Ragnarok Proofing: Difference between revisions

[[File:Sweet and Sour Grapes city ruins 5516.png|link=Sweet and Sour Grapes (webcomic)|frame|Built to last (mostly).]]

 

 

It is, understandably, common in post-apocalyptic fiction [[Ruins of the Modern Age|to show the ruins of society]]. However, many are set several decades, or even centuries or millennia [[After the End]], and the remains of [[The Beforetimes|the pre-cataclysm society]] are in remarkable condition. Buildings and objects will never fall apart due to neglect, and any [[Lost Technology|pre-cataclysm devices or vehicles]] that the characters find will work just fine.

 

{{examples}}

* Played straight & subverted in the Sankei Newspaper ''[[Astro Boy]]'' serial. When he [[Time Travel|travels back in time]] to the era of [[The Vietnam War]] he eventually shuts down due to the fuel he runs on not having been invented yet. He winds up at the bottom of the Mekong river & isn't found for decades, but a quick refill has him up & about again with no difficulty (though he was in a box at the time). When he runs out of fuel a second time due to its prohibitive cost, though, he falls down on a mountain & by the time his "birth" comes around again he is nothing more than a rusted-out shell.

* The eponymous mecha of ''[[Cannon God Exaxxion]]'' lay buried on Earth for over 2000 years before being excavated by the hero's father. Perhaps justified, in that it was kept in a giant space-packing crate and the mech itself is practically indestructible.

* Humorously averted in ''[[Slayers]]''. In her first appearance, Martina reactivates a war golem made by her ancestors during the last great Mazoku War, which took place 1,500 years previous. As she gloats over its immense power, the golem starts malfunctioning, due to the fact that its 1,500 years old and hasn't been maintained in at least 1,000.

 

* In ''[[Kyon: Big Damn Hero]]'' the SOS Brigade uses a lost dimensional anchor created millions of years ago. It works perfectly fine.

* Used to a degree in the ''[[1983 Doomsday Stories]].'' A number of places are described in varying stages of decay. Abandoned ruins and wasteland settings, naturally, suffer the worst of it though even the relatively unharmed areas such as the [[The Federation|Alpine Confederation]] show signs of neglect. Though the flashbacks show at least one particular ruin in better condition.

* Played with in [[Andre Norton]]'s ''Star Man's Son''. Two hundred years after [[World War III|the atomic war]], [[Fire-Forged Friends|Fors and Arskane]] find containers of fruit that're still good—but only if it's a glass jar rather than a metal can, and they need to check carefully for signs of the lid's seal decaying. Most automobiles and trucks are heavily rusted and unusable; the (nuclear-powered) "sealed engine" vehicles, however, are better-preserved for some reason and can sometimes even be made to run briefly—Fors mentions someone else having driven one for a quarter mile before the engine died permanently. When he and Arskane try the same, the tires shred off the wheels and the engine dies after less than a hundred feet. They're at the top of a hill-slope, though, and manage to coast down for quite a ways. This is important because hostile [[Mutants|Beast Things]] are attacking, but can't keep up with the car.

 

*** If there's no life on the ship, you don't really need life support - so as long as the ship remains sealed (or just bits) then it isn't beyond reason that there is still some breathable air in at least some compartments.

** Or TNG's ''Time's Arrow'' where {{spoiler|Data's head}} is found to still be in working condition after about half a ''millennium''. Underground. With a postmortem-programmed message still recorded and intact inside. That was programmed using a steel file. Not only was it still working, it was returned to service and seems none the worse for its advanced age, throughout the remainder of the series and movies!

** Also somewhat averted in the above: the MMPR Command Center is less than two hundred years old, and from its exterior appearance in the 1880s, has been continuously under construction and maintenance since then.

* The titular [[Aquila]] was [[Ancient Astronauts|an alien battlecruiser's]] [[Escape Pod|lifepod]] which crashed on Earth thousands of years ago, where it was later found and used to explore the world by a Roman centurion. After that, it then spent ''another'' thousand years or so buried underground before being discovered by two boys - still in fully working order.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

* Sometimes averted, sometimes played straight with ancient human technology in ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]''. Said [[Lost Technology]] has about a fifty-fifty chance of still being fully operational when discovered-but if it is operational, it's generally a safe bet that it's been corrupted by Chaos.

* Justified in ''[[Exalted]]'': Most [[Lost Technology|First Age technology]] is self-maintaining, so even after hundreds of years of moldering in some forgotten ruin or other, they'll still work perfectly. Since Solars were the only ones who could obtain or create the materials and enchantments that make this possible, however, all [[Magitek]] made since the Usurpation requires periodic maintenance to remain operational.

* [[BattleTech]]: The 'Mechs that are jockeyed around circa 3025 are already possibly hundreds of years old, passed down from generation to generation of pilot families. And they still work. Often times better than the new stuff. Many fans believe some of the absurdly heavy tonnages (you heard me) and large size of various electronic equipment and weapons is specifically ''because'' they're built to last.

** Also, presumably if you're planning to pass a [[Humongous Mecha]] off to you kids, you're going to keep it maintained. Same applies to [[Drop Ships]], which you don't exactly want to be held together by rusty bolts if you're coming down into an atmosphere at Mach 3 inside a ship that is about as aerodynamic as the Sydney Opera House. Unmaintained and poorly maintained [[BattleTech]] technology tends to fail miserably when pushed into combat.

* ''[[Rifts]]'' only uses this a little. Though the physical ruins of some cities and towns still stand a few centuries ''After'' [[After the End]], the chances of finding anything ''usable'' in them is pretty much nil. However, ever so often, a cache of military equipment from the previous age, specifically stated to be Ragnarok-Proofed, is found.

** This has been partially subverted recently, as it's been revealed that many of those caches are much more recent, and were deliberately left for people to find.

 

== Video Games ==

* When you get to the sunken city of Thor in ''[[Tales of Phantasia]]'', long since destroyed by a meteor impact, the shield around it is still working perfectly. So by extension, so are the automatic doors, the TV (and video game system) in the pub, an electronic lock and card reader, the security systems, and the main computer Oz. Justified in that the city's power comes from the Spirit of Light, Aska. After the city's been pulled up from underwater, you can free Aska and have her join you. The city systems still somehow work after that, though...

** Technology made by the [[Precursors|Quartz]], ranging from a simple lever-operated door to an entire mobile fortress, works perfectly after 2000 years in ''[[Tales of Hearts]]''.

** You don't want to know what's in the food that leaves it edible 200 years after a nuclear holocaust.

** One point about the game is that it's set in an alternate universe, where on the one hand technology leapt forward while on the other the cultural and societal mores stayed roughly in the 1950s, back before planned obsolescence was part of every car design. (Let's face it: restoring a '55 T-Bird will likely still be possible in 2055. Good luck doing the same for an '05 Mustang.) It doesn't cover two hundred years of decay, but things were designed to last back in the '50s.

* The Xel'naga from [[StarCraft]] seem to have invested in some seriously heavy-duty Ragnarok Proofing. Despite being anywhere from several thousand to several million years old, their (frighteningly advanced) relics always seem to be in working order when they are inevitably dug up and reactivated.

* ''[[Caves of Qud]]'' has this trope going on in full force with its many [[Lost Technology]] artifacts and [[Killer Robot]]s, all still around after the world was ruined probably over a thousand years ago. But given one of the [[Gamma World|settings]] the game homages, that shouldn't be a surprise.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* Lampshaded in ''[[Starslip]]'' with Vore,<ref>AKA [[Checkerboard Nightmare|Vaporware]]</ref> a robot from the 21st century found sealed inside a ''water heater'' launched into space the 35th:

{{quote|'''Vore''': [[What Year Is This?]] How long was I in there?

'''Vore''': Man! The Japanese build things to ''last!'' }}

* [[Sweet and Sour Grapes (webcomic)|Sweet and Sour Grapes]] hangs a lampshade on this trope, with Silas (a ghost) surprised to see how well the ruins of his old home have held up.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

== [[Real Life]] ==

* Currently, teams of scientists, linguists, and anthropologists are struggling to properly identify Nuclear Waste burial sites. It sounds simple at first... until you consider the half-life of this crap will [[They Don't Make Them Like They Used To|far out live any facility or structure that contains it]], the memory of what it was, or our descendants' ability to read the warnings on the labels, leaving us [[Neglectful Precursors]] to our own descendants. As an added twist, future archaeologists might successfully decode the labels, just to brush off our warnings as the [[Sealed Evil in a Can|superstitious ramblings of an ancient, underdeveloped culture]]. ''Damn Interesting'' has an [http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160 article] on the process.

* The [[wikipedia:Long Now Foundation|Long Now Foundation]] intends to build a clock capable of keeping time for 10000 years.

* Don't forget all the time capsules we've buried, some of which are intended to be opened thousands of years in the future, which are deliberately Ragnarok-proofed.

** Children's TV show ''[[Blue Peter]]'' dug up its 1971 time capsule in 2000. Half of its contents had turned to slush. Oops.

* Egyptian tombs were also deliberate attempts at Ragnarok proofing, as the ancient Egyptians believed the body had to remain intact forever for their afterlife to work properly. They didn't have all that much success, at least in the case of the Pharaohs, as the conspicuous and treasure-filled tombs tended to draw robbers. That being said, the mummies themselves, while they aren't exactly full-fleshed, still have some meat on their bones, which is almost achievement enough for any sort of organic material that old.

** Ironically just dropping a body in the sand will preserve it very well as it will dry out and plenty of soft tissue (skin) will survive. Burying a body in a coffin in sand retains enough moisture to let the body rot leaving just bones (both types of actual remains can be seen in the British Museum). Thus the entire mummification process is an attempt to recreate (and improve) the effect of the very simplest form of burial.

* Any object tossed into the vacuum of space can be expected to last a ''long'' time, as there's nothing to erode it except temperature changes, vacuum effects, radiation and micrometeorites. Supposedly, footprints on the Moon could last as long as ten million years if undisturbed (needless to say, more solid things could presumably last a lot longer), and those of the Apollo astronauts are believed to still be there today. Many of our satellites crash from high atmospheric drag once they expend their stationkeeping propellant, but anything in a stable orbit could easily outlast any artifacts on Earth's surface by a long, long time.

** There's also the matter of whether we actually WANT things to last that long for non-'not caring beyond our lifetime' reasons. A major archaeological 'resource' for telling things about the lives of Classical and pre-Classical people are shards of pottery and the remains of tools, containers and household objects in other words. While our modern day plastic bottles and powertools will probably be of great interest to archaeologists from the year 4000, we specifically recycle what we can and attempt to make what we can't biodegradable as much as possible not because we don't want to leave anything to future generations, but because we want to leave them resources in addition to useless, easily-replaced junk. And said future generations would probably appreciate our attempts to leave them a habitable, clean world rather than an ancient artefact-rich polluted wasteland.

* Provided they're well stored, Some gramophone records are likely to last thousands of years due to being made of vinyl.

* Microfilm and microfiche are resilient information storage technologies, because all that's required to read them is light and a lens.

** Even then they need careful handling and storage as they use gelatin, the stuff used to cultivate moulds and bacteria in Petri dishes.