and the chance to use Australia as an experiment) would have gone begging.
So my guess is that under such an extreme scenario, people would be scrambling to build an experimental installation on a mountainside, wouldn’t be able to come up with a system of purely underground living, and would have to cobble together floating farms to feed both underground and aboveground populations for the foreseeable future. I’ve done some rough calculations and I think it would be almost impossible to sustain any kind of serious population on current crops farmed on basic arcologies on the sea surface, but that’s what would happen in the immediate years after the flood while the undersea cities spread, consolidated, and improved biotechnology to the point where it could be conducted without soil and/or sunlight in contained spaces.
I’ll have more to say about the soil issue later …
August 15, 2012 at 9:52 pm
7-8 kms of water would leave only a few small shallow areas – which are where marine life is richest (and most deep-sea creatures rely on shallows for breeding and early life). The open oceans are deserts. So life on floating arcologies would be hard. As for undersea mines – forget it. A kilogram per ton would be rich ore – that leaves 999 kilos to be crushed, separated, and dumped against great pressure for every kilo.
A few people might survive for a century or so, but the arcologies would slowly disappear as wear, rust, waves and so on took their toll.
But if there were shallows, then more things become possible. Check out Blue World by Jack Vance.
August 15, 2012 at 10:08 pm
blah blah facts blah blah…
I can’t remember the details of the book now but I think Baxter had Everest submerged sufficiently that it was untouchable (I’m pretty sure he said 7-8kms, but Everest definitely submerged – it’s a key moment in the book – so we’re looking at 9kms probably) but the sea level rise stopped before the pressure became sufficient to freeze the water at the sea floor (I remember a number around about 11km for that to happen). So that means that China, with access to the Himalayas, could build an undersea base at the Everest base camp, and would “only” have to deal with 4-5 kms of pressure. I think with 20 years dedicated to solving only two problems (bioengineering hydroponic carbs and building an arcology at 4-5 kms depth) it could be done.
I agree it’s probably true that the oceans after a flood would actually be a desert, unless floating communities created their own environments. Fish-farming would take on a whole new importance. The alternative is artificial reefs, created out of any old crap and floated long before the end, intended to form an environment in which shallow water creatures could thrive. I actually know a guy who has studied the process of transplanting reefs (it’s taking on a new importance as reefs in Asia begin to die) and he told me that it’s generally a dismal failure. But why let mere facts get in the way of a good campaign?
August 16, 2012 at 11:48 am
I think that any attempt o use this as a campaign desperately needs to overlook quite a number of basic facts.
The first one you’d have to overlook is “8 km worth of water across the entire planet? Where the hell did it come from? If that water’s moved here, can I move to the 8km tall cavern that is apparently now available underground? It’s not like water is significantly compressible, so you can’t claim it took less space underground!”
Once you’ve over looked that, things like “That tech doesn’t exist” or “Deep oceans have bugger all life” come minor quibbles.
August 16, 2012 at 1:49 pm
Actually Baxter does discuss the science of the flood in his first book, and I think he even gives references. He says there are oceans worth of water under the crust, but they’re dispersed and could never possibly leak out through seismic fissures as the story has it. This is what science fiction is for though – to take a piece of reality and turn it into an implausible but believable alternative, and see where that leaves us. His second book, Ark, has large portions devoted to life in the colony ship, which is hastily cobbled together and was originally populated under a very dodgy program. I think it’s the first book I’ve ever read that tries to explore what it might be like in a colony ship in the near future, and it ain’t pretty.
So yeah, I guess that any campaign world is going to have to involve some hand waving and the use of words like “emergency development program” and “went on a war footing” and “bioengineering.” Of course, looking at how well the real world has tackled nuclear disarmament and global warming, it’s hard to imagine that we’d be able to do more than debate whether the water is actually rising for most of the available 30 years. Then the last 10 would be spent on international meetings that came up with stern resolutions with key sentences like “build something we can all live in” removed…
October 15, 2012 at 7:26 am
Wow! I’ll have to find a copy of these books… Coincidentally, I discovered your review and these campaign thoughts of yours today, the day after a nostalgic discussion at a party about how many years ago, together with some college friends, I set out to make an arcade 3D game designed around the premise of scavenging deep-sea divers living on the few still-exposed high-points of a sunken Earth and facing off against huge mutant angler fish. The project has long been dead in the water (ha!), but I have hopes of it’s eventual resurrection:
http://tinysquishy.com/Games/DeepPressure/index.html
My current RPG campaign setting is also built around a 100m ocean rise, totally changing the coastlines of earth, and turning Table Mountain into a deadly and mysterious island. It will be cool to see what other authors have come up with given this kind of premise.
Thanks again.
February 10, 2015 at 6:48 pm
Whether the ocean rises 7 or 8 kilometres makes a big difference. There are only 14 peaks above 8km, but 109 above 7 km (all around Tibet). As the Tibetan Plateau averages 4.5 kms above current sea level, most of it would be below 3.5 kms of water – too deep for most bottom-feeding seals. As most fish species need inshore nurseries, the future belongs to the squid. And the Patagonian toothfish.
February 10, 2015 at 7:19 pm
I think in this campaign I set it at 6km, so there are parts of the Andes still above water, and the Himalayan kingdom is large enough to be viable though poor (at a guess). Also the Tibetan plateau will be too deep for seals, but not so deep that it couldn’t be dredged for old materials by a well-designed or converted ship (e.g. a deep sea cable laying ship). My general idea is that the only way that seals, sea lions and penguins could survive is by forming symbiotic relationships with humans (except for perhaps a few tiny colonies in the tips of peaks that are too precarious for human life). Ditto for seabirds, and this is why people assume the Towers were built and set loose – as roosting spots for seabirds and resting points for seals, which would eat the marine life growing around the Towers. The Hulks, the Gardens and the Arc all have small colonies of sea lions that serve as cattle and working animals (as described by Paul). Also the only equivalent of inshore nurseries in this future world (besides around the Andes and Himalayas) are human rafts and habitations, so these places will be very rich with life if they have a sufficient underwater profile. It is, of course, extremely precarious.
Also, obviously, the arctic is now an ocean 6km deep at least, so any creatures that lived there are gone. There is still sea ice, but aside from a few animals feasting on any algae that grows beneath it, the whole region is dead. The future does indeed belong to the squid…
February 11, 2015 at 7:58 am
Hmm, by basic logic the future may belong to the squid, but by panicked humans drowning under 7km of water logic the place may be more interesting.
If they foresaw the future conditions (i.e. unable to get any dirt), then the people putting things afloat were highly likely to 1) put as much genetic engineering R&D equipment on a boat as possible and 2) not have given a stuff whether any particular idea was ethical (or even logical). That could have led to an explosion of poorly thought out ideas being released into the wild.
So in the early years after the flood researchers may have enhanced deep sea squid to grow bigger and come to the surface. Seas of plastic waste floating in the pacific would have been covered in fertilizer to promote growth of basic ecosystems and any other crazy idea would immediately have been seized upon.
The result is that additional monsters become feasible to provide bother challenges and resources. Release the KRAKEN!
February 11, 2015 at 10:59 am
Ha! In statting up the sea lion I discovered that in Cyberpunk stats beyond human are quite … terrifying. A kraken would be really scary. If only someone had a laser they could fire from space …
I wonder if squid are actually highly genetically modifiable? Could you build huge ones that can pull ships? Could you reengineer their material so that it keeps growing and growing to form living landmasses? Isn’t it said that sharks don’t age[1]?
I told my players that Ryan, the rider, was subtly reengineered so that he had better lungs and eyes. I think in the impending collapse of civilization into mad max on waves, given the postulated available time frame (30-50 years), it’s likely that ethics applications would be waived for human engineering projects. Which also opens the possibility of … PIRATE REAVERS!!!
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fn1: Yeah, but Big Ed also says dogs can’t look up!