I Drew This

I saw an ad for that new Will Smith movie, where he’s literally the last man left on earth. At least, he is in the ads; he probably meets someone else about halfway through so the movie has some kind of plot. It’d be pretty dull otherwise: get up, eat canned food for breakfast, go to video store, take anything you want, go home, canned food for lunch; watch DVDs (entire collection of 007 movies/Woody Allen catalogue/Þ0rn), read, do a supermarket run (more canned food), pick up some new clothes at department store, home, read some more, eat more canned food, go to bed listening to any CD you like, taken from the local CD store.

I’m not sure if he has electricity though – he’d have to raid the supermarkets for batteries also.

In fact, it would get harder and harder to eat as you’d have to go further and further for food. He’d have to find a semi-trailer and make a round trip to whatever supermarket is closest, take all the canned food, soap, batteries, can openers (obv) and bottled water he could carry, then head home again. In fact, I’d advocate a more nomadic existence under the circs, just taking a car and heading to the next town till I’d eaten out their supermarkets, finding another car and hitting the road again. I think I’d find a nice camera too and take lots of pictures. (I was going to say steal but there’s be nobody else to steal from, so it’s not really stealing at all.)

I got to thinking though, what if you, or Will Smith, or me, being the last person on earth, met someone of the opposite sex and decided to attempt to restart the human race. How would you go about it? Well, after shagging like bunnies and popping out one or two or ten (picking up supplies at whatever baby store you could find), how would you have them recreate? It goes into rather unsavoury territory, what with the whole incest thing, but how would you do it? Brothers and sisters would have to procreate, then cousins, and then there’d only be 2 or 3 generations that are doing what we regard as a little off.

My mind then went off on a tangent about what could happen in such a shallow gene pool. If you were, for example, a man, and if you weren’t limited by age, if you could mate with a female, then have a female offspring with 50% of your genes. If you mated with her, having another female offspring, that child would have 75% of your genes. Go again, and the next child would have 87.5% of your genes. Then 93.75%, 96.875%, and within a couple of generations, the child would have more than 99% of your genes.

So then, if you had a boy, he’d basically be a clone of you. Someone with a better grasp of genetics should feel free to correct me if I’m forgetting some kind of dominant/recessive factor.

The other thing about that movie is how NYC looked with nobody in it. Smith said it was disconcerting to have an empty New York street, devoid of any human life. It would feel eerie, no doubt.

That kind of thing happens in Adelaide all the time, especially around Easter. The only people you see is the odd tourist wandering around, dazed and confused, looking for signs of life in the shops and dodging the tumbleweed.