(This may or may not be inspired by recent cinematic events)
MODERATOR HEADS UP: the hypothetical posed in this OP has inevitably led to a discussion of spoilers (some open) below. Please proceed with caution. -Asimovian
One day, fifty percent of the population simply… vanishes. No warning, they’re just gone.
It strikes me that this would be a ridiculously bad thing. It was traumatic when it happened in The Leftovers… but that was only 2% of the population. I imagine we’d see immediate loss of life among the survivors- plane crashes, car crashes, catastrophic surgeries, that sort of thing… but I’d think the second-order effects would be devastating. Would civilization even survive?
How random would this process be? If it was totally random, the whole industries of one sort could be devastated while others others might be untouched. Until we know who exactly is gone, we can’t assess the damage/gain.
If it was totally random, wouldn’t that imply that roughly 50% of all experts in all fields would disappear?
To me the result would be that humans had to engage in mass migration so they could rebuild society. I don’t know if we could have a global civilization with half the people. The western (or eastern) half of the US may be abandoned while everyone moved to the other half. The same would probably happen all over the world, people would abandon large swaths of land and just repopulate half the planet until the next generation had enough kids to rebuild everything (4 kids per woman should do it).
Setting aside for the moment emotional issues, wiping out half the population completely randomly should be only a short-term problem infrastructure-wise. There should still be plenty of people who know how to farm, run power plants, operate machinery, etc. In some industries people might need to take on more shifts for a while, in other industries they wouldn’t even need to do that because of a lesser demand. There would be twice as much land per person to go around, plenty of housing, plenty of jobs to go around. Lots more wealth per individual. In the long term, it would probably be a plus.
If it’s the bottom half, the human race will quickly die of starvation. If it’s the top half, we’ll survive for a few decades but the inability to reproduce will kill us off.
There would be tremendous carnage, as half of all piloted vehicles lose their pilots and crash into stuff. Although only 1/4 of planes should lose both pilot and copilot. And a few of those are going to have a passenger who can land it. So you’d end up with a bunch of damage and injury and death in the immediate aftermath.
Any sufficiently large calamity might spark other conflict. Certainly, tensions will be high, and if that leads to shots being fired or missiles launched, could be really bad.
Civilization-wise, though, we’d be fine. It’d be like the aftermath of a really bad war, except with smaller losses to capital and infrastructure, and we wouldn’t have disproportionately lost young able-bodied men, and also wouldn’t have a disproportionately higher number of them disabled or injured and requiring extra care.
That seems like an extremely radical, and unnecessary solution. I don’t have the historical figures, but I imagine most every town, city, and state was once viable and growing with half the population it currently has today. Returning to that point, while jarring, sounds kind of nice: half the traffic congestion, half the lines at the supermarket or Disneyland, etc.
Presuming a truly random selection, this is probably how things will turn out, but not certainly. It’s theoretically possible that a random cull could just wipe out all the males and society dies out in a generation. It’s similarly possible that every single farmer and rancher vanishes and humanity starves. Neither outcome is even slightly likely, of course.
Naah, people wouldn’t go anywhere; some houses would be left empty, but 3 out of 4 two-person households would still have a resident with property and interest in staying, and while many businesses would find themselves suddenly short-staffed most would still be able to hobble along, possibly bolstering themselves by hiring people left unemployed when their more-gutted businesses failed. There are very few areas of the county so sparely populated that a 50% reduction would make local society collapse.
I don’t know how you’re ranking “bottom” and “top” halves here. Some mechanism that apparently lumps all farm workers and food services employees in one half and all impotent / sterile people in the other half?
“On an airplane in flight” would be pretty close to the #1 place I would not want to be if this were to happen, perhaps rivaled by “on the freeway”. Can you imagine if half of all the vehicles cruising along the freeway at speed suddenly went out of control?
Yeah - you’d certainly lose more than 50% of the population, though I’m not entirely sure how much more. All freeways would instantly become clogged with crashed and “abandoned” cars. Food shipment becomes impossible. Major cities become regions of starvation, anarchy, and death within weeks. Civilization collapses.
Preppers kick back in their bunkers and gloat. Well, the ones who are still around anyway.
I think there’d be chaos, unrest, and sporadic violence for months or even years afterwards, as every surviving basement weirdo, cultist, survivalist, religious fundamentalist, etc., sees this as a sign of whatever their preferred apocalypse, and surges out into the world, guns blazing.
Possibly. But half the stores in each town would be abandoned. I’m not sure if that would cause issues.
Also is keeping up infrastructure realistic? The roads, water, sewer, etc. would all still be there.
In Detroit the population dropped from almost 2 million in the 50s to less than 700k now. I believe one thing they did was concentrate the remaining citizens since there weren’t enough people or tax revenue to cover the entire city with public spending.
Maybe that would happen instead, a city like LA or NY would just become more congregated into a smaller part of town.