Set in a 1996 that never was, Survival Earth depicts a world a decade after the total collapse of modern civilization. The film posits that the end of the world was not a single dramatic event but a cascading failure beginning with a global financial meltdown in 1986, which triggered widespread anarchy, the disbanding of national militaries, and eventual nuclear "accidents" (specifically mentioning the Pickering nuclear plant). The resulting landscape is a sparse, regressive wasteland where survivors occupy the skeletal remains of the old world, stripped of technological infrastructure.

The societal dynamics focus on the preservation of "humanity" through traditional education and high culture, contrasted against the rise of "vandals"—roving scavengers who have lost the ability to speak or reason. A unique element of this world is the presence of "mutants," which the film defines not as physically deformed beings, but as individuals whose memories were completely erased by the trauma of the fall. This loss of collective history serves as a metaphor for the fragility of human progress when the systems that support it fail. The Earth is portrayed as a reclaimed wilderness where the ruins of the 1980s, such as abandoned automobiles and roofless houses, serve as the only remaining monuments to a lost age of plenty.

The film's most specific technological prediction involves human cloning, specifically the duplication of cellular structures—a pursuit that apparently reached fruition before the collapse. While the real-world 1996 saw the birth of Dolly the Sheep (the first mammal cloned from an adult cell), the film's suggestion of clandestine human cloning for military or survivalist purposes remains speculative. Its prediction of a 1986 economic collapse leading to the total erasure of government power proved incorrect; however, the depiction of "systemic failure" mirrors late-Cold War anxieties regarding the interconnectedness of global markets and nuclear energy risks.