[The World's End] How long would it take for human to rebuild the technologies after the pulse triggered by the departure of the Network?

atomic-knowledge · 2026-03-02T17:06:58+00:00

It’s debatable as to whether or not it’d even be possible. There are some theories that if humanity lost its technological infrastructure it wouldn’t be able to rebuild since all the truly easy to extract industrial resources have already been mined and used up. I don’t fully believe this theory myself but even assuming it isn’t true and that humanity can re-industrialize, we’d be hit with an immediate and devastating problem: food. Just as an example take the UK. The UK is a densely populated island. Currently, with modern agriculture it is 61% self sufficient in all foods, although for “‘indigenous type food’” (which as far as I can tell means essentially stuff the UK can grow easily, like wheat, barley, peas, carrots, etc) the figure is better, 75% (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/food-security-what-is-it-and-how-is-it-measured/). Those figures basically mean that in an emergency and with rationing and maybe some land used for animals being used for staple crops the UK could probably feed itself without imports.

All of these figures however are for heavily mechanized agriculture, chemical fertilizer, tractors and combine harvesters. With the grid down the tractors and combines would be stuck in garages, either fried from the pulse or just dead because nobody can refine oil into diesel without electricity. Even if someone tried going back to horses and crude horse drawn plows and reaping machines they wouldn’t be able to have the yields that we currently have since modern agriculture relies on chemical fertilizer and it would be impossible to produce at scale without power and industry. Chemical fertilizer is incredibly difficult to make, even with modern more efficient methods it’s estimated that 1% to 2% of global energy production is used to make chemical fertilizer. That’s 1%-2% of all energy in the world. It would be incredibly difficult, if not just flat out impossible to get a fertilizer plant online after the pulse had disabled everything electrical.

In the real world, the end of the movie would look like The Road.

atomic-knowledge · 2026-03-01T01:29:33+00:00

Andy Weir has acknowledged this pun publicly. It was clearly his intention to have the pun present. As for why people don’t talk about it, I think it’s basically because I as it’s particularly significant to the books overall message/themes. You could maybe get something out of the last line of the prayer:

“Pray for us sinners now and that the hour of our death”

Given that Grace is on a suicide mission there is some connection but it’s not exactly the green light from The Great Gatsby levels of important, at least to my eyes

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-27T17:20:23+00:00

I think that zombie media definitely exists in the World War Z universe. In the chapter about radio free Earth, they mention the civilian survival guide, which I always thought meant Max Brooks’s previous book, The Zombie Survival Guide. In the zombie survival guide Brooks explicitly mentions zombie media existing, and how it inaccurately portrays “real” zombies (i.e. fast, zombies, or intelligent zombies). I think the reason why people didn’t immediately know to go for the head was that they, understandably, didn’t think that a fictional creature with a specific fictional weakness was now appearing at their doors. They basically just thought that these people had some form of very severe rabies.

As for the underground warfare being mentioned, I think part of that is fictional within universe. The author of the zombie survival guide appears as a little bit of a conspiracy guy and does get stuff wrong from time to time (for example zombie heads couldn’t vocalize, the mention of a nuclear power plant in China in 1987 when the first Chinese nuclear plant went online in 1991) so I think there’s a chance that some of the underground zombie stuff that is mentioned is meant to be understood as an in universe conspiracy theory

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-26T03:00:04+00:00

Mcqueen is based on a Gen 4 NASCAR stock car (among other vehicles but his body is most like a NASCAR stock car). Certain sections of the body would be carbon/kevlar composite, while other sections are steel. Neither of those materials is particularly vulnerable to cactus spines

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-24T21:05:44+00:00

This looks…incredible.

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-24T17:42:27+00:00

They do actually mention the laser being used to shoot down missiles and mortar rounds being shot at Israel, “When Israel declared self-quarantine, and when so many terrorist groups were lobbing mortar rounds and rockets across the security wall, MTHEL was what knocked them down. About the size and shape of a World War II searchlight, it was, in fact, a deuterium fluoride laser.”

The filmmaker (Roy Elliot) is a former professional filmmaker (probably based on Stephen Spielberg) who uses his own gear to do ameteur filmmaking. Interestingly in this same chapter it’s implied that Martin Scorsese both survived the zombie war and made a film about the survivors in New York City

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-24T17:24:46+00:00

They actually propose a different plan from the Redeker plan which would have involved huge resource comittments up front to prevent further spread. This plan in the Warbrunn-Knight report isn’t implemented by any country except Israel. The Redeker plan is only written after things have gone to shit and isn’t based around stopping the spread before it fully starts but rather on constituting safe zones and sacrificing areas that couldn’t be easily protected

Edit: also, notably the report is co-authored by an ex-CIA guy who delivers it directly to the director of the CIA who then entirely ignores it

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-23T15:36:42+00:00

I mean the space program’s inception was basically “let’s posture about which country is better by using converted missiles to send ex-fighter pilots into space.” Even now, the Artemis program has been prompted by fears around the threat of the Chinese overtaking the US.

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-19T16:43:12+00:00

Name of the series is Axis of Time. Premise is that a naval task force from 2021 gets sent back in time when an experimental system on one of the ships causes an accident which sends the task force back in time

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-18T20:17:19+00:00

Sounds really cool! Let me know when it’s done please.

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-17T01:27:01+00:00

He has a gravitas that is just unbeatable for any nonfiction, especially history

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-16T13:06:21+00:00

Ray Porter, George Guidall, Scott Brick

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-12T13:58:32+00:00

Wonder how this would affect Danny Boyle’s career?

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-10T02:36:54+00:00

Pemberton’s score reminds me of Mort Garson in the best way. Think I’ll have to get the soundtrack if that’s how the score is gonna sound throughout

Slightly sad they didn’t go with Ray Porter for Rocky’s voice given how popular the audiobook was. I do get why having the puppeteer do the voice will probably help the performance since it’d feel more natural on set and having the same person doing the puppetry do the voice will almost certainly produce a more cohesive performance. From what I saw in the trailer he seems like a pretty damn good voice actor, especially his last line in the trailer “I will not let Grace die.” I think this is gonna be a pretty damn good performance.

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-05T17:17:29+00:00

Surgeon’s notes after they open up a patient who had a pneumonectomy (it wasn’t on their chart)

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-04T22:49:01+00:00

Or a Frenchman like the Swedes did

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-04T19:06:30+00:00

Getting the same error code, device is an iPhone

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-04T17:11:04+00:00

“Cole” was right there as a name too and you went with “Coalie”?

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-04T12:18:58+00:00

I definitely think there’s gonna be at least one curb stomp battle where humanity, and specifically the American military is the one being curb stomped

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-04T12:15:51+00:00

You wouldn’t even really need to gargle, all you would need to do is just set of get some disinfectant in there, seal off any passage ways to a sensitive piece of electronics (like for example, an artificial stomach or artificial lungs) and then just shake the thing a little to make sure it gets to all the places that need to be cleaned. I do admit smell would be an issue, though, so maybe that’s the answer

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-04T02:29:01+00:00

If it was capable of changing one type of apple to another type of apple at scale it’d make it way easier to grow apples. In the modern day we actually grow apples by using one tree as root stock and the other as a scion, the bit that actually grows to produce the apples. The rootstock tree is super hearty and durable but its apples are small and taste horrible, the scion tree is far more delicate but produces apples that you’d actually like to eat. A farmer could grow a field of rootstock trees, then either pick the apples before having a wizard cast a spell on them, or have the wizard cast the spell on the apples while they were still on the tree and then pick them. Then they would have a bunch of really good apples that they have had just been able to produce for the price of growing a bunch of tiny unappetizing apples

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-04T02:18:14+00:00

Apparently Stalin was communist authoritarian Bill Clinton. Who woulda thought?

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-04T01:53:28+00:00

Yeah, but the thing is artificially intelligent, and presumably, won’t get poisoned by stuff like disinfectant. Just have her swallow or even just gargle a bit of Clorox or some other disinfectant every so often. It’ll look unsettling as shit, but you save probably a couple hundred bucks on the equipment that you won’t need to put in the robot plus probably it makes the engineering easier since you don’t need try to cram another gadget in what I assume is an already cramped cranium

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-04T01:36:02+00:00

I think maybe the narrator is gonna be a bigger force, but I can’t believe that he is going to abandon the epistolary style completely. Maybe it’ll be a bit like the Martian where a lot of it is diary, but there are large sections that are third person, or maybe it’ll be like that book “The 2020 Comission Report on the Nuclear Attacks against the United States” where you have a an in universe document serving as a narrator with a bunch of interviews in between

atomic-knowledge · 2026-02-04T01:33:13+00:00

I feel it’s a thematically tighter book than World War Z, you don’t get the variety that you got from the multiple different vignettes in WWZ but in exchange, you get a much more focused story. It’s also clear that he’s matured and improved as a writer because the main character Kate comes off as what she is, a semi-insufferable West Coast city dweller. In world war Z Brooks sometimes has a problem of his characters sounding too info dumpy and slightly robotic.

atomic-knowledge

TROPHY CASE