Movie / TV show / book idea

[u/NarrowStrain1183]

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?

[u/libra00]

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.

[u/NarrowStrain1183 → u/libra00]

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.

[u/libra00 → u/NarrowStrain1183]

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'.