1 Day In America, 3: When a threat is existential level like that, when the occurrence of an event destroys civilization, you cant really contemplate it, even on an imaginary or fictional level. Post-apocalyptic fiction, like scifi about aliens or stories told from an animal's perspective, are inherently flawed because we possess as humans a near-total inability to think beyond our own circumstances. That is to say: we essentially anthropomorphize everything. The grasshopper acts like a lazy human, not a lazy grasshopper. So when we think about what the world would be like after it 'ends,' we impose our views and biases on it, with people always trying to recreate some part of society or with society failing in ways we imagine it would, without looking at how society actually has failed. All of which is to say we spent a lot of time imagining how we would rebuild society if 90% of the planet was reduced to radioactive wasteland, and no time imagining a world where 9/11 could happen