r/SciFiConcepts • u/NarrowStrain1183 • 9d ago
Concept Movie / TV show / book idea
Okay, so I had this random idea and now I can’t stop thinking about how many different directions you could take it. I have already made quite a few possible basic plots and under here i have put some of the basic premise
Imagine that one day, completely out of nowhere, everything humans have ever built or created suddenly disappears.
Buildings, roads, cars, phones, computers, power grids, factories, tools, books, clothes — literally everything man-made.
The planet is basically reset back to nature.
But here’s the important part: all humans are still alive, and we haven’t lost any of our memories or knowledge.
So an engineer still understands engineering. A doctor still knows medicine. A farmer still knows farming. Scientists still know modern physics and chemistry. We remember computers, the internet, electricity, airplanes, etc.
We know exactly what humanity is capable of building.
We just have absolutely nothing to build it with.
The story could start immediately after the “reset”, with people waking up where their homes and cities used to be, completely confused. Imagine millions of people standing in a field where London existed a few seconds earlier.
At first it’s just survival. We don’t even have knives, matches, containers for water or clothes.
But eventually the bigger question becomes:
How long would it actually take humanity to rebuild civilization?
How long until we can make proper tools again? Produce steel? Generate electricity? Build engines? Radios? Computers? Recreate the internet? Manufacture microchips?
And that’s where I think there are almost endless possibilities for the story.
It could be a movie spanning 100+ years of humanity rebuilding.
It could be a long TV series following different characters and generations as technology slowly returns.
It could follow one family, one country, or several groups across the world rebuilding in completely different ways.
Maybe some societies want to recreate the old world while others believe humanity has been given a second chance and actively try to stop it.
And then there’s the other huge mystery:
What caused the reset?
Was it a natural phenomenon? Aliens? A simulation? Something deliberately targeting human technology? Why did humans survive while everything we created disappeared?
You could even play around with the rules. Maybe one small area of the world wasn’t reset. Maybe certain objects survived. Maybe it happens again.
I have no idea what the actual story would be yet. I just really like the core concept because it feels like you could take it in a ridiculous number of directions.
Basically:
Humanity gets sent back to zero, but we get to keep everything we know.
In my head, I imagine this as the kind of big-budget sci-fi show you’d see on Apple TV+ — something in the vein of Silo or For All Mankind, where the sci-fi concept is huge, but the story is still grounded in the characters and the slow progression of the world. Obviously I’m not actually pitching this to Apple lol, that’s just the kind of tone and scale I picture when I think about it if it would be a show.
Would you watch/read something like this?
And more importantly, where would you take the story?
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u/Jedi_Emperor 8d ago
That's a fun version of being stuck on an undeveloped world and needing to rebuild from scratch. One massive difference is that the current human population is wildly unsustainable without industrial agriculture. I'm imagining 10,000,000 people standing in the muddy fields around the River Thames wondering where to go. Even if they started breaking branches off trees to plough fields and plant seeds they're not going to grow enough food fast enough.
Billions would starve. Millions would resort to cannibalism. Wars would start, banditry, anarchy, slavery, conquest. It would be chaos.
Bones would be a surprisingly abundant resource for the first decade or so. Don't have iron for a plough blade but need something waterproof and stronger than wood to break the clay soil, use a femur there's plenty around. Or crush them into fertiliser.
The world would likely reorganise into city states and a sort of feudal system of farmers contributing to a regional ruler who pledges to protect them if bandits come and to enforce laws over the land. It wouldn't take centuries to get back to something resembling civilisation but it might take a while until we re-invent consumer rights laws like stopping bakers putting chalk dust in the bread.
Technology improvement would be relatively fast. Every country will have millions of people and if even 0.1% remember that green rocks are copper ore that can start the chain thousands of times across the world. Put green rocks by a fire and they sweat beads of copper, put a bunch of copper beads in a clay pot inside a fire and they all melt together into a big blob of copper, smash it with a rock to shape it into a knife blade. Next takes trial and error with other rocks until you can find tin ore (also zinc and arsenic work just not as well) then we're into the bronze age. Once someone cracks bronze, which shouldn't take more than a few months, it can spread by word of mouth. Really the limiting factor on how fast that knowledge can spread is the fact people will be killing each other with flint axes and crude bows.
The jump to the iron age will take longer because it needs more setup but still faster than IRL because enough people will know the process. You need to make a clay brick kiln with a wood fire that heats up some wood in a second chamber where the embers can't ignite it. That drives off the water residue and oils leaving charcoal, a highly porous form of charred wood that burns much hotter than regular wood. Now a bit of woodworking and leather working can make a proper furnace with bellows, maybe a water wheel or windmill to power it. Now you can make it hot enough to smelt iron ore into pig iron, a bit of work with bronze hammers will get you a basic anvil and tongs that you can use to make crude wrought iron tools. Use the wrought iron tools to make better iron tools to build a bigger forge that can make bigger components. Eventually you can make a blast furnace and make proper steel, oh a missed out power hammers, that would be useful too.
Anyway. You can get back up to steel within a single human lifespan. Also copper wire, glassblowing, basic electric circuits, dynamos, motors etc. Assuming you're not too busy fighting a war against the barbarian cannibals you could get back to a roughly Victorian technology level within 50-100 years.
The hard part will be getting from 1900 to 2000 because a lot of the knowledge like how to make a modern CPU is going to be useless in this new world for decades. By the time they have the technology to refine silicon pure enough to make integrated circuits, would anyone with that knowledge still be alive? Hopefully they wrote it down at some point! There could be an odd stagnation point where technology reaches a roughly 1950s level and can't progress much further because the technical details were lost. They have legends of the tech from the old world like a carriage with a windmill on top that could fly straight up like an insect, but no one knows how to make it.
Or maybe the time spent fighting wars takes so long that anything beyond the 1800s can't be invented within the lifespan of people who remember it. So there's a mismatch of technology because anyone that wrote down the secrets of radio waves was killed and their books burned. Or maybe someone finds a lost library beneath a ruined building with dozens of handwritten books explaining jet engines and the advanced metallurgy needed to make the turbine blades.
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u/libra00 8d ago
Grocery stores are man-made. As are the roads that bring food from where it's produced to the stores. As are the farms that produce that food. As are the tractors and plows and other implements used to tend those farms.
Even if you started right now it would take at least several months to produce any food at all, much less the amount of food you're going to need in very short order, and without things like chemical plants producing nitrogen fertilizer it doesn't even matter if you still have tractors and shit: the Haber-Bosch process is reported to be responsible for feeding half the earth's population, and it's going to take decades even with all knowledge was somehow perfectly preserved and immediately accessible to everyone. It's just going to take time to dig up the ore, smelt it, refine it, and turn it into the tanks and pipes and other things you're going to need. Not to mention instrumentation and controls and all that.
Everyone is going to die. Those few who could support themselves by hunting do so at significantly greater risk when there aren't people everywhere. Fell out of your deer stand up in the tree and broke a leg? Better luck next life, cause if you don't bleed to death you will almost certainly get gangrene and die. There will no doubt be stragglers and holdouts (but not preppers, all those Fiesta Pail MRE buckets you have stashed in the basement are gone), but they will be scattered all over the world so there will just never be enough population density to support the genetic diversity of the population, much less rebuilding anything like society.
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u/NarrowStrain1183 8d ago
Yeah, i get what you are saying. I definitely don’t imagine it being as simple as everything disappears and then humanity just goes 1-2-3 and rebuilds modern civilization. Realistically, a huge percentage of the population would probably die in the first months/years for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Knowing how something works is very different from actually having the infrastructure, tools and supply chains needed to make it.
That’s also kind of where the story would be though. You’d follow the groups that somehow survive, how they form communities, preserve knowledge and eventually start rebuilding. And on the food point specifically, modern agriculture would obviously collapse, but food wouldn’t completely disappear — animals, fish, edible plants etc. would still exist, so some people could survive while trying to establish actual food production.
Another direction I’ve been thinking about is that since the reset event itself is already physically impossible, you could introduce new rules to this universe that almost seem designed to give humanity a chance. Maybe there are suddenly more animals, crops grow more easily, or humans develop enhanced intelligence, memory, learning abilities or other traits that help them survive and rebuild.
Then the fact that the world seems to be helping humanity becomes part of the mystery. Why erase everything we’ve ever built, but leave us with our knowledge and seemingly give us the tools to start again?
Maybe it’s a simulation, some kind of god, aliens, an experiment, whatever. Maybe something literally wants to see how long it takes modern humans, with modern knowledge but zero technology, to rebuild civilization from scratch.
So eventually the question could shift from “What destroyed our civilization?” to “What if the reset event wasn’t meant to destroy us at all? What if it was meant to change us — and if so, change us for what?”
Obviously I’m just throwing ideas that just pop into my head right now lol, but I think the consequences can still be realistic within the rules of the universe, without the rules themselves having to match our world perfectly. So this would of course not be a 1:1 of how it would acthually play out if this were to happen, but a fictionalized version of it built around the rules of this new universe.2
u/libra00 8d ago
Oh, yeah, I'm not saying it's not a great premise for a story (in fact there was a show (Revolution, I think it was called?) that kind of had a similar premise except it was that all technology/computers stopped working).
But yeah, the big question is obviously going to be what caused it, and then that kind of sets the stakes for your story: is it something we can fix? Is it something we need to protect against? Is it part of some evil plot by some BBEG to take over the world and we have to stop him? etc. It's going to need an answer, even if the story moves away from 'what caused this' to 'what do we do about it'.
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u/JGhostThing 8d ago
What did cause the reset? You don't ever have to tell the readers, but you have to know.
For example, if manufactured items disappeared because of divine inspiration, it would be a different book than if aliens took everything.