The Apocalypse Is Going to Be a Lot Friendlier Than You Think

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

Psychologist and cooperation theorist Athena Aktipis shares advice from her new book, A Field Guide to the Apocalypse, on how to survive and thrive in doomsday scenarios from catastrophic natural disasters to zombie outbreaks. Related Reading: – Could the Zombie Fungus in TV’s The Last of Us Really Infect People? – The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Email us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new everyday: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman with guest Athena Aktipis. Our show is edited by Elah Feder, Alexa Lim, Madison Goldberg and Anaissa Ruiz Tejada, with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Picture someone who is prepared to survive the end of the world.
0:06.0	What are they up to?
0:08.0	Maybe you're imagining a vulte from fallout zipping themselves into a uniform and heading underground to hide away from the rest of humanity.
0:20.0	Or did your mind jump to Nick Offerman's isolationist tactics in The Last of Us?
0:24.3	Sorry, I got to move on from that one.
0:25.7	Very quick, or I will start crying.
0:27.8	According to Athena Octopus, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University, the folks most likely to survive and
0:35.3	thrive in the wake of catastrophe would do a lot less hiding and maybe a lot more goofing around.
0:41.7	So get in, loser. We're getting ready for the
0:43.7	apocalypse. For science quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.
0:48.8	Athena, thanks for coming on. I'm really excited to talk to you about your latest book.
0:58.0	Yeah, so my book is called A Field Guide to the Apocalypse, a mostly serious guide to our wild times, and it is in a nutshell a fun book about how to survive the apocalypse.
1:11.4	Listeners might be surprised to learn that a funny book about the apocalypse is like a pretty
1:15.2	natural progression of your research on cooperation, which you've managed to apply to everything from cells to
1:21.3	zombie outbreaks.
1:22.3	How did she get into such interdisciplinary and zon- everything from cells to zombie outbreaks.
1:22.6	How did she get into such interdisciplinary and
1:24.8	zombified work?
1:26.2	Well, okay, to be perfectly honest,
1:28.6	all of this started when I was an extremely nerdy teenager
1:32.2	because I would like go and hang out in my local
1:34.8	bookstore and just like read all the books and I was like I want to understand how
	...

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