[ WP ] The Dark Ages , a period of cultural and economic decline that followed the Rapture

Hi there! This is John Green with Crash Course Earth history, and today we're going to talk about the second Dark Age which was surprisingly well lit, but primarily by nuclear hellfire. 
 
 ( Cue Intro Sequence ) 
 
 Each week, we broadcast these lessons on history to you directly through ParadiseTube, a poorly conceived pun on an ancient earthly platform called YouTube. That was, of course, before you and I were raptured to heaven, and the rest of humanity was left to suffer. 
 
 Now, historians have spilt plenty of ink from their angel-feather quill pens to describe the sequence of events that took place before and after the rapture in 0 AR, or 2015 CE as it was known then, but it's often portrayed as a divinely ordained destruction. Here at crash course, we think that's too easy of an explanation, so we'll consider the role that predicatble problems created by the sudden and disproportionate disappearance of certain groups of people had on the stability of society, and the role that psychological effects had on the End of Days. 
 
 On a May morning that's been dramatized in a ridiculous number of plays, movies, and books, billions of people disappeared. That was us, the chosen men and women who were transported to an immortal life of plenty in Heaven. 
 
 But from the perspective of those who had n't been raptured, those billions just evaporated, without any explanation. What followed has come to be known as the great `` Role Call''. 
 
 No one knew who was left and who was had gone. International stock markets collapsed as companies scrambled to figure out if their CEO still existed. Most governments fell into bickering about succession of power. Cell towers and digital infrastructure crumbled from a combination of disrepair and overload, as the entire remaining world scrambled to figure out if there family was still on Earth. 
 
 There were a few brushfire wars, mostly land grabs between long-standing rivals like India and Pakistan, but the confusion of the time actually had a dampening effect on a lot of the large-scale violence. 
 
 `` Mr. Green, Mr. Green!'' 
 
 Yes Me from the Past. 
 
 `` Everyone who was left behind was a sinner, right? That must be why everything fell apart.'' 
 
 It's not quite that simple, Me from the Past. In fact, things came back to normalcy for a short period of time. Let's go to the thought bubble: 
 
 ( Cartoon depicts city-dwellers scrambling about in confusion ) 
 
 The first few weeks after the Rapture were indeed chaos, but more because of the inherent confusion involved in losing billions of people than because of the aggregate sinfulness of those left behind. After a while, society reformed, often by spreading out into the abandoned country side to take hold of readily available farm land. 
 
 ( Cartoon depicts lawyers and business men throwing off suits to pick up plows ) 
 
 Food shortages were surprisingly rare, and the fact that land was far from scarce meant there was n't much conflict over it. While it could certainly be said that the regression into an agrarian economy from a commercial one was a step backwards, it was hardly the total collapse that would come later. 
 
 The big problems began to arise several months after the rapture, as humanity tried getting back to business as usual. 
 
 ( Cartoon depicts one-room school house with no teacher at the front desk. Students look confused and worried ) 
 
 Certain industries had been far more filled with virtuous people, and the rapture targeted those groups in a way that created problems for the earthlings. Professional teachers, for example, were all but extinct. The same happened to doctors, professors, and scientists. 
 
 Children too were disproportionately raptured, which played havoc with the age distribution of most groups. 
 
 ( Cartoon shows several people standing around a broken computer ) 
 
 Plus, with the rapid flight out of urban centers into the country side, communication networks became far more difficult to maintain, especially because of the specialized knowledge required to maintain them. Most could n't access the internet, or even use a phone. That meant that, within a generation, the collective knowledge of mankind, slipped out of the grasp of the Earthlings. 
 
 ( Cartoon shows images of a raid on a village of log cabins ) 
 
 Tribalism became the norm, food became scarce as collective farming efforts made easy targets for raiders. It was only a matter of time before some of these tribal groups gained access to nuclear arsenals that still dotted the landscape and, well, you know the rest. 
 
 ( Cartoon shows a hundred mushroom clouds blanketing the Earth ) 
 
 Earth lasted 122 years before the last lives were extinguished in a bitter nuclear winter. 
 
 ( Cartoon shows Earth covered in ice cube ) 
 
 Thanks Thought Bubble! 
 
 It's also often overlooked that the Rapture had a profound psychological impact on the Earthlings. They never knew for certain that it was indeed the Rapture that had happened, but many had a strong sense that something like selection of the `` virtuous'' had been made. 
 
 People noticed that murderers and rapists and thieves had all been left behind, but that their friends, their heroes, the people they respected, had gone. 
 
 Another thing and, this is true, a whopping 99 % of the 113th US Congress went unraptured. But, I guess that was n't a huge surprise. 
 
 The Rapture left the sinners to stew on the mistakes that had kept them out of Heaven. It's not hard to imagine that the destruction of Earth was a self-fulfilling prophecy: the Earthlings expected it to happen anyway, so why fight it? 
 
 In the end, the destruction of Earth may not have been ordained at all. The challenges faced by the Earthlings were daunting, but certainly not insurmountable. Europeans had crawled out of the First Dark Age, a time that was surely more desperate, or at least more plague-ridden, than the Second, so why could n't it happen again? 
 
 As cheesy as it sounds, it seems that a shortage of hope was what really doomed the Earthlings. 
 
 Thanks for watching, we'll see you next week. 

