There’s a new TV show this season called “Flashforward.” Part of the premise is that everyone in the world passes out simultaneously for two minutes. Pilots pass out, causing planes to crash. Surgeons drop, killing their patients. Drivers, construction workers, nuclear plant operators – all of them are completely out for two minutes.
Would anyone care to speculate on the death toll if this phenomenon were real? How many killed in plane crashes? How many dead on the highways or drowned while swimming or killed in kitchen fires? How many parachutists would fail to pull their ripcords and how many mountaineers would tumble to their deaths?
Worldwide? The world population apparently just hit 7 billion, so if only 1% died that would be 70 million.
The deaths wouldn’t all be from that two minutes either. Every plane would fall out of the air, and many would land on populated areas. Fires would start with no way to move trucks to the areas. Every moving vehicle would crash and all streets would be clogged. A large proportion of injured people would die because they couldn’t be gotten to medical facilities.
Anybody know how many people Rob Sawyer killed when he wrote the novel?
Note that two minutes without pilot input is no big deal for most airliners during much of each flight. They have sophisticated autopilots (which not infrequently can land the plane). There would certainly be some crashes, but probably not a high percentage of flights.
I’d expect that two minutes inattention by nuclear power plant operators would be even less of an issue - it would be most surprising to learn that automatic control systems couldn’t handle the job for extended periods.
Yeah, I would expect that the highest immediate death toll would be on our roadways. At any given moment, you’ve probably got millions of people driving on high-speed roads. At freeway speeds even two seconds of complete inattentiveness can lead to disaster; two minutes would put nearly everybody off the road violently, killing who knows how many. Add to that the subsequent congestion and inability to provide medical care to all of the victims mentioned by Exapno Mapcase, and I’ll bet the death toll from that could top a million worldwide.
Airplanes and power plants, by contrast, would suffer little. Planes currently undergoing takeoff and landing would end up in serious trouble, but most of the others should be fine. I can’t think of any reason two minutes of unsupervised power plant operation would be dangerous at all, but then I’m no power plantologist. Maybe there are some out there that are so incredibly unstable that they require constant adjustments of the duct tape and bubble gum that’s holding them together or else they’ll explode.
What about all of the people who would be sleeping when the giant pass-out occurs? Does this pass-out thing somehow adjust for different time zones of the world?
This is based on the book by Robert J Sawyer, isn’t it? In that book, IIRC, people who flashforward while asleep simply think that they have really vivid dreams. Until they wake up and start to compare notes.
Only if for some reason the plane went into a very very steep dive. The only way I could imagine that happening in this scenario would be if maybe both pilots passed out forward onto the control yokes. I’m not even sure if that is enough.
The secondary wave of deaths resulting from the temporary breakdown of order might exceed immediate deaths. At a minimum you would have: more casualties than the combined medical services could hope to treat, more fires than the firefighters could attend to, more emergencies than police could respond to, all through blocked streets and with the emergency personel themselves among the casualties. I’d say a week under martial-law curfew just to restore the rule of law to the cities, deal with fire and toxic spills, and restore basic services. I’m thinking of half the cities on the planet looking like New Orleans during Hurrican Katrina.
Then you get into tertiary deaths: the economic and political disruption caused by a disaster so widespread.
One thing I found implausible was the number of plane crashes. They said there was something like 800 plane crashes. I guess it’s possible that that many would be taking off and landing within any 2 minute span, but if they are in the air then autopilot is pretty decent. Planes flying on a course aren’t going to suddenly change unless the pilot falls asleep on the stick and changes it.
Only? I’d be staggered if 1% of 1% were in life-critical situations in any given 2 minute period, such as they would die. Virtually everyone in the world is sitting, lying or walking at any given moment.
I don’t think so. Very few planes would crash. If it’s a jetliner, once it’s away from the airport, it’s on auto-pilot, anyway. Nobody would notice if the pilot took a snooze for two minutes or an hour.
So you really only have to worry about planes on approach or taking off at that moment, small planes with no auto-pilot which won’t kill that many people, helicopters, and a few unlucky hang gliders.
Most power plants wouldn’t even notice that their operators fell asleep for 2 minutes. Operators is somewhat of a misnomer anyway, the personnel are more like caretakers… Power plants pretty much run themselves, and the operators just monitor the systems to make sure everything is working as intended. The only way they would really be affected in that 2 minutes is if they were in the middle of a complex and time sensitive procedure, but that would only be a minor fraction of a percent of all of the utilities. 99% of the world would probably still have power.
Minus, of course, the thousands of downed power lines from cars losing control and plowing into the poles. The death toll on the roads would be severe.
Y’all are all forgetting something. It would be far worse than 800.
Any major airport has a lot of takeoffs and landings every hour. If even one crashes on the airstrip, then that airstrip can’t be landed on. And the crash might take out more than one runway. What happens to the planes waiting in line, even if they were on auto pilot for those two minutes? Where do they land?
What about airtraffic control blinking out for two minutes? I can easily see how the hypothetical scenario would strand planes up in the air with no place to land. And with no place to land, you crash.
Unless you’re Captain Sully and the Hudson’s near by.
First, the world population has not just hit 7 billion. The current estimate is 6.787 billion. Second, someone asked how many people died in the novel by Robert Sawyer. I’m a little over halfway through the novel. I don’t believe that he ever gives a number. I would guess that from the incidents that he mentions that the death toll worldwide is in the high hundreds of thousands or low millions, so it’s well under .1%. Also, the movie is wildly different from the novel. Aside from the fact that they’re both about everyone in the world passing out and having a flashforward, there’s very little the same about them.
But does the autopilot / automatic system jump in once the pilot stops reacting; is it set automatically nowadays as soon as things are running normal, or would the pilot/ operator need a one-minute warning to activate it? Because in the 80s TV movies, the autopilot would need to be explicitly engaged, but then, they have apparently improved the software a lot since then.