Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead, The Stand, etc Show the Fragility of Civilization

Recently I watched the reboot Battlestar Galactica series on Peacock (and before that the original on TubiTV) and it got me thinking how fragile society actually is.  And likewise shows like The Walking Dead and The Stand also make the same point.

In Galactica the 12 colonies out in a galaxy far, far away are destroyed by the robotic Cylons.  A group of survivors aboard a fleet of mostly civilian ships heads out into space to try to find a new home.  Besides the Cylons there are a lot of other problems, like critical shortages of food, water, fuel, and medicines.  There are also shortages of specialized personnel like pilots, soldiers, and doctors.

The water and fuel (tylium) and to some extent food (in the form of algae) they can find on asteroids or planets, but a lot of the other stuff is almost impossible to replace--especially people.  Training someone to fly a Viper fighter or Raptor bomber/transport usually takes months.  So every time a pilot is lost, that means it would take months to replace him/her, if not years.  And we just saw how hard it was to train a decent army in Afghanistan.  And then you have doctors, who are much harder to replace.  When Commander Adama is shot in one episode, the only doctor on the ship is on another ship, leaving a medic to basically patch him up and keep him on life support.  If Doc Cottle had never arrived, the commander would certainly have died because no one else had the expertise to do the necessary surgery.

If Doc Cottle had died, they would have been pretty screwed in that show since he was basically the only real doctor.  They did in one episode introduce a civilian doctor and in another a brain surgeon, but mostly it was Cottle in charge of all medical care for the fleet.  And he was an old guy who smoked so unless he trained a replacement, in years they could have lost their most competent doctor.

This is true in lots of other positions because their world, like ours, is one of specialties.  In The Walking Dead, The Stand, etc you have the same problem.  Because society is a web of specialties, when you start taking strings out of that web, inevitably it's all going to fall to pieces.  Some people, like me, are far less useful.  I mean in an apocalypse you don't really need accountants or writers.  But others like doctors, engineers, mechanics, plumbers, power/water treatment plant workers, are essential to important things functioning.

But even a lot of those people are not 100% experts at everything.  I mean a plumber might know how to unclog your drain, but does he know how to make all his tools?  The same for most everyone else.  A doctor knows how to treat your broken leg, but does he know how to make painkillers?  So many different people and skills are needed that if you start losing big chunks of people, it won't take long for things to start falling apart.

Society probably could limp on in a sort of medieval fashion and for a while we could squat in the ruins of our old glory, but eventually everything would run out or stop working.  It's like in the Warlord Trilogy by Bernard Cornwell that takes place in the late 5th/early 6th Century in Britain.  After the Romans left, the native Britons could live in the ruins, but they really didn't have the skills to keep the Roman technology alive.  At one point Arthur laments that no one in Britain could make a stone bridge like the Romans did, or the paved roads, aqueducts, and buildings.  They could make wooden bridges and buildings and such, but those were not as durable.  In the same way, after some cataclysmic event we might be able to keep our buildings, roads, power plants, and so on working for a little while, but eventually the systems for maintaining and building them would break down and the knowledge would be lost.  Like in Britain we would eventually slip into a Dark Age that would probably last centuries, if not forever.

If someone preserves the books and knowledge then it would help civilization rise again, but even with knowledge it would take resources.  You can read a cookbook and know how to make something, but you can't actually do it without the ingredients, an oven, mixer, blender, or whatever.  And for those appliances you need power, which means you need a power plant, and power lines, and so on.

If you're one of those survivalist or "prepper" types you can probably last longer.  But even they will eventually run out of stuff.  I mean those people might have stockpiled seeds and stuff, but do they know how to make a plow from scratch?  Or an axe?  Or how to domesticate animals?  There's just so much stuff that goes into keeping our society working that while it has endured and evolved, it is really, really fragile.

BTW, the lame thing with Star Trek Voyager vs Galactica was that Star Trek tech makes survival a lot easier even in another quadrant.  I mean you have replicators for food, beverages, and equipment.  You have an Emergency Medical Hologram for healthcare.  You have "sonic showers" so you don't even need water for those.  As long as you keep that stuff working, there would only be minor inconveniences.