Okay, so hypothetically, BAM! Everyone on earth just disappears. Nothing else is affected, only the people vanish. How would computers; utilities, (electricity, gas, water) and mainly phones continue to work, and for how long, without the people who operate/control those services, or could they even continue to work if people were no longer, well, there?
I’d guess 90% last less than a few days (most power plants will fail without a constant supply of fuel), and after a week or so, pretty much everything will be dead. There may be some small solar-powered services that will work for a long time.
Also take into account cascading failures
In her Staff Report from a few years back, Una estimated the power grid would collapse within 24 hours. (That’s a Zombie Apocalypse, not the Universal Rapture, but essentially the same answer.) Telephone company Central Offices have generator backups, but with no one around to top off the fuel tanks, they’re probably gone within a matter of days. Additionally, the modern Internet is much more dependent on the primary power grid than old fashioned Plain Old Telephone Service–even a lot of phones these days no longer can run off the DC signal from the telco, and of course computers, routers, DSL modems and so forth need to be plugged in to a power source to work. The Internet is effectively gone as soon as the power grid collapses–if you’re the Last Man on Earth, you’ll be hard pressed to find a place to login and update your Facebook status (even if some big server farms continue to run automatically on their own emergency power arrangements).
Don’t know about gas and water.
From the Wiki article:
What kind of catastrophic events are they referring to exactly? Wouldn’t a nuclear reactor shut down relatively “clean”, with the only real problem being the leak of radiation decades/centuries down the road when the containment corrodes through?
Also, nuclear plants only run for an hour and a half without being connected to the power grid? Is that some kind of built-in safety feature?
Initial shutdown will be clean. The problem comes with long-term management of decay heat. The reactor core will continue to generate enough heat to cause a meltdown for some months after shutdown. Depending on the reactor, the automatic cooling systems may or may not be able to deal with this. Modern designs can deal with this heat with completely passive cooling systems and will be fine. Older designs, like the old GE Mark 1 reactors at Fukishima, will melt down after a few days without external cooling.
Actually, they’ll trip and shut down immediately on loss of external power. That’s an intentional safety measure, reactors aren’t supposed to run without an external power source as a backup in case local power generation is lost.