The Black Death was fucking insane

I've heard sources that antibiotics are going to become ineffective pretty soon and as bacteria evolves to become stronger than our deterrents, eventually we're going to have a major pandemic.

God isn't that cool.

still we are going to have hygiene and knowledge on how the disease spreads this time
and we won't be completely defenseless without antibiotica

I don't think the problem is quite as bad as it sounds. Part of the problem is not that we're at the limits of what antiobiotics can do, but that pharmaceutical companies are not investing a lot in antibiotic research because it's a lot more profitable to treat diseases than cure them. If antibiotic resistant bugs become a serious problem in the future the government might step in and do something about that.

ya but donald trump won so 2016 is the worst year ever

source?

You really think so? I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the western world is prepared for another major pandemic. I highly doubt though, given how far we have come since the Black Death that the First World would be decimated to the point that we lose 2/3rds of the population, but at the same time I'm not too sure if would have the same amount of optimism. If another pandemic were to occur, we would probably have a situation similar to the Spanish Flu but more deadlier in the sense that hundreds of millions of people from the developing world die and as many as a billion are infected. I'm no expert on pandemics but the next likely pandemic would be an influenza outbreak that would affect the Third World a lot more than in the First World where we have more of an awareness of hygiene and how disease spreads. Still we could possibly lose hundreds of thousands of people. I have no doubt, we would be fine but we would lose a lot of people in Europe and in the United States and Canada.

But then again, at that time even local elotes wouldn't have much information about what's going on all over the world. Peasants even more. Could anyone really care much about places and people they would never see?

Actually the last antibiotic bastion fell last year I think. The last known antibiotic that could kill any bacteria was unable to kill a new strain. We are effectively at the beginning of a post-antibiotic society. I know big pharma gets a lot of deserved bad rap, but I guarantee that they are busting their ass to find a new form of antibiotics right now. Whatever is discovered will be the new last bastion and will make megabucks. That all being said, I don't think we'll see another pandemic along the lines of the black death again. Something viral maybe, but we're pretty good at finding out ways to kill bacteria. Though the bigger and more dense our cities become, the more likely something is going to mutate and transmit. It's not outside the realm of possibility that we could be hit with something pretty fucking bad. Even a disease with a 5% mortality rate that is airborne will kill millions and millions of people.

t.biochemist

>I guarantee that they are busting their ass to find a new form of antibiotics right now

The problem is, no they're not. Most have shut down their anti-biotic research departments because the return on investment is too low. The government either needs to come up with ways to incentivise anti-biotic research or fund it directly, because the market incentives for it just aren't there. It's more profitable to treat illnesses than to cure them.

> Even a disease with a 5% mortality rate that is airborne will kill millions and millions of people.
It won't be a problem as long as we can make sure it stays in India or China.

>mongols destroyed european culture, inbred with the natives and conquered them
Incas were more advanced than most europeans.

This is true in that we're having to come at the bacteria problem from a different angle now. Most antibiotics are just analogs of one another and there were so fucking many it seemed like they would never run out. Well, they have. Mostly thanks to people not taking them for the full cycle, doctor's over prescribing them, and the meat industry forcing them down animals throats. There is still an incentive because the first company to find that antibiotic is able to patent it and it's analogs. Then they'll be the only game in town for a last resort drug and can charge whatever they want for it. But like I said, they're having to discover novel pathways to kill the bacteria. The old shit doesn't work anymore. And pharma companies aren't the only ones working on it. Government agencies and academia are also working in the field because of how lucrative it could be.

On the bright side, all those people dying caused a kind of redistribution of wealth and increased the value of labor among the peasant classes. In England in particular, farmhands found themselves in high demand after the plague subsided and were able to improve their lot considerably due to landowners competing for their labor. And in Italy, it is not a coincidence that powerful merchant families like the Medici rose to power starting in the 14th century onward, because the Plague hit Italy first and Italy recovered first, they were in prime position to be on top as Europe came out of the Black Death.

Nice b8

yes, it was aliens. Aliens knew humanity was shit so they tried to wipe everyone

Never forget, the great European genocide brought upon by Mongols.
The Chinese must pay reparations now!

They didn't even have a complete writing system, just some crazy deal with strings

.t Alonso Quetzalcoatl

They could have just towed a medium sized asteroid from the belt and dropped it on the planet and that would have killed like 90% of all life.

Something is bound to happen sooner or later.

It's this or water shortages that will get us. There is only so much potable water and an increasing number of humans. Desalination takes a lot of electricity.

you're probably right about water shortages

if you read the pope's newly released encyclical, he talks about this stuff

if anything humanity will be crushed by the destroyed ecosystem and the destroyed environment, basically ruining the planet life

>We are effectively at the beginning of a post-antibiotic society

Unlikely. The reason its so hard to get new antibiotics is that the rigorousness of clinical trials makes it both expensive and difficult for research to pay off. In the worst case scenario, standards are lowered, the tons of Phase IV antibiotics are released and pharmaceutical companies can see antibiotic research paying off.

If a new plaque were to strike. It will be the hospitals and old folks homes that will be ground zero.

Think about that.

>India was depopulated, Tartary, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia were covered with dead bodies
Really makes u thnk

Like that other poster said, it's not that we've exhausted all antibiotics, it's that there's not much incentive to create new ones when there's already working drugs on the market. While concerns of a potential 'superbug' are legitimate, it shouldn't be overblown nor should humanity's ability to deal with that problem underestimated.

Water is super important. Food (especially meat) takes a lot of water. Our populations cannot sustain its growth when water is so finite.

It's going to be a huge problem.

In the face of a new superbug, our knowledge about hygiene alone would probably save untold millions. Just washing your fucking hands would probably put a damper on how many people it would kill.

The black death was overall positive. Ended feudalism an was the spark that started the renaissance.

>took out 80% of Southern Europe by some estimates
>killed half of Paris
>60% of London
>wiped out entire towns and cities leaving literal ghost towns
no fuckin way
that's sounds almost apocalyptic level

That's why the people living through it thought it was the End of Days. They didn't understand Germ theory or anything, god deciding to devastate the earth with a Biblical-scale plague seemed like as good an explanation as any.

Also solved population crisis too.

Interestingly, St. Sebastian became very popular during the Black Death. As the story went, Sebastian was tied to a tree and shot repeatedly with arrows. He survived this and went on to be canonized, which people found super relatable. After all, they were facing their own metaphorical hail of arrows in the shape of the Bubonic plague.

You know things are grim when you start feeling intense kinship with a guy whose claim to fame was getting pincushioned by Roman archers.

...

It might just be his tenacious clinging to life gave people hope. Proof that you can survive even a sentence of sure death by the grace of god. What else hope did they have really? Clergy died just as much as everybody else so obviously god wasn't playing favorites.

Although there exists no concept of an actual morbid entity, there are some forms upon which the mind can provisionally agree as characterizing certain phenomena, and it seems that the mind can agree to a plague described in the following manner.
Before the onset of any very marked physical or psychological discomfort, the body is covered with red spots, which the victim suddenly notices only when they turn blackish. The victim scarcely hesitates to become alarmed before his head begins to boil and to grow overpoweringly heavy, and he collapses. Then
he is seized by a terrible fatigue, the fatigue of a centralized magnetic suction, of his molecules divided and drawn toward their annihilation. His crazed body fluids, unsettled and commingled, seem to be flooding through his flesh. His gorge rises, the inside of his stomach seems as if it were trying to gush out between his teeth. His pulse, which at times slows down to a shadow of itself, a mere virtuality of a pulse, at others races after the boiling of the fever within, consonant with the streaming aberration of his mind, beating in hurried strokes like his heart, which grows intense, heavy, loud; his eyes, first inflamed, then glazed; his swollen gasping tongue, first white, then red, then black, as if charred and split--everything proclaims an unprecedented organic upheaval. Soon the body fluids, furrowed like the earth struck by lightning, like lava kneaded by subterranean forces, search for an outlet. The fieriest point is formed at the center of each spot; around these points the skin rises in blisters like air bubbles under the surface of lava, and these blisters are surrounded by circles, of which the outermost, like Saturn's ring around the incandescent planet, indicates the extreme limit of a bubo.

Once the plague is established in a city, the regular forms collapse. There is no maintenance of roads and sewers, no army, no police, no municipal administration. Pyres are lit at random to bum the dead, with whatever means are available. Each family wants to have its own. Then wood, space, and flame itself growing rare, there are family feuds around the pyres, soon followed by a general flight, for the corpses are too numerous. The dead already clog .the streets in ragged pyramids gnawed at by animals around the edges. The stench rises in the air like a flame. Entire streets are blocked by the piles of dead. Then the houses open and the delirious victims, their minds crowded with hideous visions, spread howling through the streets. The disease that ferments in their viscera and circulates throughout their entire organism discharges itself in tremendous cerebral explosions. Other victims, without bubos, delirium, pain, or rash, examine themselves proudly in the mirror, in splendid health, as they think, and then fall dead with their shaving mugs in their hands, full of scorn for other victims.

The dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their frenzied greed, enter the open houses and pillage riches they know will serve no purpose or profit. And at that moment the theater is born. The theater, i.e., an immediate gratuitousness provoking acts without use or profit.
The last of the living are in a frenzy: the obedient and virtuous son kills his father; the chaste man performs sodomy upon his neighbors. The lecher becomes pure. The miser throws his gold in handfuls out the window. The warrior hero sets fire to the city he once risked his life to save. The dandy decks himself out in his finest clothes and promenades before the charnel houses. Neither the idea of an absence of sanctions nor that of imminent death suffices to motivate acts so gratuitously absurd on the part of men who did not believe death could end anything. And how explain the surge of erotic fever among the recovered victims who, instead of fleeing the city, remain where they are, trying to wrench a criminal pleasure from the dying or even the dead, half crushed under the pile of corpses where chance has lodged them.

>it took centuries to even recover

Towns and cities used to get wiped out all the time, nothing special about that
Its the amount of death on the countryside which makes the Black Death unique