Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Cyber-Dave Feb 25, 2008 23:02:01	Ok, so I need a semi-feasible reason why a nuclear war might leave a planet inhospitable to life for over 500 years. Fallout doesn't last that long... so what sci-fi mumbo jumbo can I use to explain why the planet might remain irradiated enough to be deadly to human life for that duration of time? I figure that there will be a nuclear winter, coupled with fallout, and irradiated chunks of planet. Any reason why this might make the atmosphere unbreathable? The more ideas behind how such a war can leave a planet inhospitable for 500 years or so, the better...
#2 backstabbist Feb 26, 2008 2:49:29	Nuke the Ocean, then the rain cycle is something to avoid getting on you or in you. Without drinkable water, Earth is not such a great place to live. Convetional the Nukes, BunkerBust open the Fission power plants around the world, and the holes where they went ChinaSyndrome or Chernobyl will continue to cook off serious rads for a long time into the enviroment.... keeping the place hot. Catastrophic Failure of the Moon Maser, While carving the trench to reverse the flow of the Colorado River, a major systems fault could cause the Moon Maser to output an unfocused harmful band while the system is operating, and it will only operate as long as Sol powers the collector fields on the moon.... and that is a long time.
#3 atanakar Feb 26, 2008 5:41:29	A scientific experiment gone very wrong. For exemple, testing of a recently discovered atomic particle - Davenium;) - triggers an unexpected chain reaction. This new element when bombarded has the side effect of attracting all other radioactive particles within a 100 mile radius to sustain itself!
#4 ed_209a Feb 26, 2008 13:07:25	Weaponized Nanotechnology might be a good one. Ditto if mass drivers in the asteroid belt are used to bombard the planet. If you drop a rock on every city large enough to see from orbit, technology will collapse pretty quickly, and without technology, this planet is pretty inhospitable for naked apes like us.
#5 jaid Feb 26, 2008 15:28:46	Weaponized Nanotechnology might be a good one. Ditto if mass drivers in the asteroid belt are used to bombard the planet. If you drop a rock on every city large enough to see from orbit, technology will collapse pretty quickly, and without technology, this planet is pretty inhospitable for naked apes like us. humans would be able to survive just fine with nothing more than pointy sticks and stones. wouldn't be nearly as comfortable, but it is certainly possible. from there, it would take very little time for crude technological devices such as slings, bows, spears, knives, etc can be made, and probably a variety of other basic tools such as hammers, axes, knives, etc. likewise, clothing would be entirely possible (minimal equipment is needed to knit or crochet, so if you can get your hands on yarn or even string you could make clothes, not to mention hides could also be worn, even if they are not terribly high-quality in the clothes department). seriously, the loss of technology would suck in a big way, but it absolutely would not render the planet uninhabitable.
#6 closet_nerd Mar 04, 2008 17:19:58	It doesn't matter if the planet is inhospitable if nothing lives there right? Just say that everything died. We have enough nukes to destroy the earth as we know it. It really doesn't matter if you go underground because chances are you don't have enough food or water there to sustain you for any reasonable amount of time. One word: volcanos. The Tsar Bomba (largest nuclear weapon ever exploded) generated a 7.0 on the richter scale and it was detonated 4km above the surface of the earth. Nagasaki, also detonated in the atmosphere generated a 5.0. Now if we imagine lots and lots and lots and lots of 5.0 magnitude quakes all over the earth- lava is going to flow. When lava flows, ecosystems die.
#7 ead Mar 07, 2008 12:50:22	What about the inhabitians of Earth, and the PCs, are they living in shelters, or are they on an other planet???.
#8 crwydryny Mar 08, 2008 8:19:57	well apart from the fallout (which usually lasts several weeks to a few months), then you have the nuclear winter (if the nuclear exchange was big enough) which should last a few years, next there's the possibility of nuclear weapons not being the only devices used. in a full scale nuclear war full NBC (nuclear bilogical and chemical) weapons will be used, resulting in plagues, toxic water (and as an extention rain) destroyed eccologies, then there's the posibility of instibility of the earth's crust should one of those strikes hit a falt line. this will result in the planet being uninhabitable for about 100-200 years, at which time it will start to repair itself so 500 years may be a bit long but you could explain it with the old "humanaty settles some where else" or "humanity becomes nomadic and eventually returns" sort of thing at which point you can go into all kinds of fun such as mutants and so forth
#9 backstabbist Mar 08, 2008 12:06:24	What about the inhabitians of Earth, and the PCs, are they living in shelters, or are they on an other planet???. Nukes are an Area Of Effect, the PCs simply had Evasion & made their save when the nukes hit their town.
#10 atanakar Mar 10, 2008 16:02:01	Gamma Rays from twin star final phase (real science) http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080310-mm-grb-us.html
#11 schizoveen May 03, 2008 14:58:11	any influence of oxygen should do it.. no oxygen == no life
#12 backstabbist May 03, 2008 16:06:05	What about a shortage of CO2 causing a catastrophic Global Cooling? You could have the temperature drop like 10 degrees over a 300 year period to kill everybody. Think of the poor polar bears unable to go swimming, they would die from boredom
#13 Mr_Rose May 04, 2008 5:16:14	no oxygen == no life Hahaha, no. Ionic Oxygen is a metabolic poison and it's release as molecular oxygen by the first green plants was an apocalyptic disaster for all life on the planet at the time (except the plants because they already had immunity, or they'd die of their own exhaled breath). If you re-combined all the O2 in the atmosphere into CO2 and other oxides it would mostly only severely inconvenience (aka kill) obligate aerobes like us. The bacteria would love it and the plants would probably learn to cope. As for he OP's question; frankly, it would be extremely unlikely that even a total release of all the nuclear weapons that were commissioned during the Cold War would have any appreciable long-term effect on the planet's ecology. Nuclear weapons just aren't that powerful. Consider that the atmosphere regularly absorbs and dissipates more energy that every nuke ever built could possibly release on a second-to-second basis and you're basically into "what effect does lots of fallout have on people?" Unfortunately for apocalyptic shenanigans, the answer is not very much at all - radiation poisoning in the severely affected, a slightly increased cancer rate in the general population and that's pretty much it... Basically, if you want a nuclear exchange to have the effect you describe, it's got to be stupid-big (like about a thousand times the USA's Cold War stockpile) , not limited to ground-based targets (stratospheric bursts spread fallout far more effectively than a typical airburst over a city), and use weapons that haven't actually been invented yet such as a cascading neutron activator that turns every atom within range into a neutron radiation source with a half-life of 250 years.
#14 doomsought May 04, 2008 9:25:42	Asteroid bombardment is your best bet. Lets say some BBEG found an asteroid made mostly of radioactive isotopes. then he got his hands on a few ICBMs and nukes. He uses the nukes to redirect its orbit so it falls to the sun. the earth just happens to get in the way. if this thing is about 10% long half life isotopes and a few miles in diameter... you can let the players think it through.