The theme of survival in a post-apocalyptic or post-disaster scenario as context for science education is explored in this article. Though this theme is prevalent in a wide variety of popular media, only a small number of educators and researchers report having explored it as a means of engaging students, and there is almost no description of its use in teaching science in the pertinent literature. We demonstrate, by illustrating commonalities between this approach and other successful methods, and through the results of classroom evaluations we have obtained, that there is good reason to suggest this theme would succeed as a tool for teaching science at elementary, secondary and post-secondary levels.