In that case, I think I’ll go whole hog in index futures as the stock market will certainly crash.
Man, just the thought of loosing my son scares me. I would think that a large portion of society would delve directly into science and a massive undertaking to build some sort of craft to rival the aliens, so we can go reclaim our loved ones. We humans can do alot given the right incentives.
Every Florida vote is five times more important.
Folks are gonna die, today.
Air traffic controllers will notice the phenomenon of pilots, either present or not present in the first few moments after the whiz bang disappearance, except at those places where all of the controllers disappeared. Somewhere out there in the ocean a randomly empty boat is steaming along toward an unmanned port. Oil tankers have small crews, compared to their size, and the number of guys who can steer the damn thing is usually a single digit number. Lots of places where random kills.
Did the eighty percent of drivers have time to pull over and park? How about the eighty percent of the bus drivers with their not quite empty busses? The patients disappearing during surgery are really not going to do well, after they arrive in whereverland, but the ones whose doctors vanish won’t do much better.
Lots of babies will die unattended, when five member families loose four members. A lot of them will be in locked apartments, or remote homes. Quite a few abandoned children around, and in some cases, those kids are not going to have much chance of being found in time to save their lives, what with the number of people looking for them being so small.
Even the non-immediate problems, are pretty grim for a lot of people.
When I go to work tomorrow, some random number of clients, and some random number of coworkers is missing. Depending on the ratio, it could be a very tough day at work. It will necessarily be a very tough day in part of the facility, since some units are two worker standard teams, and some of them will necessarily be unstaffed. Since the number of clients is uniformly greater than the number of workers, the probability is that the workload will be unmanageable in a lot of places. In the places where lots of workers didn’t disappear, well, I am figuring the number of people calling in today is likely to be fairly high, percentage wise.
Hospitals have the same problem. The smaller the hospital, the more likely the ratios are totally unworkable, with half the sick people gone, and ninety percent of the nurses gone, and all the electricians. Professors with nearly empty classes might seem great, but classes without professors are gonna be fairly boring.
This random thing is gonna be very hard on people. By the time it sorts out, the population is going to be much smaller than twenty percent of the current numbers, and that doesn’t even consider the possibility of social disorder. Homer Simpson is not nearly as atypical as we might hope.
A hundred years from now, populations would be stabilized on a curve identical to the present one, only a couple of billion behind. Take the incentive for birth control away from the developed nations, and they would expand population much faster than the third world does now.
Tris
“A hard rain is gonna fall.” ~ Bob Dylan ~
According to the U.S. Census’ clock, there are 287,613,576 people in the U.S. right now. Taking away 80% of those leaves 57,522,715.2 people. Does anyone know how long ago that was roughly the country’s actual population?
This is a lot like a particularly bad Piers Anthony novel I read once. I can’t remember the name of it but the main idea was that man invents cheap matter transmission and people start migrating to other planets, depopulating the planet without a war, plague, disaster, etc.