Could human civilization survive at its current level of sophistication (I.e, easy worldwide communications, general spread of liberal, democratic ideas, etc) if there was to be a sudden population drop of about 90%?
Assume population drop is even worldwide (no country is hit harder than any other) and that reason for drop is a quick killing plague that disappears after infecting and killing the 90% of humanity vulnerable to it.
Society would no longer exist as we know it. Our current capability to produce the resources that we do is based off of a large world-wide work force that distributes these resources via trade. Some countries harvest more basic resources and sell these to countries with more sophisticated means of production that then use those resources to make a variety of products. With a 90% drop in world-wide population, most of the means of harvesting base resources as well as producing more useful goods would practically disappear at once. Worst-case scenario, the remaining 10% fight over what's left until a larger society is formed to protect their remaining resources and to attempt to rebuild the previously lost society. Democratic ideals would be lost very quickly as control and safety are prioritized over freedom and self-determination. In the end, human civilization is put back a couple hundred years, and eventually we catch up. Might be better that it had happened in the end, as the newer society isn't dependent on policies that are self-destructive in the long term.
I...what kind of question is it? Of course not. You'd be lucky if humanity survives at all.
I'm pretty sire ~740 million is enough for humanity to survive
You realize humanity was once only 10,000 people, yeah?
>Could human civilization survive at its current level of sophistication
I imagine civilization would even be better off.
Fewer people means less antisocial and psychotic behaviors in the gene pool, which ideally means fewer differences and fewer conflicts. There also shouldn't be any conflict over resources since there would be ample real estate to go around. Ample real estate also means people don't have to be housed together like sardines, which means less conflict with neighbors.
Fewer people to maintain and operate the means of production doesn't mean production will cease. It will just operate in a much smaller scope.
Look like small nations like Iceland. They have their own factories and assembly lines.
But since the damage is spread equally to each nation, the productive capabilities of all those affected would be drastically reduced no matter who they were.
So now it's just a world of icelands
Without a lot of modern equipment or easy ways to scavenge and produce more of it, most people would be farmers.
Whatever community survives would probably have very strict rules to prevent inbreeding. So even though they'd be distrustful towards strangers, they would have to interact with them some of the time.
The United States of America is the most-advanced nation on planet Earth.
15% of its population are employed in agriculture.
About one in seven people makes food by trade. That's not even counting those of us who have ever had house plants.
If 90% of the world died out? Well, 50% of the rest would quickly die from sanitation problems. After that? We'd be fine.
Humanity hit a bottleneck of a population no-greater than 1k, about two-million years ago. The entirety of North and South America, in pre-Colombian times? Populated by no-more than 70 people. Which means "probably a lot less." We're looking at two, maybe three families, that gave rise to every pre-Colombian civilization on two continents.
We're good.
>a population no-greater than 1k, about two-million years ago
Two million years ago there weren't humans, at least not homo sapiens as we know them today.
Humanity (as homo sapiens) has never had a population bottleneck as a whole, but certain parts of humanity have, for example, all of the Native Americans, both North and South, can trace their genetic ancestry to only
Inbreeding to the point of genetic damage is a very difficult thing to do, taking something like three or four generations of blood-related siblings pairs to get your first downie baby.
Even then, the inclusion of just a single outsider into the tree pushes that downie-baby limit even further down the chain.
>Humanity (as homo sapiens) has never had a population bottleneck as a whole, but certain parts of humanity have, for example, all of the Native Americans, both North and South, can trace their genetic ancestry to only
Dumbest comment in this thread.
Shit would get feudal, and after one or two generations, technology would become a mishmashed cross between medieval tech and early renaissance tech, with modern artifacts thrown in. Hell, this'd make an awesome campaign setting, now that I think about it.
Short answer "no".
Long answer
youtube.com
Going by our history, it'd probably be some version of the 1750's, when we were last at a population of 740,000,000
>feudal
Why? There are places in the world that have never experienced feudal government, why would they revert to something they never were?
Tribalism. Or tribidism. Lucky ladies. Rub-rub-hubba-hubba. Let's just pretend and do stuff.
Doubtful, except for places such as pacific islands and sub Sahara Africa.
Rest of the world would continue with some form of the government they have now, just on a smaller scale
>that period from 1300 to 1400 when the human population kept dropping every year
spooky shit, man
Yeah bro, Black Death was a bitch
Scholarship seems a little outdated. Would love a modern take on the thesis
Power Plants AREN'T designed to blow up when a certain number of people die.
If anything, things will run so much smoother with a power grid that suddenly has 90% of it's work load relieved.
>What is greentexting?
>What is power vacuum?
Dude, after everyone dies, it's not going to be hand-holding and peace-waving for the next 500 millenia or something.
>90% dies
>That's more then 280 MILLION people in just the United States alone
>Military infrastructure crumbles
>Nuclear capacity is compromised
>Infrastructure is devastated
>Political discourse is completely halted
>New factions emerge in reclaimed portions of small cities
>Mostly start off as small gangs, or maybe even villages, working together to secure resources and provide protection from the outside world
>They grow larger
>Eventually, they grow so large, they intersect with the territory of another such settlement
Now there's two ways they can go about this.
>One, they can consider diplomacy. "You take up to Lewer Street and the old Firstun Bank. We'll occupy the whole of downtown. No one needs to get hurt, as long as we stay copacetic. Capiche?"
>Two? Total war. The first to secure the armory, gather weaponry, ammunition, vehicles, outfit their troops, mobilize the infantry, recruit the stragglers, and occupy hot points is now the defacto king of the city. That means they just provided their group with all the food, water, shelter, and power they could ever provide. No one will go after them and they'll never have to worry about raiders again because, guess what? They're either all dead, or they work for us now.
You think just because 90 percent of the world dies, humanity suddenly loses its competitive edge? You think people will suddenly lose interest in power and control? You think just because land is so great, they'll do everything in their power to NOT own it?
There are a lot of historical cases like this, where apparent stability is suddenly violently ruptured, and it always ends in a power struggle.
I think all fa/tg/uys should visit Veeky Forums every once in a while. It makes worldbuilding that much more fascinating when you understand the movement behind human nature and all its follies.
>>Military infrastructure crumbles
>>Nuclear capacity is compromised
>>Infrastructure is devastated
>>Political discourse is completely halted
Why?
>Why?
90 percent of all military, nuclear operators, engineers (infrastructure, wastewater, agriculture, construction, repair, etc), medical professionals, politicians, law enforcement, and women are now dead.
The ten percent of all military men? You think they'll stick around to protect their now defeated nation? No. They'll find a way back home to be with their (probably dead) families. You think the presidential runner-up will be in any shape to run a nation when 90 percent of all his advisers, officers, and secret servicemen just died? You think he'll care about running a nation when he just watched his wife and daughter die from an illness his best men had zero chance of stopping?
You think the engineers will stick around to fix the potholes left on the sidewalk now that they're not being paid? You think they'll give a fuck about the Empire State Building when a 9.0 earthquake brings it down to the ground in 5 years?
What WILL happen is, soldiers, politicians, doctors, athletes, and social and material engineers will STILL be largely valuable in this post-apocalyptic world, but they won't be working for money anymore. They'll be working in tribalistic loyalty.
Among a group of scared refugees, the now ex-mayor will band them together to lead them into recovery. He'll find out Charlie was a doctor, and he'll get him patching up Billy's gash so that Billy (who was an ex-marine) can now take post atop the barricade Darcy (an architect) just engineered. They'll send out Wayne, who was once the star quarterback of Ridgemont High, to round up all the wounded men lying around the streets and bring them back to their base to see if they can be of use.
One of those wounded men happened to be an enlisted man who tried travelling back to Montana to see if his wife was still alive. He's very well educated about the function and properties of several spare guns.
And so on and so forth, and that's just the way it goes.
You seem to be thinking of a 99.9% death rate.
A 90% rate leaves us with 31 million people still alive, comparable to the US population in 1870.
The situation stays the same. People will want things to "go back to normal". That's all they'll ever really want. To make these ends meet, they'll take it upon themselves to establish order and control without the existence of a pre-apocalyse government, which means tribalism and war to fill a very vulnerable power vacuum.
Whether this means two factions of 10,000 people fighting one another in New York, or 18 factions of 1,000 people fighting for the ruins of Old Detroit, the result will always be the same.
There will always, and I mean this is the most literal sense I can possibly muster, ALWAYS be a power struggle in the history of humanity. A thousand years from the future, no one's going to just...stop trying, simply because someone tells them not to. Someone will always be inventing, someone will always be climbing, someone will always be running, jumping, and shooting faster and harder then everybody else, and to think that humanity would abandon their nature in the event of some natural phenomena? I don't believe it one bit.
Sudden mass death puts strain on any society. When the death rate is as extreme as 90% even the societies with strong internal cohesion have difficulty maintaining normal function.
Why?
With a 90% death rate the probability that the person in charge was the seventh or further down in line of succession is about ~47%. To put this into perspective, this would make Attorney General Loretta Lynch the president of the USA. Normally a chaotic succession like this would be a problem, but other parts of society would help facilitate the change. Other parts of the government would pick up the slack until the newly minted president assembled her team and got her bearings.
With the sudden death scenario described, ALL positions of authority in society would be suddenly and simultaneously undergoing this kind of chaotic succession. Even the 10% of cases where the person on top survives the staff they rely on to do their job would be devastated. The most probable result is a break down in social order. At the very minimum you have some kind of massive shakeup in the power structure.
700 million people is a fuck load. After a few weeks of instability, the surviving world governments attempt some sort of rebuilding effort. The vast majority of the survivors would be waiting for rescue forces and would gladly accept. A bunch of farmers, teachers and clerks who likely just watched most if not all of their family members die will be looking for peace, order and safety. They won't instantly turn into edgy mad-max walking dead level gangs who seem okay with massive gunfights over key buildings.
It would take at least a few years to get over the initial shock. The new governments would be very conservative. Parts of the world would be straight-up wiped out.
Most of the stuff would work out, but I suspect the result would be post-apocalyptic nations with clear 'hats' that seem almost like a parody of their previous national identity.
I highly doubt that with even SIXTY percent of the world population deceased, any formal motion to anoint the new president-elect into office would be seriously impractical.
I do not think the remaining 10 percent (or 40) would even bother to search for whoever's 7th in position to take over as president. There might not be anyone left high up enough who actually KNOWS this information off the top of their head. And even if they did find Mrs. Loretta Lynch, or GI Jane, or whoever the fug else is supposed to be president, chances are, she's either dead, dying, or travelling across the country.
With a 90 percent reduction in total population, we're talking ABSOLUTE failure of government response. There will be no party large enough to reform the US government in any shape fit to run a severely wounded nation.
The initial survivors will largely be peaceful. I cannot imagine our society going from civility to violence within just months, but after a year or two, the stakes become much higher.
Someone WILL want total control of the suburb/town/city/state, and with a surplus of functioning weapons and free ammunition, the formation of a group of raiders or thugs, it's almost inevitable. Honest groups will have to arm themselves if they don't want to be taken advantage of by these gangs, and eventually, one of them will try and seize control of as much land as they possibly could, for a number of reasons. It could be for the sake of "safety", or it could be to plan for long-term resource management. It could simply be to deny power to tribes they deem less deserving of land and power (ie. "I'd rather I be in charge than those violent savages"), there's a lot of reasons why war is inevitable.
When the government finally grows big enough to mount a nation-wide response, they'll probably be faced with tribes aslarge as they are, or probably even larger, who feel they could do the job of running the country much better than the new government could.
watch that show 'Life after humans' or what ever it's called, See how may industries of humanity go FUBAR after only a few months with no oversight. after the last 10% f workers abandon ship and try to find their families, or hell, if they keep at it trying to provide energy for who ever's left, all parts are extremely valuable now, And no one's going to be able to manufacture turbines or ballbarings to the specifications needed after the global market falls apart.
So, a fuckload of industrial buildings/storage tanks will fall apart and poison the lands around them, squandering even more of humanity's strained resources.
So really, the only chance they'll have is downgrading back to easier to maintain, if more intensive, generators and shit.
Did we read the same book?
The main thesis of World Without Us is that most systems are automated and would continue on without us for months/years but all have their own safety-off switches
>There will be no party large enough to reform the US government in any shape fit to run a severely wounded nation.
How large so you think the us government was in 1870?
This already happened to the Americas. Based on the Amazon basin, my answer is an overwhelming no.
Let's assume a bit different scenario: A terrible disease spreads through the population. It's not lethal, but it makes 50% of women completely infertile, and the remaining 50% can't have more than two children. It continues for three generations, then the effect wears out.
How bad do you think it would get?
Are you trying to imply that just because they'll be the same size a government that has just lost 90% of its highly specialized personnel is equivalent to a steadily growing group that has been building upon itself for years?
Aye, but 740,000,000 folks evenly spread across the globe limits mating options. Similarly, the vast majority of that number is not physically or mentall equipped to survive at an iron-age or lower level.
Considering most western women don't even have two kids?
Not much
Nah, in Western Europe fertility is always around 2 children, check it out. With this scenario next cohort would be 50% smaller than the previous one. In three generations we have only 1/8 of the original population.
I sistinctly remember oil fires.
People would not immediately realise that the disease is gone. They would be afraid of getting infected. They would hide.
When the reserves slowly dwindle and people leave their shelters, they'd do what they can to get things back on their feet.
Society would be kinda similar, but with less consumption, and a lot more humble. A lot of effort would go into preventing this from happening again.
That would be a fucking godsend.
Research spending would go up, as we try to understand and stop whatever is happening. It would cause a lot of chaos in low income countries, might destroy a few shitholes if we're lucky.
>Aye, but 740,000,000 folks evenly spread across the globe limits mating options
Depends on how intact public transportation remains. If 90% of the population disappears overnight, I'm sure most people would find the means to move to the nearest metropolis. Unless you live in fucking Siberia, in which case I hope you enjoy walking and have a good sense of direction. Humanity will persist eventually.
It also depends on how these deaths are concentrated. 90% could mean everyone outside of Europe and a handful in Europe die. That'd be a lot less impactful (for the surviving Europeans) than 90% of the population dying evenly across the globe.
>Nah, in Western Europe fertility is always around 2 children
KEK, no! Only France and Ireland hit that (and in the case of France, we know who's having the babies). Germany is even as low as 1.3 per woman, DESPITE having (in total numbers) the largest Muslim community in Europe (and that's prior to the refugee crisis. By now they might have twice the number of Muslims of the next most Islamized country). When look at the native population, in every country in Europe (even Ireland.. barely) more people die than there are born.
Damn, I could swear I've seen different data, maybe it had some other way of counting it. Looking at the world bank data you're right.
With - 1.7% yearly growth in Germany we may finally see the end of overpopulation.
Thanks user for showing me how wrong I was.
>With - 1.7% yearly growth in Germany we may finally see the end of overpopulation.
Germany alone has about 1% of the global population. Europe as a whole somewhere around 10%. India alone cancels out Europe's population deficit entirely. And that's ignoring the America's (stable), China (stable) and Africa (growing like it ain't nobody's business).
And let's not forget that, while Germany's native population is shrinking, Germany's overall population is growing. We won't see the "end of overpopulation". It's entirely an African and Indian problem.
lrn2basicdemographics
Part of the reason for that is the sheer cost of having a child plus housing on the level needed to comfortably raise a family. If housing was relaxed massively then childbirth rates would shoot up.
If 90% of the worlds pop died no one would go back to work. Last thing I'd do if I survived a plague is put on my uniform and pop off to my job. People would band together in dumb little communities and farm and shit
>People would band together in dumb little communities and farm and shit
Hate to break it to you, but that's working.
Not that user, but did you miss the part about how New York subways will start to flood and break apart after two days of no oversight?
America existed before the New York subways, I'm sure she can continue to exist without.
Wasn't the point of the post but thanks for playing
>>Dude, after everyone dies, it's not going to be hand-holding and peace-waving for the next 500 millenia or something.
Unless we were thrust into a global thermonuclear war that destroyed all major governments and any plans for continuity of government, why would anything change? OP's scenario involved a plague, not a global conflict. Humans wouldn't suddenly go batshit crazy or regress to some feudalistic way of life just because there was a population decline.
A sudden 90% population decline is likely to be pretty psychologically crippling no matter how it comes about. People don't just get over losing 9/10 of everyone they've ever known, even in passing. People are not rational actors when everyone around them is dying.
Point of the the CHAIN of posts was that civilization's systems of technology are essential to the civilization's survival, and as was pointed out earlier, the essential ones are sell-protecting.
You brought up an unessential system, and I pointed it out.
Not my fault you can't backread more than one post, chuck
>15%
Uh buddy, the 40s called, they want their statistics back.
Eh, it depends. The sudden loss of that many people to plague would likely totally fuck up the world for a while maybe permanently.
However if we discount panic caused and probable wars and power vacuums and such, there is really little that would change. Only a fraction of the world's population is really involved in maintaining most of the vital systems of the world, and much of that is concentrated in a relatively small population groups in first world countries. While the loss of many of these people would be pretty traumatic, there would still be many people who could continue their jobs, and with reduced demand for almost all services and goods the reduced population could still likely fulfill their needs and even grow.
This is partially because of how heavily we have mechanized and automated much of the work we do, but it's also partially because much of the world population is these days involved in nonessential work. I mean we have the leeway that someone can get paid to just look pretty and promote a brand of superfluous products and get by, say compared to back when most people were farmers and were concerned with producing enough food to survive another winter. Those people if lost wouldn't cause too much harm, and if they aren't lost they can be retrained to fill some of the vacant essential roles.
But yeah, again the real problem is with the sudden and traumatic loss that would do untold damage to the hopes of modern world survival, not the actual problems of running a world with a reduced population.
Might be helped that since this is a plague and most inherent immunization is family based, for you survive it's more likely your family members survived as well.
My point is (and this seems to be the part everyone is so keen on missing), a worldwide event such as this would INEVITABLY lead to a very large power vacuum that people would INHERENTLY exploit through active conquest or diplomatic maneuvering.
As communities band together to find safety within numbers, they'll eventually get so big, they'll come into conflict with the interests of a similar community within the same suburb/district/city/state.
Historically speaking, do you know what happens when two different societies intersect each other's territories? It's either war, or commerce, but frankly speaking, those that come into power may not always be "good" people. Hell, they don't even have to be "good" to segue into total war. As long as they're simply "unstable", or "desperate", or maybe even "suspicious", those are all grounds for eventual war.
Not all Kings are as wise as King Solomon. Sometimes kings come into power because no one else wanted to lead the way and they just happened to be chosen for one reason or another.
Raiders and thugs are NOT the most problematic scenario these survivors will encounter. Of course raiders and thugs will be dangerous, and like the Barbarians to Rome, if they don't do something about them, eventually they will grow powerful enough to overturn everything they've built up, but the biggest concern will be dealing with the other communities that build themselves up a few miles away from you (which might actually be run by a raider or a thug int he first place anyway).
And when the US Government DOES finally gain enough strength to try and reclaim all of America, what's to say the people who've finally put themselves in positions of power will simply LET the US government take over for them? Isn't that cause for war, or at the very least, strained diplomacy?
Yes, as long as it's only whites and Asians left alive.
Tbh a great depopulation would do wonders for Africa
thank you for salvaging this thread.
depending on why everyone died you'd probably get a major existential crisis but logistically things would be fine...better even depending on where you lived.
>moves to California.
I think so, provided enough general scientists survive and infrastructure too.
A lot of people actually think it would be beneficial, cos muh Unabomber.
Humanity would definetly survive a 90% (even bigger) population drop- we're fucking great at adapting quikly and survival instincts kick in pretty quick as well- civilization as we know it would certainly break completely... but the chances of a big part of it surviving here and there would be big, and recovering to the same status would take way way shorter then the time it took to get here.
Too fucking much is dependent on unsustainable systems outside of the current model, but at the core not that much of our current philosophy trully depends on it.Consumerism for example dies but not the idea, capitalism survives and would rise again pretty quick since we've been born into commerce. humanity going backwards is actually pretty unrealistic since knowledge builds on- even if a number of generations don't have the time and convenience to think about higher concepts they already have those concepts from thousands of years of thinkers, science, literature and so on- and considering whatever caused the population drop affected the population only theres still plenty out there that resists time(printed books for example) that wouldn't even be a rare commodity since we have so much stuff and so little people remaining to use it.
On a breakdown alternative models are a sure thing to rise and have an opportunity- i mean, all kinds of societal systems know and unknow would appear; But by one generation or two they would be pretty similar to the ones we know- they are prone to natural selection as well- unless better models appear (and those are likely- we live in a enviroment that is negative to change, such a breakdown would create an opportunity for our current level of knowledge to try things differently).
But all of this is moot because the circunstances of this population drop could change everything. If people are desperate, melancolic, thirsty for war... how sudden or slow it happens... The circunstances make a huge fucking lot of impact.
How much savagery, union, disunion, chaos, fight or fligth over conversation and etcetera... how things breakdown could change everything.
Its too vague as a scenario for any reasonable 'forecast'.
Oh, and i almost forgot: WHO SURVIVES and in wich proportion would make all the difference as well.
Who would be those survivors? Scattered across all classes, nations and fields?
Across all ages?
War leaves the old behind. Sickness tends to leave the young. The circunstances leave more of the upper class or lower classes.
Scenarios where it happens suddenly are all or mostly cases where very specific niches would survive- for example those living far away from urban centers. Lifestyles, beliefs, culture... it all would make a difference. Heck if most of the survivors are those who aren't into our current lifestyle or live in backwards communities heck, yeah, our current civilization (way of life) would be at risk of never surfacing again.
>Unless we were thrust into a global thermonuclear war that destroyed all major governments and any plans for continuity of government, why would anything change? OP's scenario involved a plague, not a global conflict. Humans wouldn't suddenly go batshit crazy or regress to some feudalistic way of life just because there was a population decline.
Are you legitimately autistic or something, or do you just not have an social connections at all and assume everyone else just does what they are 'supposed' to do. No, they do what they do because they care for certain very specific people in their lives. The vast majority of people who arn't basement dwelling spergs, hermits, or higher level ascetic monks base a vast part of their personal identity on that bubble of people around them, on their family unit, how they mesh with their religious and social community.
You remove those people, even if it was something as painless as a 'they all disapeared when nobody was looking one night' and NOT the OP scenario of 'watching almost certainly painful and agonizing death by disease coupled with paranoia and survivors guilt' you'll have mass hysteria and the complete collapse of people's motivations and identities. You'll have people wandering the streets aimlessly in fucking fugue states or randomly committing suicide on a regular basis for months if not years.
The mailman may be alive, but he's not going to deliver your goddamn letters because even if he could get gas in his fucking car he doesn't give a shit about your fucking junk mail because he watched his daughter, his mother, his wife and finally his son pass away in his arms while he could do nothing, over the past few weeks and when he was finally ready... death never came back for him. He can't help you, because he doesn't even know who or why he IS anymore.
Fucking this. The amount of people who don't understand basic human behaviour/psychology in this thread is appalling/scary.
Here's your (you)
t. Grognard Neckbeard Who Knows Nothing
:^)
You've never had anyone in your family die, huh? Both sets of grandparents still alive? Lucky.
That's nowhere near the same thing, you fucking faggot.
I think a lot of people are looking down on human ability to bounce back from a disaster.
If the deaths are truly uniform in such a way that we maintain an equal percentage of engineers and doctors and other educated professionals in most industries as we do right now and we also have access to reading material from libraries, there is no reason why the survivors couldn't band together and start their own civilization with a standard of living comparable to ours after figuring how to maintain an electrical grid and find ways to harvest materials locally that used to depend on imports from other countries, and even then only in cases where we suppose that the international grid has gone dark and we're stranded on our land, which might not necessarily be the case.
The biggest hurdle would probably be finding ways to overcome the psychological scarring that would inevitably occur and be present in every single individual for an entire generation. The will to live would probably win out in a lot of cases, but even then such a massive extinction level event would leave a massive cultural footprint for centuries to come.
>I think all fa/tg/uys should visit Veeky Forums every once in a while. It makes worldbuilding that much more fascinating when you understand the movement behind human nature and all its follies.
Veeky Forums used to be Veeky Forums and we did a better job of it too.
I'm the guy that's proposing society would attempt to fill a large power vacuum with either war or diplomatic maneuvering.
I'm not saying humanity is "doomed" in any sense of the word. In fact, humanity will do just fine. But I highly doubt we'd be back to the same standard of living pre-apocalypse in just a matter of years. It'd take a hundred years AT THE VERY LEAST, and even then, i'm going to assume 100 years is a long shot.
Well we sure as hell lost that ability now.
>You've never had anyone in your family die, huh? Both sets of grandparents still alive? Lucky.
There' dead man, but I've still got plenty of people left alive in my family and circle of friends.
It's not 'oh boo hoo some people died I saw a body or two' it's "I very probably don't have any meaningful relationships left to rely on and if there is by chance one or two people I care for left alive it's entirely possible I'll never be able to contact them again what with the complete collapse of modern communication and transit.
1 in 10 isn't even enough a good enough statistic to actually bury all the dead, most of them are going to rot where they died!
What human ability? Do you have some weird narrative of the past?
>I'm not saying humanity is "doomed" in any sense of the word. In fact, humanity will do just fine. But I highly doubt we'd be back to the same standard of living pre-apocalypse in just a matter of years. It'd take a hundred years AT THE VERY LEAST, and even then, i'm going to assume 100 years is a long shot.
Without oil, we can never recover. There's nothing else that can provide the energy a modern world demands.
>complete collapse of modern communication and transit.
Why?
Telephone lines don't just stop working as soon as a certain number of people die.
With a 90% decrease in the consumption of gasoline, the "stockpile" in your average gas station is going to last quite a while.
Have you read any of the books that have come out concerning the Second Congo War?
First thing that comes to mind, though there's countless examples throughtout the modern world of how far living standards can fall and people still bounce back.
Human beings can handle more than you give them credit.
>Telephone lines don't just stop working as soon as a certain number of people die.
Yeah they do. They have to be monitored and maintained constantly.
You're hoping that the 10% that survive are skilled? You know how unlikely that is?
>Have you read any of the books that have come out concerning the Second Congo War?
No?
>First thing that comes to mind, though there's countless examples throughtout the modern world of how far living standards can fall and people still bounce back.
State a few.
>Human beings can handle more than you give them credit.
Individuals, to a degree, yes. Populations of them? Not so much. How'd easter island fare?
>nothing else that can provide the energy a modern world demands
Has nuclear been handwaved away?
Nuclear EROEI 5:1.
Oil EROEI 20-30:1
Nuclear is too costly in comparison. If were assuming that people are building them without oil-based equipment, then it becomes even less likely that anyone will ever build new ones.
The modern world happened because of oil's low energy investment and high return, not because of some magic singularity of humans becoming newtypes or some shit.
>You're hoping that the 10% that survive are skilled? You know how unlikely that is?
I imagine of the millions alone in America that survive a 90% plague, yes, there'll be enough skilled workers to pick up the pieces and begin teaching others the secrets of their trade.
Being skilled in telecommunications management doesn't make someone more likely to catch the plague.
>there'll be enough skilled workers to pick up the pieces and begin teaching others the secrets of their trade
10% scattered across the continent with no means of communications?
Yeah, but we certainly won't go "extinct" or something. We'll just find other alternatives, and if those alternatives might take us a thousand years (however unlikely that may be) to get up to our current standard of living, then so be it.
Communication wouldn't be a problem. Reliable communication with the right people at the right time would be a problem.
Electricity will go down after a month, and cellphone carriers will be rendered useless in weeks. Do you travel around some foreign city on a bicycle, screaming your lungs out with a megaphone trying to find your maybe-not-dead parents? Do you post billboards all around the downtown area telling them to come meet you in the bronze statue every afternoon? And do you really want to advertise who you are and where you're going? What if someone goes crazy and tries to kill you for some reason? Do you really want to make yourself such a vulnerable target for crazy people and raiders?
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Gasoline can expire, and there's not going to be a new shipment of the stuff anytime soon. If you want your group of 100 or 200 or 300 or whatever to survive, you're going to want to control the gas station of X street, Y street, and Z street, which means your group is going to have gasoline for longer. But what if that group of 200 people ALREADY owns Z street? This is why conflict will be inevitable.
There's a LOT of resources to salvage, but any reasonable leader of a group will want more and more and more until he has MORE than enough to help his tribe survive; other tribes be damned.
>Is that a bad thing?
And in 100 years the only ones still alive will be the ones who can actually farm.
>Yeah, but we certainly won't go "extinct" or something. We'll just find other alternatives, and if those alternatives might take us a thousand years (however unlikely that may be) to get up to our current standard of living, then so be it.
Permanent pre-industrial tech level. If anything happens to civilization right now that will be the only result. Coal will still be in abundance, but without oil we cannot make the transition back to the modern world.
>Electricity will go down after a month
I'd say closer to a week at best.
Not only that, but without oil, no plastics. Sure if you knew how to recycle plastic you can get some extra use out of it. However plastic degrades horribly after recycling it once or twice, requiring freshly made plastic to take its place.
Frankly I don't see how modern society can snap back without oil readily available to refine, especially since most if not all the easy deposits have since long been tapped out.
>10% scattered across the continent with no means of communications?
31,000,000 people in a single country with a communications system still in place because the plague does not specifically target telephone repair men?
Yes, seems quite plausible.
>Electricity will go down after a month, and cellphone carriers will be rendered useless in weeks.
But they won't?
Alan Weisman gave the communications systems a longer life span the power grid, and that was with a 100% plague.
>I'd say closer to a week at best.
Even with NO ONE running the system, it'd still be a year at minimum before the system started to have faults (t. Alan Weisman)
I think that before we talk about anything else we should set in stone what kind of pandemic we're talking about.
I don't know enough to start talking about viruses and infectious diseases, but given that we're talking about survivors we should make it clear that there are diseases that target one demographic much more frequently than others.
What happens to isolated populations that aren't immediately touched by the disease? What happens if america successfully quarantines for a year or two before the disease hits? What if it only targets specific ethnicities or targets men more frequently than women?
What about tracing the timeline of the spread of the disease? The areas hit first would probably be hit worst but also have the chance to recover faster than those where the disease burns slowly due to people who are susceptible taking measures to quarantine and keeping it alive.
How do we tell infected people apart from uninfected? How do we tell if someone is immune to the disease or susceptible to infection? What if it mutates and becomes even more aggressive as it burns through the world?
Does it pass through physical contact? Bodily fluids? Mosquitoes? breath and miasma?
Or do we just suppose that 90% of people completely at random and without warning disappear overnight leaving 10% to fend for themselves?
I think the only people arguing that the modern world could exist without oil are those that believe in the bed-time story of the singularity.
>With a 90% decrease in the consumption of gasoline, the "stockpile" in your average gas station is going to last quite a while.
As an emergency fuel technician, lemme tell you, das bullshit.
Gasoline only has a shelf life of a couple of months at best without special treatment, diesel is better but you've still got to treat the stuff for storage, but I'mma let you know right now, if it all collapses to a 90% Kill Plague I don't think I'll be out to service the hundreds of emergency fuel tanks on the cell towers and comms stations you know what with the power priority going to lab containment, and hospital power... and even then after all but one other randomly chosen member of my family dies I literally won't have the manpower or the total skilleset necessary for maintaining my own operations either (even if I somehow had the heroic willpower necessary to work myself to death for distant strangers.)
>31,000,000 people in a single country with a communications system still in place because the plague does not specifically target telephone repair men?
What percentage of the population are currently telephone repairmen? Why would they keep doing their jobs and not try to survive in other, more practical means?
>But they won't?
Based on?
>Alan Weisman gave the communications systems a longer life span the power grid, and that was with a 100% plague.
Who? A senior official of a power company?
>Even with NO ONE running the system, it'd still be a year at minimum before the system started to have faults (t. Alan Weisman)
A bachelor's degree in literature tells you about infrastructure how?