But there are a lot of YouTube videos. For medicine, I doubt there are many things a doctor would need to know to conduct a physical exam (for example) which are not available in that format. I bet there are thousands of videos showing pilots’ tricks of the trade or many other technical subjects. Yes, it would take further time and experience and be flawed in some ways, fail sometimes, and require trial and error. But it would still be better than what was taught a century ago.
This isn’t starting from scratch at all. Sure, most people would not want to do so and so. But the ones that do would presumably be as driven and directed as they are now.
One of these is written by the voice of experience and the other is a utopian fantasy. Which is which is an exercise left to the reader.
While @Voyager knows one brilliant 16-year-old, those of us whose professions are educators of this age of children have worked with thousands of children and adolescents. Who has a clearer perspective?
I have taught kids whose maturity puts most adults to shame. Kids who went on to elite universities. But it’s not the outliers who will define society, but the average.
All of this is really irrelevant. Society would collapse, manufacturing stops, systems become unusable, motorized transportation ends and the infrastructure starts to crumble. Without modern medicine, illness again becomes more prevalent.
The question of survivability of small child really doesn’t matter either. It doesn’t matter if the population plummets by 90% or 95%.
The focus on 16-year-olds also misses the point that these kids will become adults far sooner than anything can be done by society to utilize any books.
Almost nothing in my field is on YouTube videos. True, it is a bit erudite for an after the disaster situation, but textbooks would work much better.
YouTube is great for procedures, better than books. But I think it might be tough to learn anatomy only from YouTube.
However, if the scenario in the OP did not allow any electronic resources to be available, then they would be totally screwed, since a lot of stuff is only electronic these days, like most manuals.
If our society was at the level of the average person, we’d be more screwed than we are now. Society has always been driven by the leaders.
I know lots of teachers, none of whom think the kids are quite as awful as some of you seem to.
As General Turgidson said, it’s not like we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. Kids with significant illnesses are going to die. But kids of that age are healthier by far than people of my age. I pretty much never went to the doctor from age 14 right through grad school.
Sure manufacturing will stop, but there will be a surplus of goods so who cares? Need a chair, go into the next house which is now empty to get one. Of course a system without manufacturing or motorized transportation couldn’t carry our current population, but it wouldn’t have to.
And I’m assuming that kids don’t die when they turn 17, so I don’t understand your last point. If they do die at 17 the population would drop to near zero soon enough and no one would have time to learn.
Counterpoint to that ---- in this particular scenario where there is literally no adults at all and no normal laws any person with that type of “bully mindset” will probably end up being killed by his “victims”.
No, I very seldom watch TV. I prefer internet and Netflix.
Internet is the first thing that stops working, faster than the electricity grid even. You may have local electricity with solar panels while the sun shines or the odd generator as long as there is fuel available, but even batteries for night storage will be few and far between.
Post-apocalyptic movies and tv shows invariably include characters/groups who will quickly gravitate towards force and oppression of others in order to survive. No one will admit to being one of those types. What percentage of the survivors do we expect to go all Negan on the rest?
Who do you suppose is keeping the network and systems infrastructure up? There aren’t a lot of engineer-level IT people who are 16…mainly, 16-year-olds, if they are in IT at all are help desk or call center techs. They aren’t going to be able to keep anything running. I’d guess that parts of the internet would be down within a day or so, and the vast majority within a week. There will be isolated pockets still up for maybe a month or so, but you’d only be able to access those if you knew what you were doing…which, the vast majority of 16-year-olds or younger aren’t going to know. They also won’t know how to restart the data centers to mine them for knowledge, at least not on any sort of realistic time frame before the centers are beyond recovery…those that survive fire, flood, weather and climate.
They won’t be starting from scratch, no…again, that’s why I said we are talking about maybe a late 18th to early 19th-century society could emerge. But they aren’t going to have YouTube videos or most other internet sources data available to them, as most of that will be down before the shock wears off and they start to get their shit together to survive.
I’ve been sharing this thread with some of our other faculty. They say to thank everybody for the laughs. Uniform consensus is the total and complete collapse of civilization and a reversion to a feral state, with the eventual extinction of humanity. The only argument we have with each other is over how long it would take.
None of us have humanity lasting more than a year.
I think this goes the other way into too much pessimism, to perhaps balance out the ridiculous optimism some on this thread seem to be fixated on. To me, there simply is too much technology and resources out there for a complete, total collapse across the board. You are going to have some groups that simply are going to band together and are smart enough and lucky enough to survive and thrive. They will have an incredible amount of resources in the short term and will have a technological base to start from. Perhaps not that many groups, but some…enough I think to prevent a complete collapse and everyone going feral.
Worse - public high school! I admit, we’re a little biased. But the common observation this school year is that the year and a half the kids were at home and out of regular school made them feral. So I hold little hope that a total removal of any and every authority would make them buckle down and save everything for the benefit of Humanity and the Future. William Golding was an optimist.
If Golding was an optimist I may be one too, but I hope that reading this thread you did not count me among the pollyannish bunch. I reiterate: no grown ups means: no internet, no intranets (not even the passwords are known!), no electricity grid (some electricity locally), books far for optimum allocation, medicine goes bonkers, experience is obliterated, superstition rules, Cargo Cult reigns supreme, everything goes down the drain. And that is just the short version.
Just in case there was any doubt about my stance.
Thank Godott this is just a thought experiment, right?
I highly doubt humanity will go extinct. There are estimated to be around 2.6 billion people under the age of 20 in the world today, and even after this Rapture-like event we would still have ~2 billion people remaining on Earth.
Meanwhile, it is speculated that around 75,000 years ago humans went through a population bottleneck of around ~20,000 individuals (although the exact causes of this bottleneck are still an area of debate), and yet humans made it out fine since then, even though back then humans had an obviously much lower level of technology, skills, and infrastructure.
Now, you could say that 75,000 years ago, the humans of that time had much more in the way of survival-oriented skills compared to the low attention span, TikTok generation of kids today. Which is true … but with 2 billion survivors it becomes more of a pure numbers game at this point.
Certainly a large majority of them will die in the chaos that erupts afterward, but plenty of kids grew up on farms and have enough agricultural skills to avoid famine, while a proportion of other kids had survivalist junkies as parents, who passed on some of this knowledge to them before the Rapture. And with humans being humans, people will naturally band together to fight out external threats, so I concur with the speculation that humanity will devolve into a bunch of feudal kingdoms.
As for the level of technology this post-Rapture society will attain, I think within 20 - 30 years it will be similar to the 19th century Western world, thanks to the knowledge contained in libraries. However, for humanity to regain a level like what we have today will take at least several hundred years, possibly even over a millennium, because there is too much information that is not captured in books, and the amount of infrastructure built by the pre-Rapture society that will have crumbled is unfathomably vast.
Oh come on! Have a little more optimism! A bunch of teenagers are suddenly going to have absolutely no adults to supervise them, access to a seemingly unlimited supply of alcohol, drugs and guns, with no police, laws, schools or parents to check them, free access to sports cars and anything they could want (of course, many of these things are going to be worthless in a few hours to days as the power grid dies, but they don’t know that yet) with the shock of the loss of every adult these kids know, but they will make the right decision!
Writes somebody who optimistically calls himself “the gun is mightier than the pen”. Well, I claim that the pen is mightier than the gun, at least when the pen is a 5H pencil or harder, at close range and used by surprise if you manage to stick it deep enough into the eye. Then I agree that humanity will not go extinct, only society will. Loose bands of hunter gatherers will survive and regress like the inhabitants of Tasmania did when they got separated from mainland Australia when the waters rose (around the time of the Noah flood, they did not call it the Rapture back then, I believe).
