May 22, 2024 By Rachel Feltman & Anaissa Ruiz Tejada
“Rachel Feltman: Picture someone who’s prepared to survive the end of the world: What are they up to? Maybe you’re imagining a “vaultie” from Fallout zipping themselves into a uniform and heading underground to hide away from the rest of humanity. Or did your mind jump to Nick Offerman’s isolationist tactics in the The Last of Us? Sorry, I gotta move on from that one very quick or I will start crying.
“According to Athena Aktipis, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University, the folks most likely to survive and thrive in the wake of catastrophe would do a lot less hiding—and maybe a lot more goofing around.
“So get in, loser! We’re getting ready for the apocalypse.
“For Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
“Feltman: Athena, thanks for coming on. I’m really excited to talk to you about your latest book.
“Athena Aktipis: Yeah, so my book is called A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times. And it is, in a nutshell, a fun book about how to survive the apocalypse.
“Feltman: Listeners might be surprised to learn that a funny book about the apocalypse is like a pretty natural progression of your research on cooperation, which you’ve managed to apply to everything from cells to zombie outbreaks. How did you get into such interdisciplinary and zombified work?
“Aktipis: Well, okay, to be perfectly honest, all of this started when I was an extremely nerdy teenager because I would go and hang out in my local bookstore and just like read all the books, and I was like, “I want to understand how everything works.” And then also I was like, “Things in the world don’t seem quite right.” So I was kind of coming of age in the 1990s, in the late 1990s, and I was like, “Maybe this isn’t sustainable. Maybe we can’t keep doing things the way we have been forever.” And I very much became an environmentalist as a teen. But I was also just fascinated by human nature and trying to, like, just really understand how it is that we are the way we are and especially using evolutionary biology as a tool to understand human nature.
“And actually, I know this sounds kind of crazy, but, like, I made a conscious decision when I went into college that I would go all academic to learn as much as I could about all the things that are relevant to human nature for dealing with the problems in the world. And then I was like, ‘And then at some point in my life, I’ll turn to pulling it all together to try to, like, do something about all of this.’…
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