What If...

So I saw the preview for this movie Blindness. Really disturbing premise – a disease that causes blindness plagues the earth. Now I don’t know all the details of the movie, and I may have just grossly exaggerated the plot, but actually think about that. An epidemic of complete blindness instantly swarms the entire planet. In a matter of days, every human being is blind. What would really happen? Let’s explore.

For the first day, most people would be fine. Those who were at home when the blindness struck would be able to feel their way through their homes, finding food and water. All traffic would come to an immediate halt. The streets would fill with frightened citizens, screaming for help. Fully-automated systems like cell communications would continue to function for a while, allowing people to call their family and friends. Hospitals, police, electricity, porn – all these systems would completely collapse.

By the end of the first week, shit would really hit the fan. Assuming that the water would continue to run, those of us in cities and towns would soon realize “Crap, I’m out of food.” Every grocery store and market would be ransacked in a flurry of blind panic. With all transportation completely frozen, the stores would soon run out of food. Farmers would likely find ways to live off their land. But the rest of us would be totally fucked. People would start dying of starvation, falling, or eating random poisonous stuff. There might even be some cannibalism.

People who were already blind before the epidemic would become our leaders. They would use their heightened senses and directional abilities to safely guide us, all the while laughing at the irony of it.

Most of the world’s population would die off in the first few weeks. Animals would start to re-incorporate us into their food chains. Survivors would live in small farm communities, finding ways to protect themselves. Eventually, people would start having hot blind sex. Within the first year, there’d be some babies.

There would be a lot of pressure on that first baby. Is it blind? The parents would have to test the baby by sitting it down and doing frightening silent things in front of it to see if it cries. If it turned out that the baby could see, it would be a hell of a waiting game.

“Humankind has nearly gone extinct, and our only hope lies in the hands of a generation of babies.”

That could be the sequel: Blindness II: Generation-See.