The breakdown of social order in a sealed off city.

I've been trying to write something for a while about a town and surrounding area that gets cut of from the rest of the world by a supernatural disaster, but some questions keep coming up.

The setting: a small-ish town or city and surrounding area, population 130 thousand ish. United Kingdom

The event: A darkness barrier (dome) blocks all access into and out of the area, no light can get though, power and communications are cut off, gas and water pressure have plummeted.

The questions

1.What is a realistic time scale for all social order to break down?

Current guess is under a month.

2. What would be the mental and psychical effects of prolonged lack of sunlight?

Vitamin D deficiency and depression/suicide is all I can thing of right now.

3. What is a realistic death toll for the first three months?

4. How much would the temperature drop with no light getting in?

5. Is this kind of thing likely to cause insanity in some people?

edited 25th Jun '11 5:17:06 PM by MCE

If there's no sunlight, it could become pitch black so probably you'd go crazy and scared within days. Plus you've no electricity for lights. You might even die of thirst within a week because it's nearly impossible to get water (you'd basically be blind).

If we say there's some little amount of light, so that you can at least see everywhere but it'd be a night time glow, then I think maybe the realisation of the lack of food sets in pretty quickly (maybe 2-4 weeks, so yeah a month sounds reasonable, but I'm not a psychologist). So the question is whether everyone just goes, oh well we're screwed now so we should just do whatever or we should just die together.

The people in this story would be dependant on torches and the like. I predicted there would a lot of deaths within the first two weeks, mostly of the elderly, those is hospitals and those unable to care for themselves.

I'm also guessing there would be several 'end of the world parties' as people just gave up or couldn't cope with the idea of survival in the darkness.

edited 25th Jun '11 10:05:10 AM by MCE

Depending on the city, it's quite plausible that it might have its own power plant that could provide power for however long it has fuel for—probably a small number of weeks.

Just remembered that my idea was originally about a town not a city, still, event without a local power plant some organisations (hospitals, police stations) would probably have emergency power for a few days.

To discuss the thermodynamics of it: If the dome is some magical no-energy-passes machine (or if it's mirrored on the outside), then everything will quickly start to become very cold. Depending on how much heat still passes through the ground, air may or may not start liquefying by the time a month is out. (Actually, this behavior depends on how incident radiation to the inside of the dome is treated; if it's absorbed without heating the dome, then yeah, air liquefying within a month. If it's reflected, or the dome acts like a real black body, not so much.) If the dome acts like a real black body on the outside, it will get cold in the middle of the dome, but probably just bad-winter cold, and probably become oppressively hot near the dome itself.

I'll probably allow heat and air to pass though the dome, just not light. How much info to have on the dome is tricky, considering it is the only supernatural element in the story. (probably)

edited 26th Jun '11 3:38:09 AM by MCE

If you allow heat and air through...well, you can probably just handwave it, in that case, and your eventual temperature will be colder but not even winter-cold (imagine nighttime of whatever season it is).

At the beginning, I imagine bottled water, flashlights (anything battery-powered, really), and canned food will be life savers. But things like that can only last so long. Realistically, people and large buildings do own generators, which again would be a temporary fix. Not to mention those hand-crank flashlights some people have. But since not everyone has them and many people would probably prefer electrically powered light over torches, you could have people with things like that be mauled for their resources. Not to mention what would happen to supermarkets.

Chances are - and I'm no psychologist - that people could probably be categorized based on their reactions. Optimists who are waiting for help, those who have given up hope on help but still attempt to maintain order, straight-up anarchists (after a while becoming the majority whether it's because they kill the others or because other people simply give up on order), and the loners who stock up on everything you'd need for a zombie apocalypse and never go outside.

I'm sure there have been people who have gone years without looking at the sun. Perhaps you could do some research on the subject. Actually, what about those miners last year? I didn't read a lot about that incident, but the lack-of-light part of the situation seems pretty similar.

I imagine, given generators and flashlights, proper order could be maintained for...a week. After that, chaos starts to set in. At about three weeks, maybe four or five, resources start to disappear and things turn from slightly out of control to all out anarchy as people start to attack each other. At some point, once everything else is gone, cannibalism becomes the remaining option. That probably wouldn't happen for a while, though. It really all depends on how long the resources last for. Will people stick together and share their resources with others? Or hoard it for themselves, leaving their neighbors to starve?

But these are just theories and all of that could be completely wrong.

Also, I know that personally I'd go neurotic without television or my computer. Two lousy hours of battery power? I'd die. It's not just about losing sunlight, it's about losing electricity in such a technologically dependent society.

I'd venture to say that the darkness would only be the physical manifestation of everything that's happening (after all, blind people go their whole lives without light), but really it's the lack of energy and electricity that would be the problem. No sunlight = no plants = no food. If they had some means of continuing the cycle of life within the dome, they might have a slim shot at surviving for generations. But without that option, that's ultimately what will kill them. Even if they had ways to create those lights that plants can get energy from they could do it. But they don't.

Good points here. I'll look into some of the suggestions.

I'm kind relaying on a significant death toll in the early stages, made worse by the fact the darkness barrier causes progressive sensory deprivation the further you try and go into it (from the inside, solid on the outside).

If you get too far in you would collapse, unable to feel anything, slowly dying of thirst or starvation. I figure a few thousand would be lost in the first day or so as people try and get out. The survivors would be too afraid to try and escape or would warned by others about the effect.