Modern man is and always will be a social creature

Imagine waking up one morning and finding you were all alone.

Not just where you live, but everywhere you go. You get into your car and drive through your neighborhood, but you don't see any other signs of life. You get out onto a main drag, or a freeway, only to see that you are the only car moving in either direction.

You stop at the grocery store. The parking lot is empty, and when you go into the store, there is no one there. The only sound you hear is the air conditioning. You take what you needed, and since you're honest, you leave money on the counter to pay for it.

Back in your car, you turn on an oldies station. After a Beatles song and a doo-wop group, a song comes on that you had all but forgotten. Jonathan King's "Everyone's Gone to the Moon."

It's funny. Right around the time we actually did go to the Moon, we stopped believing in all those wonderful stories about space travel and colonizing other planets. We stopped thinking that ordinary people -- average Joes and Janes -- would ever get to do things like that.

The stories changed. Now when the towns were empty, it wasn't because the people had gone anywhere. It was because they had died. Dystopian stories like George Stewart's "Earth Abides," Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" and Stephen King's "The Stand" told wonderfully how the Earth was rapidly depopulated. Two by disease, one by worldwide nuclear war.

All three books are worth reading, so I'm not going to recap plots. But I was listening to the audiobook version of "The Stand" -- King's apocalyptic tour de force -- and two of the characters were looking for camping supplies in a completely empty small town in Colorado.

That's nothing strange in itself, but imagine an America where the population has dropped from more than 300 million people to about 2 million. Due to the gregarious nature of people, some less-populated states might drop almost to Zero Population.

Think about walking into a town that has been completely depopulated. There's a library that will never issue another card or check out another book, a movie theater that will never show another film, a church where no one will ever pray.

Think about driving, or riding, or walking hundreds of miles and never seeing a living soul. Think of living out the rest of your life and never being able to talk to anyone else. Of course you would have to give up television, radio and computers, because there would be no one to keep the electricity running. If you were knowledgeable enough to use portable generators and to find gasoline and/or batteries, you might be able to have at least a few benefits of the modern world.

But you would never be a social creature again. And almost any formerly minor problem could be fatal. Step on a rusty nail and die because there's no one to give you a tetanus shot. Or you might break a leg and not be anywhere you could do anything to fix it.

Of course, the saddest of all possibilities came from the mind of Rod Serling in the first season of "The Twilight Zone." Burgess Meredith plays a harried little man who loves to read but never has time to do it. One day he is deep in an underground vault when a nuclear explosion destroys New York.

Meredith comes out to find that he is the last man alive in the city. He joyously finds himself outside what remains of the New York Public Library, and sees books he loves scattered all around him.
Then something happens and he realizes what all of us eventually would. Man is a social creature.