Ragnarok Proofing - Television Tropes & Idioms

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alt title(s): Ragnaroof Proofing

We've gone from bashing our information into rock, where it will last a billion years, to putting the sum-total of the knowledge of the universe on - a chip you can destroy with a fridge magnet.

— Glen Foster

It is, understandably, common in post-apocalyptic fiction 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 pre-cataclysm society are in remarkable condition. Buildings and objects will never fall apart due to neglect, and any pre-cataclysm tools or vehicles that the characters find will work just fine.

In reality, time isn't so kind to abandoned modern technology. As far as electronics are concerned, all but the simplest circuits will fail after decades of being unused. Electrolytic capacitors dry out, batteries self-discharge, flash memory very slowly fades away, and the chassis and contacts will rust. Hard discs rot or degrade in the same time frame, and the skin of optical media such as blue-rays and DVDs corrodes and renders the disc illegible (aka "CD rot"). Wooden frame buildings will last about 50 years before falling apart thanks to termites and rotting. After about 75 years, cars will turn into almost unrecognizable piles of metal. Large bridges will collapse after only a century, and most skyscrapers will collapse after around 200-300 years. After 500 years, nearly all concrete structures still standing will crumble as their steel reinforcements corrode. And this is all assuming that a natural disaster like a tornado, earthquake, or hurricane doesn't destroy it all first. (How much of Florida would survive 10 years if people weren't around to board everything up each summer?)

None of this even takes into account planned obsolescence.

After a thousand years, the Earth will look much like it was before humans, and few obvious traces of civilization will be left. Plastics will keep for a long time until something figures out how to properly eat them; major cities, being massive conglomeration of artificial rock on the scale of a coral reef or lava flow, will leave traces in the geological record discernible for several hundred million years; depleted uranium will remain detectably depleted for billions of years; anything made out of bronze is expected to last for millions of years (so cast your memoirs with it) — but none of this will be visible to a casual observer, or even a medieval society.

Note: there is an expensive way to render any metal rust proof the same way that platinum is. One would assume that these relics have survived because of a similar process and the chemicals used in it are breaking down. This allowing the relics to decay in places where the treatment faded first.

If only one thing inexplicably survives, such as in a Time Travel or Earth All Along setting, it's known as The Constant.

Societies with Ragnarok Proofing will allow a Scavenger World to exist, using Schizo Tech from many different time periods.

The History Channel produced a television special documentary film and TV series Life After People where scientists and other experts speculate about how the Earth might be like if, suddenly, humanity no longer existed. The timeline they predict can be found here.

The term Ragnarök comes from Norse Mythology, and means 'Destiny of the Gods'; it's more often mistranslated though as Götterdämmerung, 'Twilight of the Gods' due to some German composer by the name of Richard Wagner.

A subtrope of Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale. See also Durable Deathtrap, Apocalypse Not, In Working Order. Subtrope of They Dont Make Them Like They Used To. See Indestructible Edible for the food version.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Played straight & subverted in the Sankei Newspaper Astro Boy serial. When he 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 Canon God Exaxxion, which lay buried on Earth for over 2000 years before being excavated by the hero's father. Though it was kept in a giant space-packing crate & the mech itself is practically indestructible.
The main premise of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is partly about people (and Ridiculously Human Robots) having to cope with just how little Ragnarok Proofing actually exists in the real world.
- One memorable Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming, however, shows the Robot Girl blown away by the beauty of a submerged Yokosuka, streetlights still operational.
Both played straight & subverted in Turn-A Gundam. While Mobile Suits sealed in special "Mountain Cycle" chambers work more-or-less perfectly due to maintenance Nanomachines, other Lost Technology isn't so lucky. When Loran finds the titular Gundam's armory, nearly every weapon crumbles to dust when he tries to pick it up, aside from the Hyper Hammer & that one breaks after being used only once.
Played partially straight (but Justified) in Gao Gai Gar, when the missing ChoRyuJin is dug up after sixty-five million years, his body is completely fossilized, but his AIs are found to still be in working order. It turns out, however, that he had some serious Applied Phlebotinum they were using specifically to keep himself alive long enough to be found again.
Averted in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, where one universe features an entire world in ruins from acid rain and pollution, most buildings already starting to crumble from the carbonic acid and lack of human maintenance.
- A flashforward to a few centuries hence shows nothing but desert. The aversion is partially suspended for a single building, justified by its having a magic reservoir underneath it- and it was partially decayed.
In Desert Punk, the Great Kanto Desert is littered with the ruins of an ancient civilization — giant, worn-down, mostly collapsed skyscrapers.
The manga one-shot Hotel is a case of deliberate Ragnarok Proofing. The main character is a robotically controlled, self-repairing structure designed to preserve the genetic data of Earth's creatures for billions of years after global warming has destroyed everything.
The supply hatches in 7Seeds.
- Slightly subverted by a hotel dining room that's found in one chapter. It's obviously rotting and is filled with overgrown plants. Played straight in that it has a perfectly working organ.
A significant plot point in King Of Thorn, when the characters are trying to figure out how far in the future they are after waking up from suspended animation. The massive jungle of thorns that has overgrown the island indicates that thousands of years have passed until one character notices that the lights are still on and none of the bulbs have burned out...

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Film

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: the main character David (a Ridiculously Human Robot made to be exactly like a real boy) ends up trapped underwater in a police hovercar/submarine, wishing to a statue that he could be a real boy. 2000 years later, he's run out of power and is revived by a literal Hand Wave from a Sufficiently Advanced Alien. Boy robot gets up and walks around, albeit clumsily. As an added bonus, the New York Skyline (circa 1999) is perfectly intact despite being submerged in water which then froze solid.
- Well, given that he's been sealed in an airless environment (the air wouldn't have stayed in the submarine forever, of course) there wouldn't have been much to erode his systems. Plus, it is a Hand Wave- thereby restoring aged systems and reactivating him in the process. As for the Skyline... I got nothing.
Nicely averted in Back To The Future III. The time machine, built out of a DeLorean, is sealed into a disused chamber in a boarded-up mine in 1885, to protect it from damage. When it's dug up in 1955, even though it's mostly intact, it still needs extensive repair.
Battlefield Earth is one of the worst offenders. The Earth has been taken over by aliens for a thousand years, and the characters escape into the ruins of Denver, Colorado. Not only are all of the buildings still standing, but books are still readable, computers still work, and military jets that should have crumbled into dust centuries ago are completely operational. And they have perfectly working jet fuel, which has a shelf life of 40 years. And as if that weren't bad enough, the characters even encounter an abandoned shopping mall where frozen chickens can still be found in the supermarkets.
- This is a major divergence from the book, wherein civilization was pretty much completely gone, buildings crumbling, machines rusted to junk, books decayed to the point of falling apart. Although the book has other problems.
Averted in Children Of Men when the main characters walk through a crumbling school and see a deer. The school showed fairly realistic decay and mold for being unused for roughly 10-20 years.
In Demolition Man, La Resistance lives as scavengers in the underground ruins of San Diego. (Or possibly Los Angeles. Or literally anywhere in between.) In the midst of all this poverty and squalor, they happen to have a perfectly maintained and in working order 1970 Oldsmobile 442 — a muscle car that would've been decades old when Sly Stallone's character was first frozen. They also happen to have a working freight elevator that's strong enough to carry the car to the surface... and through the floor of an office building.
- Well it's not like all that much time passed, the ruins being a result of an earthquake and the squalor fitting their "living down and dirty" philosophy (remember, they could all join in a life of boring comfort on the surface if they wanted).
Waterworld is another major offender. It's been long enough for people to forget that there ever was dry land. The ruins of pre-cataclysm society have spent all this time underwater. Despite this, ~~anyone~~ the Mariner can just swim down to a former city and come back up with perfectly working artifacts. The "smokers" have completely operational jet skis and sea planes, and even large stashes of cigarettes, which have a shelf life of a few weeks.
Parodied in the Woody Allen comedy Sleeper. After 200 years, a VW Beetle is still in perfect working condition. Woody's character then remarks, "Wow, they really built these things, didn't they?"
In the Ralph Bakshi film Wizards, Blackwolf finds a movie projector and propaganda films from Nazi Germany. The film is set two million years from now.
WALL-E plays this straight mostly. The world that's been abandoned for 700 years is filled with rust and falling apart. The eponymous robot has only survived for so long by scavenging parts from other robots as they break down. However, even after 700 years, and all the believable wear and tear, there are a great many buildings still standing, ships operate enough to use their magnet, buildings are mostly intact, electronic billboards operate enough to give exposition, and most of the random gadgets that Wall-E finds are in perfect working condition, including an old VCR and VHS (maybe not perfect, but far better off than they should be after 700 years).
- If you watch closely the beginning, you could see a group of wind electric generators in a hill near the city where Wall-E lives, who can explain how the electric billboards are still (randomly) working. Still, how those generator are functional after all those years push the suspension of disbelief a bit.
  - Not necessarily. WALL-E survived for 700 years; there's no reason to think that other robots didn't last a few centuries. It's not difficult to imagine repair robots mindlessly maintaining the wind farms for hundreds of years.
  - Pretty much all the technology in the movie was built to last through the ages. Say what you want about Buy-N-Large, they didn't skimp on quality.
  - One should also note that they didn't skimp on the quality when it came to food as well, as evident by WALL-E feeding a cockroach a seven hundred year old Twinkie bar. Still intact. With the cream filling still inside. Effective preservatives, then.
  - I think the Twinkie part was played less for realism and more for humor. As the joke goes, "What are the only two things that could survive a nuclear apocalypse? Cockroaches and Twinkies."
Semi-averted in The Time Machine (2002) when Alexander Hartdegen finds the library from 2030, but in the year 802,701; the building itself is in ruins, but the artificial intelligence Librarian Vox 114 is still unbroken and semifunctional.
- Barely. His sanity was hanging on by a thread. Fortunately he got repaired and was able to fulfill his programming, happily teaching kids in the sunlight.
- The computer that is his brain, along with most of the projectors producing his image are undamaged after untold millennia, with no explanation to their power source. Considering that in the original work the Morlocks had considerable technical aptitude this could have been nicely explained that they kept him in working condition... but in this adaptation all Morlocks save for their leader-caste are savage brutes and even they don't seem to have interest in old technology.
The So Bad Its Horrible, unnecessary remake of Planet Of The Apes had a space station shot through a Negative Space Wedgie of the especially Magical variety. It wound up being abandoned for centuries, on an Earthlike planet's surface, with zero maintenance, and the computer and thrusters still worked immediately upon being activated.
The main character in Doomsday finds a Bentley that's been in a storage locker for twenty-seven years. It's in perfect condition with a full tank of petrol, and she has no problem using it to stage a Mad Max-style chase with the bad guys. This may be justifiable (after all, it had been locked away in a sealed underground bunker), but what can't be explained is how the denizens of post-apocalyptic Scotland have somehow managed to keep their own cars running for twenty-seven years, despite there being no oil on the Scottish mainland (it all comes from the North Sea).
Played completely straight in the movie Logan's Run, where the city has been running completely without maintenance for at least 200 years. The main characters wander through several rooms of massive machinery which is merrily pumping away with no one looking after it. And this doesn't even get into the problems of how food was imported into the city and waste was exported from it.

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Literature

Marvin from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. Thanks to Time Travel, his subjective age is 37 times the lifespan of the universe, and the diodes on his left side were never replaced in all that time.
- This was Played For Laughs though. The diodes had been causing him pain since before he was first separated from his human companions so, given his miserable outlook they would be the only thing on him that was never replaced.
The Takers, an Indiana Jones-homage novel by Jerry Ahern, has an abandoned alien base with still-operable UFO's under the Antarctic ice. It also contains the dead bodies of an earlier Nazi expedition — as it turns out, the base's self defense system is also in full working order...
In the Ray Bradbury story There Will Come Soft Rains, a futuristic house is shown with still working robot technology after a nuclear war has wiped out humanity, since it has been programmed to do a certain amount of self-maintenance. Too bad it runs out of water trying to put out a fire in itself, since there isn't any water service anymore, and its backup systems don't prove effective enough.
Averted in World War Z - when most things from before the war end up either being ruined (including buildings), useless (electronics), or scrapped and recycled (cars into Lobos for instance.)
Averted and justified in the Homecoming series by Orson Scott Card. The technology was all designed to be self repairing even on the stuff doing the repairs and last a very long time regardless... but it's been forty million years since this stuff was built. Naturally, some of it broke down anyway and characters are amazed that even more isn't broken.
Averted (sort of) in 3001: while no real Ragnarok affects it (civilization is alive and well, in fact), the 20th-century architecture of the UN building in New York City is extant and about as close to Ragnarok-proof as they come because it has been preserved in a thin layer of diamond.
L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth had the library deliberately preserved by the Psychlos, but it still had skyscrapers still standing, tommy guns and other munitions still functional, and other things unlikely to have survived a thousand years intact.
- If I recall the various guns were in an air tight sealed container.
The Dark Tower books by Stephen King have technology of the Ancients that still exists and functions, for the most part. There are functioning oil derricks in Mejis, working robots near the Callah Bryn Sturgis, and Blaine the Mono. This might be justified, because the flow of time in Roland's world is said to be very inconsistent, as is distance and direction.
- The robots and Blaine were designed with future tech that was supposed to run forever, so the fact that they're breaking down at all is proof that they weren't Ragnarok Proofed. We'll have to go with the funky flow of time thing for the derricks, though.
  - Flow of time and reality itself... pretty much all of existence is going completely loopy. That's what the heroes want to fix, after all.
Averted in The Pilgrims of Rayne in DJ MacHale's The Pendragon Adventure series. The ruins of Rubic City are seriously damaged solely due to neglect. The presence of some operational machines is justified by the presence of the Flighters, looters who don't have much of a civilization at all but apparently maintain a few things they find useful, such as warships.
Semi-averted in George R. R. Martin's Tuf Voyaging, where Tuf finds an EEC seed-ship which has been abandoned for over 1,000 years, which is somewhat functional as the original crew had shut it down for long term storage including automated repair robots, but which required significant repairs to make it fully operational. But only semi-averted, in that things like air lock door seals and handles still worked perfectly even after being exposed to vacuum for a millennium.
Larry Niven's A World Out Of Time has high-tech devices, including a network of teleport booths, Flying Cars, automated house-manufacturing units, and medical technology still functioning after three million years. The setting does have temporal stasis technology, so may be Justified.
Averted in Terry Pratchett's Strata. An artificial world has survived for several thousand years, maintained by a sophisticated AI and an army of robots that have managed to keep it and themselves in working order, but they can't keep it up forever; eventually there will just be too many worn-out parts for them to replace. ("What do you do when the robot that repairs the robot-repairing robots breaks down?") The protagonists arrive just as things are reaching that point and the world is on the verge of final breakdown.
- In fact it is revealed in the end that they arrive because the world is on the verge of final breakdown and they've been brought there as a result of the central AI's desperate attempt to get outside help.
- Larry Niven's Ringworld is in a similar state of decline when discovered, due to centuries of not-so-competent management by Bram.
Discussed in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space:
Sylveste: It's my suspicion — no; not a suspicion, my conclusion — that the Amarantin eventually progressed to the point where they could achieve space travel.
Sajaki: From what I gathered on the surface there's very little in the fossil record to substantiate that.
Sylveste: But there wouldn't be, would there? Technological artefacts are inherently less durable than more primitive items. Pottery endures. Microcircuits crumble to dust.
In Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen, set thousands of years After The End, the heroes search for a magic metal elephant to help them in the war. The elephant turns out to be a ~~completely~~ mostly operational nuclear-powered battle tank from before the nuclear holocaust. The armament is dead and the chemical-protective gear crumbles when touched, but the controls still light up, the engine roars, and none of the drive mechanism is broken. This is rare enough on a tank that hasn't been maintained since last week.
H. P. Lovecraft's Elder Things and the Great Race of Yith were said to have colonized the Earth about a billion years ago and 200 million years ago, respectively. Yet, there are remarkably intact ruins of their colonies on Earth discovered by humans much later on. The Shadow Out of Time even has the protagonist uncovering Yithian books from a millions-of-years-old ruins in the Australian desert. Then there's At the Mountains of Madness where an entire Elder Thing city is found relatively intact in Antarctica, along with exceedingly well-preserved Elder Thing bodies. May be explained as the Elder Things and Yithians being very advanced aliens and possibly in possession of insanely durable materials construction and preservation technologies, but still...
- The whole point was to demonstrate just how ridiculously advanced they were. The archive of the Great Race was explicitly stated to have been built to last any cataclysms in the billions of years it'll remain unused, until they come back to reclaim it. None of the advanced technology of the either species has survived, however.
- Also, the Elder Thing city has "only" been abandoned for about 5 million years, and it's made of *insanely huge* stone blocks.
  - And there was a perfectly good reason why the bodies they found were so "well-preserved"...
In Timothy Zahn's Star Wars novel Dark Force Rising, the characters come across a lost fleet of heavy cruisers which have been missing for ~~sixty~~ forty years. The running lights and life support are still active on most of the ships, but other systems, including engines, weapons, and others are either broken or one use away from disintegrating. A few ancient maintenance droids still make their rounds in the ships, and the main computers seem to be online. One character notes that ships using "full slave rigging" were designed to last.
- For those who don't know, "slave rigging" means that a ship designed to run with a crew of 16,000 is refitted to run for the rest of its useful life with a crew of 2,000 or so; that means droids keep everything in working order the best they can without replacement parts and keep the lights on for their long-dead (from some sort of funky disease) crews.
In The Night Land, there are aircraft that would still be functional, if the air wasn't too thin to support them. They've remained in working order for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of years.
In Foundation and Empire, one person notes that on the planets which the Empire left, 150 years later the factories are crumbling into dust - but the park benches remain.

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Live Action TV

In an episode of Star Trek Enterprise, Archer is transported to an abandoned Earth in the 31st century. There, he finds a library with books that are still readable.
- The episode, however, doesn't really tell us when Earth was abandoned, though it's implied to be sometime before the Next Generation/Deep Space Nine era, so it might be one of the rare instances of Enterprise avoiding a screw-up.
- Let's not forget the TNG Episode "Booby Trap", where the crew boards a 1000 year old Promellian warship that still has air. Yes, the life support system, lights, power generator etc. have been in use constantly for 1000 years with no maintenance and not only have not completely broken down but are in good enough condition that the Enterprise crew feels safe beaming over with no spacesuits. There is Lampshade Hanging, with Picard remarking that the ship was built "for the generations" and it worked.
- Or TNG's Time's Arrow where 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.
- This is quite aside from a 1937 pickup truck, floating in space and intact, in the Voyager episode "The 37s". The truck itself surviving in space isn't as silly as it seems (though see below), but never mind that the fuel's still good: that there's fuel left in the tank at all, it having been in space for some time (even if it wasn't for the full 450 years), puts the entire thing into the realm of the ridonkulous.
  - Not to mention that aforesaid pickup started on the second try without any repair work other than 'try it again'...
- In the TNG episode "Contagion", they come across a perfectly functioning pan-galactic teleporter, which was built over 200,000 years ago... and the planet it was found on was an uninhabitable wasteland... which was made that way via orbital bombardment, around the same time.
Averted in the ''Doctor Who" story "The Sontaran Experiment" which has the Doctor, Sarah and Harry land in the middle of a nice, pleasant meadow that just happens to be what once was the heart of central London many centuries ago.
Red Dwarf has no end of functional artifacts and living creatures that seem to date back to around the time that Lister left the solar system, give or take a few centuries, including the eponymous ship itself. Given that the show takes place 3 million years after he left, it's amazing they still work so well.
- According to the novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, the ship was originally used for extremely long periods of deep space exploration before being converted into a mining craft — the reason why it carries a stasis chamber to begin with. Also, "vacuum storage" is mentioned, indicating that the possessions of the crew were kept in stasis as well.
This problem is mostly avoided in Stargate SG 1, where most of the alien sites the team visits are some combination of inhabited, in ruins, or made of Applied Phlebotinum.
- In the episode Moebius, Daniel takes what appears to be a small commercial camcorder on a time-travel 5000 years into the past. When the team screws up the timeline, he leaves the camcorder in a buried jar to be unearthed in the 21st Century. The Alternate History SG-1 watches the tape with little difficulty (Hammond says only that the battery needed to be recharged) and take the camera with them to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, then leave it buried again for the back-to-normal SG-1 to find, meaning this simple piece of home electronics has made a 10,000 year round-trip journey!
  - Justified as it is essentially an alien stasis chamber, able to keep a symbiote alive for just as long.
  - No, it couldn't have been, since Daniel planned for it to be found by a civilian archeology excavation. It was a normal jar, sealed and buried to protect against heat and exposure. If it had been a stasis jar, why would the battery have needed charging?
  - Because, as we can see, it already ran out when Daniel tried to record information about the ZPM.
In the spinoff Stargate Atlantis, Atlantis has been abandoned for 10,000 years at the bottom of the sea with a shield covering it, but most of the things inside is in working order or at least intact, down to the dead plants. We do see several sections of the city that protruded outside the shield and were worse for wear, however, and in one episode we see a "sister city" of Atlantis that was left on a planet's surface without the protection of a shield. It's so overrun with vegetation and general decay that only the central tower is even recognizable. The city's weapon system is still functional, however.
In Stargate Universe the Ancient exploration ship Destiny was launched on an unmanned voyage long before Atlantis left Earth, perhaps more than a million years ago. When the protagonists arrive it's still travelling but is very much the worse for wear - the majority of its interior is sealed off to contain various hull breaches, its life support system is no longer able to extract carbon dioxide from the air (the filters are quite realistically choked with toxic black muck), and even the lights are dim or failing. It appears that much of the plot of the show is going to be centered around the challenge of trying to stay alive in the decrepit hulk. Still, this is not bad considering how long it's been traveling.
Power Rangers features this in spades. Alpha is not limber or possessing of sufficient dexterity to have kept the place running for 10,000 years. Dai Shi's palace also survived 10,000 years with no repair, and the haunts of the demons in Lightspeed Rescue made it for 3000 with no maintenance while all its inhabitants were trapped in a tomb, and while the Animarium displayed some decay, it was much too intact for having been uninhabited for 3,000 years.

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Tabletop Games

Video Games

In Assassins Creed, the Piece of Eden, an alien artifact of unknown origin is in perfect condition after being lost and buried for god knows how many millenia.
- God did it. Don't question it or you'll wind up writing articles like this one.
Justified/handwaved in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The abandoned Dwemer settlements, despite being deserted for thousands of years, are filled with running machinery and weapons and armour in perfect condition, however the Dwemer bent/changed the laws of physics to make their materials impervious to wear, tear and corrosion.
- Lampshaded in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion when random civilians remark that it's amazing that all the traps in the ruins still work after all this time.
You can't swing a sword in Final Fantasy games without hitting a fully functional relic of a lost civilization:
- The very first Final Fantasy has the Sky Warriors, who built a fabulous Floating Castle, robots, and an Airship before being obliterated by the Fiends. The Castle was abandoned, the robots were left to fend for themselves in the ruins (one of them even fell from the sky and crashed near a waterfall) and the Airship was buried in a desert, and yet everything is in perfect working order by the time the Light Warriors need to use it.
- The Lonka (or Ronka) Ruins of Final Fantasy V, buried beneath the surface for thousands of years, work well enough to activate computerized defense systems and artillery when raised into the skies.
- The Gardens in Final Fantasy VIII were built by the Centra, an ancient civilization that was obliterated during the last Lunar Cry. Though hopelessly derelict by the time they're turned into SeeD schools, the technology that transforms them into flying, mobile stations works perfectly fine.
- The Al-Bhed tribe in Final Fantasy X is devoted entirely to salvaging Ancient Technology, but this often goes to ridiculous lengths. Case in point: Cid's airship, the Fahrenheit, was found embedded in rock, underwater, a thousand years after the fall of civilization. Not only is its interior in perfect condition (as Tidus and Rikku verify when they first salvage it), its weaponry is fully operational and Cid gets it airborne within a matter of days. Similarly, the Sin-level Vegnagun, sealed under Bevelle for a thousand years, is in perfect condition when Shuyin steals it.
Averted in Half Life 2. The world is one giant ruin, and the only technology that still works reliably is being maintained by either the alien invaders or human survivors.
- Note that the game takes place only twenty years after the alien invasion, so most of the buildings are still standing and such, although many are falling apart.
Xenogears embraces this trope with singular joy:
- Although the Eldridge crashed into Earth tens of thousands of years ago, and broke up as it hit the surface, its individual systems (such as the security robots, laser turrets, and defense reflectors, and the computer systems needed to run them) work as if they had been built yesterday.
- Additionally, there's the Gears themselves (giant mecha found buried beneath the surface), some of which come from the previous civilization, but the most powerful ones are much, much older than that and presumably come from the Eldridge itself.
- The Yggdrasil vessels, including a sand-sub, a seaworthy version, and even a gigantic robot which had actually been built on because people thought it was a ruin.
- The Eldridge-era Merkava and Excalibur-class ships.
- Although it comes after the Eldridge incident, the Zeboim civilization is thousands of years old by the time the game takes place. It left behind an entire city, preserved for thousands of years, including a nanotechnology lab with a living Artificial Human made entirely out of nanites.
  - you forget that Xenogears revolves around the Zohar, so its not unlikely that it literally Deus Ex Machina-ed some mecha for the people who would eventually free it... hell, that is why it reincarnated the same dumbasses again and again throughout the centuries.
  - Hell: the civilisation that built the Eldridge managed to enslave god, so their gadgets should at least be able to endure a few millenia.
While Chrono Cross's Chronopolis is at least ten thousand years old, it can be argued that its AI caretaker took precautions to keep it in working order. The same cannot be said for Terra Tower, which was sealed under the sea for that same amount of time and whose defense mechanisms (of a more organic, rather than electronic, form of technology) were up to the task when freed.
Avoided by Chrono Trigger: By the year of 2300 AD, mankind is struggling to survive using technology from 1999 AD, but since most of it has broken down beyond repair, humanity is nearly extinct. Even Robo, found in an abandoned dome, needed extensive repairs from a genius inventor. The only technology that still works properly is the one maintained by the Mother Brain.
- Similarly, after spending a couple of hundred years enshrined in a forest temple, Robo had to be repaired again by Lucca, proving that his technology isn't durable without constant maintenance.
One part of Metal Slug 3D has Marco fall into decently preserved ruins of an ancient alien civilization... 8 billion years old.
Averted with glee in Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden, wherein they are teleported to a strange and distant world with a mishmash of technology, only to discover it is their future, some unknown amount of years. Almost nothing from the past has survived but technology specifically sealed in Mountain Cycles, chambers made to maintain whatever is in it indefinitely.
- ...which is a plot point taken from Turn A Gundam.
Justified in Halo. The eponymous rings are in perfect working condition, but there's robots to upkeep everything, and factories that build robots, etc. The Forerunners built these things to last.
In Mega Man ZX Advent, you can find several artifacts from the original Mega Man series, despite the fact that at least 400 years have passed since then. Legends seems to play this straight with its underground ruins full of Lost Technology, but later we find out that while the infrastructure that maintains them is severely compromised, it's still there, just hidden from the common people.
- Of course, then it turns out that the common people are Lost Technology themselves; a form of robot called a 'Carbon Unit', and the last actual, biological human died a very, very long time ago. Of course, we're talking Lost Technology capable of sexual reproduction here.
Mass Effect is littered with Prothean relics and buildings, despite the fact that the Protheans died many thousands of years ago. However, some of these places, such as the gigantic Citadel space station that still works perfectly despite being millions of years old, are constantly being repaired.
- For example, the Prothean ruin humans discovered on Mars had an ancient computer and generator that were still working despite fifty thousand years without maintenance. The in-game codex lampshades how unlikely this is.
- Also The Citadel and the mass relays aren't Prothian, but built by a significantly more advanced race who designed them specifically to survive the lifetime of Galactic Civilisation.
- The Mass Relays and the Citadel fall under slightly different rules given they aren't confined to an atmosphere or the gravity of a planet. This works for and against the devices. While they wouldn't fail due to rust, they also wouldn't receive the protection of an atmosphere. They'd be directly exposed to starlight—heated to molten temperatures—or possibly allowed to drop to brittle temperatures that would cause them to shatter. Further more, without an atmosphere, they'd be subject to the same kind of debris that has left the face of the moon scarred.
  - However the Prothean Megacity on Feros, and the Archives on Ilos, definitely do fit under the trope. On the former thin vertical spires several kilometers high are still standing, even after said 50,000 years of weather erosion and simple decay. On the later there are still functioning power sources, elevators, lighting, force fields and elaborate Virtual Intelligence terminals (slightly degraded).
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 Quartz, ranging from a simple lever-operated door to an entire mobile fortress, works perfectly after 2000 years in Tales Of Hearts.
The Fallout series takes place a number of years after a thermonuclear holocaust wiped out every major population center on the planet. Despite that, Fallout has completely abandoned sewer systems that haven't collapsed fifty years after the last human could have walked through them, Fallout 3 is set 200 years after the War, and there are still freestanding wooden house support beams, identifiable cars (that explode), glass soda bottles that still have ~~good-tasting~~ potable liquid in them, and a standing Washington monument. The most grievous example? Abraham Lincoln's Henry Rifle from 1860, fully functional.
- 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.
  - Not to mention that this is an alternate universe run on 1950s SCIENCE! in which radiation makes animals bigger, stronger, and in some cases intelligent and vacuum tubes can be used to make everything from wrist-mounted computers and robots to Frickin Laser Beams. Safe to say that the creators intended a slightly different version of the laws of physics.
  - Presumably this also explains why one can enter an area that was hit directly by a nuke (the Glow, for instance) and find computers and other electronics in perfect working order. EMP shielding was serious business in 2077.
  - Actually, that ties into the vacuum tubes. Vacuum tube computers may be slower, clunkier, and overall less efficient, but they lack the vulnerability to electromagnetic pulses that modern computers have.
Used and abused in the Legend Of Zelda series, which not only takes place over a period of thousands of years, but already has ancient Magitech in the chronological beginning, which is still running perfectly by the chronological end, despite being used (and not at all maintained) fairly frequently throughout. The Master Sword in particular is notable, as it is never shown being cleaned of blood and spends centuries at a time exposed to the elements, yet still hasn't shown any signs of rust.
- The Master Sword isn't made of iron, and it's explicitly magic. I think that one's justified. The bow you get in Twilight Princess that was implied to be the one from OoT? Not so much.
  - Yes it is, and it's the same justification. There's a reason it's called "Fairy Bow".
Done in Marathon 2 and Infinity (3rd game). The ruins of the S'pht civilization might look run down, but anything the player needs to use (Computer terminals, shield rechargers, doors, lifts, etc) works just fine. Lampshaded at least twice.
Tycho: It's likely a quick and dirty patch into the durable S'pht hardware. These types of strongholds were build to outlast centuries of warfare.
Pfhor computer terminal: The quality of the machinery is quite extraordinary, and most of the computer terminals are still functional even after two thousand years.
- Justified, in that the S'pht have been so advanced for so long that prior to meeting the Pfhor couldn't conceive of non-cybernetic intelligence. They were originally created to serve as servants of the Jjaro, a race so advanced that they could warp entire planets instantly through space millions of years before the game's timeline.
Wild ARMs - This trope inverted may actually justify the Word Of God stating that all six games take place on the same very unlucky planet... just thousands upon thousands of years apart. After all, technology just doesn't last!
- Of course, you've still got facilities/bits of tech built thousands of years before game start in working order in 3...
Overplayed to the extreme in Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. At one point in the game Shadow gets stuck 200 years in a post-apocalyptic future complete with a city that is mostly intact only perpetually on fire. Rouge's solution? [[To put a Mineral Mac Guffin in her robot friend E-123 Omega's glove compartment and put him on sleep mode for the next two hundred years so Shadow can find him in the future and use it to teleport back in time.]] Needless to say, he survives Armageddon unscathed and the plan works perfectly.

Close Video Games

Web Comics

Western Animation

Thundarr The Barbarian. It's very doubtful that the working machinery and the wrecked cars that everybody tosses around like footballs would be anything but dust in the year 3994. Same for all of the buildings which are ruined but still standing.
Partially justified and averted in "Artifacts", an episode of The Batman set 1000 years after Batman's death. All of the computers in the Batcave were entirely ruined. The suits were vacuum-sealed. The entire reason the cave stayed up was because it had braces made of titanium, which is famous for resistance to corrosion, that also had a message stored on them in binary since Batman knew the computer wouldn't keep working, and the largely intact Batmobile was presumably made of the same material.
Old New York is in surprisingly well-preserved ruins a thousand years later under New New York in Futurama when Fry, Leela and Bender go there to find Fry's lucky seven-leaf clover.
- The mutants have been working there in the meantime. So there's that.
- Let's not forget that Bender's head spent a thousand years in a New Mexico desert without looking any worse for wear.
  - As of Bender's Big Score, he's lived thousands and thousands of years.
- There's also the cryogenics lab where Fry and others throughout the series are frozen. It remains completely functional and undisturbed while the rest of New York appears to get destroyed several times.
Cadillacs And Dinosaurs. (Hand Waved in that humanity has been living in underground cities, and the cadillacs are converted to run on dinosaur guano.)
In TheDCAU, the Justice League episode "Hereafter" has the JL's orbital Watchtower's communication system still funtional after tens of thousands of years in a jungle without maintainance. Even Batman can't build 'em that good.
- Savage said that the Watchtower only crashed into the jungle seventy-five years before that point in time. For most of those millenia, it was in space where the only threat was radiation and the occasional meteorite.
  - It's implied Savage used his gravity-messer-upper to soften the landing.
Subverted in Avatar The Last Airbender. An ancient city is in pretty good shape, but then it turns out the inhabitants still live there. No proofing, just actual upkeep.

Close 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 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 superstitious ramblings of an ancient, underdeveloped culture. Damn Interesting has an article on the process.
- Let's face it: if whoever is excavating this hundreds of thousands of years in the future is of Simian descent, ANY warning is just going to whet their curiosity.
- And whether the concept of radioactivity still exists or not at that point, it is still virtually impossible for ANY language to survive that sheer amount of time. Now, exactly how many archaeologists take Geiger Counters to their dig sites?
  - Fortunately, all of the nasty stuff will have decayed to background levels after only six, or seven hundred years. The long lived stuff is barely radioactive (there is an inverse relationship between half-life and radioactivity). If the Romans had nuclear power for a while and buried all of the evidence, the only telltales would be finds of depleted uranium— like at Oklo, careful chemical analysis would reveal the truth, but one of the signs is that it would be less radioactive than expected.
The 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.
- Subverted in that for many time capsules, nobody bothered to write down where they were and everybody who knew oops died of old age.
- Turns out the ragnaroof-proofing on the car time capsule mentioned below wasn't sufficient enough (after only 50 or so years).
- 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.
- What's inside them may be (as a rule) long gone to looters... the pyramids themselves are a powerful example of this trope. The Great Pyramid is over four thousand years old and spent most of that time as the tallest structure on the planet. Its so well constructed modern science can't decide on how it was done, and lacks only its limestone facade from ancient times. Barring the destructive impulses of its creators the Great Pyramid will likely last on a geological timescale.
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.
- Depends what it's made of. Space conditions can be very harsh on some substances.
The book The World Without Us, History Channel's copycat program, Life After People, and National Geographic's adaptation, Aftermath: Population Zero, very vividly and accurately illustrate what would happen to everything if humans suddenly disappeared, wrapped up in a big ol' theme of "humans suck, yeah?". The digest version pretty much is what the main article of this trope says.
- Less "humans suck" and more "humans are utimately small, ephemeral things in the existence of this planet much less the universe." Hm...
A working car, a (not enough) tightly sealed time capsule, and only half a century of waiting? Result: A rusty mess.
- The people who designed that capsule were idiots. Yes, it was "strong enough to withstand nuclear attack" (which was, in fact completely useless: nukes have been used how many times since then?), but they didn't bother waterproofing it! The car was soaked for the entire duration!
  - The vault was welded shut and the car was sheathed in plastic and sealing goo, but despite being nuke-proof, the vault wasn't construction-proof. They suspect it cracked due to construction in the area, and then flooded completely.
Take a trip into the Zone of Alienation to see what 18 years (as of the Spring 2004 trip) will do.
The book 'The Zombie Survival Guide' takes a close examination at what life will be like if say, the last living humans on earth in a huge honking survival shelter decide to go out for a look after fifteen years of hiding.
We really don't build them the way the Romans used to. Almost all of the buildings in the ancient Roman city of Ostia Antica are over a thousand years old; most of them closer to two thousand years old. It's still safe to wander up to the top of millennia-old blocks of flats to look at the cityscape. Pompeii and Herculaneum are similar examples, although they did have the advantage of being buried for most of that time. And some Roman roads are still in use today.
- Best example: Roman aqueducts. Many are essentially functional after a millennium of being in service. Carrying one of the main causes of erosion no less.
- One of the three underground fresh water feeds into Ancient Rome is *still* in use today, largely unmodified.
The Sword of Goujian was discovered in December, 1965, untarnished and still possessing a sharp edge, despite the tomb it was discovered in being soaked in water for over two thousand years. This exceptional state of preservation is believed to be due to the airtight scabbard in which the sword was found.