Movie post-apocalyptic civilizations

could they survive?

Snowpiercer and Mad Max

It’s always fun to see things that could happen in the near future portrayed in a movie, especially when it’s based on how we would survive as a species. Today the two films in question are Snowpiercer and MadMax, both of which show our world in the not-too-distant future in a way that the human race is barely being kept alive. But how accurate are these movies’ visions of human survival and it would be even possible to stay alive in the conditions they portray?

Snowpiercer

(The main engine car of the Snowpiercer train)

What’s the situation?

In an attempt to stop climate change, the governments of the world injected huge amounts of special aerosols into the atmosphere to try and block out the sun over the poles and stop the ice from melting. This backfired and worked too well, ushering in another ice age and freezing the entire planet, but before this happened, a company built a huge train for humanity to survive on.

The train is called Snow Piercer and is 1001 cars long, housing about 3,000 people across 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class passengers, as well as a large group of people living at the rear of the train called “tailies” who jumped on before it left and weren’t planned for the journey.

How is snow piercer powered?

Its primary engine is a perpetual motion engine that provides electricity to not only the train engine itself but also the thousands of lights and heating systems the train uses. Perpetual motion is scientifically impossible because it breaks the laws of physics, and involves creating more power from its own movement than it takes to move itself, with the additional power being used to run the train. So before we even get into food, the idea that snow piercer could work just from how it’s powered would already be a massive NO.

Food and water on Snowpiercer

Water would essentially be unlimited because ice could be collected from the outside of the train and melted. The whole planet is in a deep ice age so it will always be present, but food is a big problem. The train is made up of 1001 carriages and is 10 miles long, which makes the average size of a single carriage to be just 15 meters long by 5 meters wide. It would take about 60 carriages to provide one acre of growing ground, so if 900 carriages were designated to nothing but food, they would have 15 acres of farmland.

(A farming carriage on the Snowpiercer train, showing a guy pulling a cart full of food he got from presumably about 50 carriages)

The most productive thing they could grow would be potatoes, which can produce up to 25 tons of food per acre, which could feed 25 people for a year. If all their crops were potatoes, then they could feed 375 of the 3,000 people on board or 750 people on half rations. They show the use of insect protein bars as food, but these still take up far too much room and need space for their own food to be grown. The train also has cows and fish on board which take up more space and need more food than people do, so unless all the food sources on the train are massively genetically altered, then they wouldn’t be able to feed even a quarter of the population they have.

Could they survive the cold on Snowpiercer?

The coldest it ever got outside was -120°C which was the point the ice age peaked at before warming up slightly. In these temperatures a train would have to be constantly heated to a very high degree, having to displace over 100 degrees of temperature for 1001 carriages which takes a massive amount of electricity. If the train was capable of creating this amount of energy, it would still have constant problems from everything else freezing up.

(This amount of cattle would need hundreds of carriages dedicated to growing food to keep them fed and is one of the least space-effective forms of producing food)

Grease, petrol, oil, rubber, and pretty much everything else that’s used on the outside of a train will freeze solid and stop working. All fans will freeze and the air intakes will become jammed with ice crystals unless someone is prepared to go outside and fix them regularly. In the Snowpiercer world, these people are called breachers and have the ability to resist extreme cold, but going outside at -120°C with the added wind chill of being on the outside of a moving train will instantly freeze anything flexible, so again, this is definitely not possible to survive as a species.

Snowpiercer survival conclusion

The energy source is impossible, but even if it was there still wouldn’t be close to enough food being produced to feed everyone on board. There is also the added danger of something going wrong with the train or the track itself, as a single part of one track segment becoming damaged would cause the end of the human race, and it’s the same principle with the train wheels. It can only stop for no more than a few hours before having to move and create more energy, but people wouldn’t be able to go outside and change a broken wheel anyway because of the temperatures, and if they were stationary for more than a few minutes then every wheel on the train would freeze solid.

Mad Max

(The main settlement in the film Fury Road is called the citadel and is home to hundreds of people)

What’s the situation?

Set in Australia in the near future, the world has been at war over the last few remaining natural resources and land that hasn’t been ruined by the increasing world temperatures. The war was nuclear-based and only sped up the warming of the earth and created high radiation zones all over the planet. Society has turned into small and independent groups of raider-like factions that fight over the last remaining fragments of the old world. Max himself is a drifter who moves around this desert wasteland encountering various people as they become part of his story.

Food and water in the Mad Max world

Water can only be found at natural springs and basically, any water that comes from underground. The seas are supposed to be mostly dried up and the few remaining sources of surface water are heavily contaminated with radiation. All the main settlements seem to be built on a source of underground water, but food is rare for everyone, depending on what you’re prepared to eat.

(The main and only source of water for the entire settlement, but it only flows for a short while each day while the valves are open)

There are cannibal tribes in the Mad Max world, but most people eat whatever they can get their hands on. These include scenes of people eating raw lizards or eating bugs that have landed on them, but there are settlements that grow actual plants. In the movie “Fury Road” the main settlement has a massive underground water source it uses to grow food in what appears to be a hydroponics setup, but with the size of their greenhouse and the number of plants it contains, there wouldn’t be enough food for more than a handful of people. The Citadel contains hundreds of people, and its food-producing capacity shown in the movie wouldn’t feed more than ten, with hunting and foraging not likely to feed more than a few dozen at best.

Conclusion of surviving in the Mad Max world

If you were lucky enough to have a source of food and water then you could survive for as long as it took to develop radiation sickness. The amount of food produced at any of the settlements seen in any of the movies is a long way off from being able to feed a fraction of the people seen living in them. There is also a distinct lack of trees and plant life which means nothing to burn as a heat source or to cook with, and any renewable sources like solar panels would have broken down or been destroyed, leaving people in a medieval-style way of living.

It would only be possible to survive for no more than a few weeks as a normal civilian in an average settlement because you would starve to death. Living as a cannibal or having access to the occasional lizard will only slow down the inevitable, even if it means dying from a lack of nutrients. Almost everyone would develop scurvy from a lack of vitamin C which would eventually kill them, but there is also the added danger from violence, disease, and infection, all of which no one in the Mad Max world has the ability to cure.