How much of the world's population has to die before the majority of people begin to believe that they're living...

That's actually a pretty good point that I could only realize after what this user posted: If 30% to 50% of the world fucking died that WOULD be an apocalypse.

>Does 2% sound too high or too little?
this is the plot of "the leftovers"
in that it ends up being enough that people go a bit crazy, but life continues on and while everyone is effected by someone they know disappearing, it doesn't collapse governments or start wars or anything.

i would imagine you would need at lest 5-10% of the population to go before it really started feeling apocalyptic, with the caveat the the ensuing conflicts and starvation style problems from them dying would cause a lot more deaths.

Don't they have the world's biggest oil refinery there? Jamnagar refinery, right?

There's a reason that Decimation means "Death of one in ten"

>If 30% to 50% of the world fucking died that WOULD be an apocalypse.
Who rolls out of bed for less than a 90% kill count?

Because it was a Roman military disciplinary tactic and that's what they called it?

>Not giving it 110%

Lazy fucking millenials

Yeah, exactly. The WHO.

So as all of humanity is dying, 10% of that is babies born and then those babies die?

That's how we did it in the good old days, back when America was great.

I really like that show.

Honestly I reckon 2% is enough to begin tipping the scales into mayhem in the streets. I think that the major factor that stopped it turning to complete anarchy in the show was that people only disappeared once . If it had been an ongoing thing and people kept disappearing after the initial departure people would have began relocating to the basements and wearing tin foil in droves.
So if it's a disease/plague/whatever and people are watching those around them falling off in a fairly rapid rate (especially the important people to show no one is safe) then I reckon you'll hit 'apocalypse' soon enough. It's about rate as much as quantity IMO.

Season 1 was better

The various massive plagues serve as exactly a historic example of this.

The Black Death was regarded by basically all common folk at the time, as well as much of the clergy and nobility, as a genuine apocalypse. That was between 30% and 50%. Recovery took decades, some regions simply didn't.

The Plague of Justinian was regarded as a herald of the end if not the end itself, in the ares worst struck, and it hit 30% at its peak. Recovery was torturous.

To contrast a more modern example, the Plague of Yunnan killed some 10% of China in 1855, and was regarded as a herald of the end only by some, not by many. It was also largely disregarded outside of the directly affected places. However, many short-lived death cults sprung up in badly hit areas in Yunnan Province, where mortality often exceeded 50%. Outside of the disastrously-hit areas, recovery took a few decades.

So we have a standard. If more than a third of the population dies of something, and we do not understand how to meaningfully stop it, it will be called an apocalypse.

Compare to the Spanish Flu, which killed about 100 million people, as many as the high estimates for the Black Death. But it was far more global, less regionally catastrophic, and the world's population was far higher, at two billion, so this plague was a mere 5%. While disastrous in many ways, it was not seen as an apocalypse, and demographic recovery was prompt.

The whole of subsaharan africa could die and nobody would care as long as the deaths didn't spread. If I told you "14 million people died of spontaneous combustion this year in Africa", you wouldn't give a shit. If I told you "14 million people died in Europe this year of spontaneous combustion", you'd probably care about it but it wouldn't seem like the world is ending.

You'd need about 1/3 of people in the developed world to die before it seemed it like there was an ongoing apocalypse.

>Does 2% sound too high or too little?

WW2 got about 2.5%

>the whole indian subcontinent cleansed of people
The only shit other countries would care about is how much a chunk of india can they carve for themselves.

Probably depends quite a bit on the technological level.

Global mortality numbers only matters if we have global news coverage. If we're looking at mediaeval standards then someone in Europe won't care if everyone's dead or not in South America, he doesn't know they exist(ed), and whether he thinks the apocalypse is coming or not may be based on nothign much mroe than the events in his and the neighbouring villages, or all of Europe (or wherever) for a nobleman.

2% of the world's population dying would not be an apocalypse, because we've actually gone through this before. 3% of the world's population died in World War 2.

To be fair that must have seemed fairly apocalyptic in quite a few areas.

Well a good way to contextualise it is to list everyone you know, as many as you can and number them.

Put a percentage in your head and figure out how many that is on the list and use a RNG that many times and think how the sudden removal of those people who's numbers came up would affect both you and your community at large.

Eh, even at the darkest days of Stalingrad and Nanjing, the people in those battles still understood that there was a world outside the city where things weren't as shitty.

It's not an Apocalypse if three hours over there's no apocalypse

Excellent post, well done.

>convince people they're living through the Apocalypse

With the right special effects, you don't even need very many people to die.
>sky immediately turns red
>flashy, people die at once in the same place
>literal demons flying around
>series of seven trumpet-calls blare through the whole world

You say that, but its pretty common for front line soldiers in areas of heavy fighting to just forget about the outside world because they're utterly focused on not getting killed.

You know that not everywhere is like your immediate surroundings, but it doesn't feel like the same world.

Hol up
>All of Europe bombed to shit
>Entire world at each other's throats
>The only victors can be Communists or Facists
>dropping Bombs that wipe entire cities off the map
>not an Apocalyptic scenario

I mean, this only happened 70 years ago. We still haven't seen the long term effects from this. WW2 could have very well been the tipping point for Earth.

It depends on what happens.

>meteor destroys asia, most people there die.
Not an apocalypse scenario.

>epidemic kills 6% of the population, globally, there seems to be no sure way to stop it.
A lot more panic. Government could probably maintain most of it, except some riots that go out of hand.

>a single nuke is launched
Get into those shelter, its coming!

You are LIVING through the long term effects of WWII. Modern life wouldn't exist as we know it without WWII. We're one of those settings where the world is just recovering from a great war.

Reported to the FBI, the Vatican, and CERN

>meteor destroys asia, most people there die.
>THE ENTIRETY OF ASIA reduced to rubble
>this isn't an apocalypse
user, did you think this through?

I don't think he realizes most of the world's population is in Asia. Heck, India and China by themselves already are almost a third.

>most people in Asia die

Do you understand what this would even do to the economy?

I'm not even talking about your staples like food and power production, I'm talking about electronics and manufacturing. It would be an economic upset so powerful that our previous 'Great Depression' would need to be retroactively renamed to 'A Spot o Money Troubles' to make way for THE DEPRESSION.

>You are LIVING through the long term effects of WWII

Which itself is nothing more than an effect of WWI, which itself is nothing more than an effect of the French Revolution, which itself...

Yes, human history is a mess

The biggest war in history still deserves some attention though. Even if the mongolds came shockingly close to the death toll

Don't more people live in and around India/China than outside it?

That may be the case, but then we aren't talking about a global apocalypse and shouldn't be measuring it in percentage of global population lost, but in terms of population lost at a local scale.

No, that's only about a third of the world

But, if we include the rest of East Asia, then yes.

I just realized, if you take away the white circle, but keep the caption, it's still technically a correct statement.

It will be helpful when we have to remind space colonists of their relative irrelevance.

a good 60 percent and dropping.

But people are stupid so the population really just need to drop to 90% with decent cashin in it for the media for the apocalypse alarms to go off.

Are you kidding, the American media went into full panic mode over ebola, which was fucking nothing.

Yes, shits would be given, but OP wants to know how to make it feel apocalyptic.

The loss of one country would not make for an apocalypse. If a die-off is geographically concentrated, it loses most of its emotional impact.

Best estimate, OP? Between 10-50% of the population. At the high end, that's enough for most people to know one or more people who have died.

At the low end? Well, that's what happens when you confine the dying to children or those of young age. Imagine a world where over 80% the kids just start dropping, and the future for your country/culture/species starts to look pretty bleak. Like the end times, almost no?

It's important to keep the proportion of deaths high, otherwise humans have a tendency to just start having many many children to offset the mortality. You need enough deaths to keep people from feeling they can repopulate successfully.
If you're too squeamish for that, just make women barren and men sterile.

Ignore the economy. Ignore the politics.

If an impact event wiped out all of Asia and the Indian subcontinent...enough ejecta would have been tossed up into the atmosphere to kill over 90% of plantlife on Earth. Maybe not total biosphere collapse, but it's hilariously unlikely that enough people would survive outside of Asia to maintain a breeding population. If they survive at all.

Holy shit user..

2% is fine if that 2% is highly concentrated. Consider that 2% of the world's population is the entirety of Russia, or half of the US. Suddenly losing that many people in a single event would be catastrophic and would absolutely send every place else into a panic.

Well in today's interconnected world we probably couldn't absorb a 60% casualty rate and keep going like it's 1345 hell even 10% is savage. Can you even imagine one in ten of everyone you know just vanishing? The wreaking ball that would take your life and the economy the relied on them.

With these sort of things it's hard to say for certain, for example if it's concentrated in one area then you can contextualise it as a disaster rather than a apocalypse and of course there's a huge difference between a plague that sweeps a continent over a decade vs three months.

Unless you drop 2/3 of entire population and in some massive die-back events (so the thing happes within few months top), nobody would even care.

You say that, but Americans would flip their shit if every call center disappeared overnight

Yeah no one gives a fuck about this sort of thing right?

What if the impact was small enough that the ejecta is what wound up "destroying" Asia and the Indian sub-continent

>I'm not even talking about your staples like food and power production, I'm talking about electronics and manufacturing.
Asia isn't a net exporter of power, nor food trough.

And most semiconductor fabs are located in Europe or North America, so we'd still have electronics, we'd just lose some assembly plants.

Airborne weaponized virus causes rapid cellular complete dissolution of individuals with a Y chromosome. Disperse this into major metropolitan areas of global economic powers.

With a 1.08 ratio of male/female, you're looking at 4.05 billion potential effected, not to mention the ratio of governmental power.

People would care pretty quick even if a fraction of a percent died.

Don't rip off a book/graphic novel/whatever you want to call it.

But a targeted virus can be a pretty cool idea. Just have it wipe out people who had a certain gene, both men and women. 15% of people across the world die; maybe one area has a greater concentration, but it hits all over the world. Everybody feels hit. Everybody knows somebody (even if it's just a friend of a friend) that died. Should be enough to rattle things up.

Make it non human made. Make it some quirk of nature, or extra-terrestrial if you want to go that way.

Have the extreme religious groups say it's judgment from on high.

Just the English-only ones. We would just have to go through the added inconvenience of having to dial 2 for Spanish. (Spanish-speaking call centers are all located in the USA. Also, the people working there are almost always bilingual, so even if you don't speak Spanish you can still call them up and get them to assist you in English.)

>Don't rip off a book/graphic novel/whatever you want to call it.

All my best ideas are rip offs

At least try to be a bit more subtle about it.

We didn't start the fire

Banner material post user.

How many people can honestly name a single epidemic disease beyond AIDS and the plague?

If I didn't die of it, why should I give a fuck?

ZA WARDO

Back then communication was obviously much more limited. I think with modern media the threshold has dropped dramatically. Just look at ebola or SARS or swine flu, which were tiny.

I'm no scientist, but I'm pretty sure that anything that made that much ejecta would be far too imprecise to hit just one subcontinent, especially with other parts of Asia immediately downwind. the only way your (frankly rather ill-formed) scenario could play out without completely ruining the biosphere is if it were a bunch of meteors that broke up into shittons of fragments before impact, like a MIRV strike, and even then I doubt you'd be able to get away from the ejecta (or earthquakes, or tectonic fuckery, or shift in weather patterns, or possible change in sea level...).