i asked a similar question a year or to ago deeling with an 80% loss of human life. some good suff. i say we do it!
I didn’t forget about the Flu of 1918… but although it had the highest death toll in sheer numbers I am not at all certain of the percentage of die-off. I recalled some for the Black Death, that’s all.
Anybody have a percentage for the death toll of 1918 Flu vs. world population at the time?
Don’t know about the world, but the populations of the US was about 100 million at the time. Half a million lost (cited above) would be .5%. Much lower percentage than Europe during the Black Plague. I expect the percentage worldwide to be no worse.
Nipicking some cited text:
From what I understand, the Bayer factory in the US had been confiscated during WWI and given or sold to an American pharmaceutical company to run. So the US was actually protecting the profits of one of its own companies, not one of the enemy’s. Whether that’s better or not I leave to your judgement.
Aww, you guys beat me to the “How many rotting bodies per survivor” question. 
I’d say 50% would be survivable, but 75% gets dubious, and the reason would be the loss of organization. On the farms there would be 1/4 of the farmers and their families and labor, and 1/4 of the transportation to markets, and 1/4 of the markets, and 1/4 of their suppliers. People can move to the country in the wheat belt, and eat all the wheat they want year round…you need the organization.
Since the selection is random, in some towns there would be 0, 1, or 2 power-company hands-on guys left. If power in your area goes down, the phone, radio, TV, etc, communications go with it, and it makes it WAY harder to bring in people to fix the power. People begin to leave for other locations, which is not too bad a thing, but they don’t have good information on where to go.
And more important for each area, some of the people needed to solve the problem(s) would be leaving–ie, if there might be a simple fix for the power, and the remaining phone techs go away meanwhile, you might not get dialtone back.
Then people do get upset and make bad moves. “This is an emergency! Of course we have to declare martial law! And shoot strangers! And confiscate food and supplies (rather than let existing methods allocate them)!”
I’m assuming that though x% of the population goes, the existing infrastructure remains. Sometimes, this will be a problem, e.g. food going rotten because there isway more than can be consumed. However, a whole lot of existing problems become easier, because of an over-abundance of things like houses, cars, etc.
Some people (very old, very sick, and very young) would die. But if 75% of the population of your neighbourhood dies, one of the first things you’ll do is go round checking up on who survived. If the only person who survived in the house down the road is the 3-month-old, the adults around will take care of its immediate needs, then sort out who can adopt it: it won’t die immediately without help, and it will let you know it’s there by crying!
I think a 90% loss would be traumatic, but easily survivable. We’d lose a lot, including most of the small languages and cultures in the world, but we wouldn’t lose much technological knowledge.
With 99% loss, the species would still survive, but it would be losing significant technological knowledge.
Some things representing the pinnacle of science and technology would almost certainly be put on hiatus. For example, three nations currently run manned space programs: the US, Russia, and China. If the population of the world, and therefore the GNP of those nations contracted by half, they probably couldn’t afford to continue those programs. High energy nuclear physics is another example (unless there was some major international consolidation of effort). Things that require large economies of scale, and the support of GNPs in the terabuck range.
Economies of scale: How many things would vanish if the market demand was reduced to half, or a third, or a quarter? Would there still be jumbo jets, or would there just not be a big enough market left to support flights with hundreds of passengers? Maybe they’d be replaced by smaller commuter jets. Giant chain stores like Walmart? Supertankers?
My guess is that the level of technology that could be sustained would start taking a serious hit at the 75% loss level.
You mean all it takes to put Wally World out of business is wiping out 75% of the human race? Huzzah!!
Now where did I put that darn Ray-O-Matic Disintegrator gun…?
Actually, an interesting side question is how many naval vessels remain operable if 90% of their crews drop dead. If, say, the American Navy manages to pull itself together, whoever has seniority can suddenly become the most powerful man on Earth. Actually, these ships likely have existing plans on what to do in a post WW-III environment, which is somewhat close to the proposed scenario.
I think any significant (in my book, let’s say over 1 million from one cause in one day extended for at least a week or more than 5 million in a single day) loss of life will be accompanied by drastic changes in life and/or civilization. If the US has 250 million appx (around 1/24 of the world population), that is a loss of 42,000 or so every day for a week or 210,000 with the one-day number.
To give a scale, there are around 8,000 worldwide deaths from AIDS every day. The Black Death was over a scale of centuries. Sure it was a drastic population reduction but it was in waves and life had a chance to adapt between waves. 1918 flu resulted in 1-2% of the world dying in one year, so around 60 million in today’s numbers, or around 164,000 worldwide in a single day.
Perhaps this is a hijack and not answering the OP, but I think with any drastic, concentrated reduction of population from a single cause will lead to a massive shift of resources to a) keep control if death continues (we would be looking at a reduction of around 1/16 of the world population in a single year) and b) to prevent said death from happening again. If it were a death ray, we would devote everything we had to an anti-death ray. If it were aliens, we would be placing an anti-alien missile shield up in a few months, even if it only happened on one day. Every scientist would start to work on a vaccine if it were a virus.
Nicholas Kristof had a NY Times editorial about nuclear weapons going off in NYC. dailyhowler.com had a review of the editorial with a line that stuck in my head: “This would spell the end of American civilization as we know it.” It is absolutely true with the nuclear weapon incident and even more so with my scenario – with my numbers you are talking about an event 14 times 9/11 every day for a week, repeated in every country across the world scaled for population. Our response would be drastic and civilization as we know it would be drastically altered. Our institutions are fragile and with an absolute focusing of vision that this event would provide, many of them are out of the window when emphasis is placed on order and prevention. I don’t want to go GD, but imagine the Patriot Act times 100. Obviously the response is not entirely linear, but it would be in a different scale than anything we have seen or could even predict.
Incidently, we are pretty ripe for another influenza pandemic. The 1918 strain was characterized by an antigenic shift, not the usual season-to-season antigenic drift. Shift is a major rearranging of the outer proteins of the virus in such a way that our immune system has no recognition of it. Drift is minor rearrangements in ways that our bodies can at least present weak defense against. Flu is serious and can be horrible – variants of flu may cause all types of nasty things besides the myalgias and fever that we are used to. Think peri- and epicarditis, encephalitis, severe untreatable pneumonia leading to respiratory distress, rhabdomyolysis. The H1N1 1918 virus killed healthy men, not just the old and weak, probably from a primary pneumonia. Antigenic shift is behind many of the flu pandemics – 1918 and 1956 were the two severe ones but there were mild ones reported every 10-15 years. I don’t believe there has been a shift reported since the 1977 Swine flu pandemic, although there was some thought that avian flu could be undergoing a shift with human flu (hence killing all of those chickens in Hong Kong). Not to scare you, but there you go…
Here’s a nice outline.
I’ll adjust my answer: If people act sensibly and decently, you could lose over 75% and cope.
In the Middle Ages, apparently the Black Death resulted in increased wages, increased freedom for the serfs (they could take off and get another livelihood), probably a better ratio of resources to population, a societal loosening up, advancement of cities, etc. I can’t help thinking a 10-50% loss of population in the world might end up with an economic and social upgrade (I am not saying it would be worth it, unless I got to pick the ones to get whacked )
Um, I think you musta skipped my post, which contained much about 1918, including many links. At least one of them suggested that that particular virus was not one of the usual mutations of the already adapted 'flu virus. It appears to have been a completely new invasion direct from the bird virus (they’ve recovered the virus from a body). IOW, as bad as or worse than SARS, rather than like the <ho-hum> usual debilitating virus that merely kills a few children and seniors every year. Anyone who read my links should be thoroughly intimidated - which was my purpose. Even given that the general public responded better to the annual warnings to get vaccinated last year than ever before, most people still have no clue about the potential danger. Here’s the National Geographic link again.
To all readers:
I strongly recommend that people start being obsessive about hand washing, with soap [COLOR=Black](disinfectant not required), working up a lather, then rubbing all surfaces of the hands and fingers (including under the fingernails) for at least 60 seconds.[/COLOR] If you wash your hands in a public restroom, blow-drying your hands is best, but even that won’t do much against contact infection if you then touch the (contaminated) doorknob (or whatever) as you leave the room. Yes, it looks peculiar to use a paper towel to open the door, but your choices are a) look like a wuss or weirdo, or b) re-contaminate your hands. 
I’d start no later than September, when flu season begins nowadays. And I’d be especially sure to wash my hands as soon as I got home from any public place (particularlly stores), and spray everything I had touched as I got home with Lysol. Do I sound paranoid? Maybe so, but remember, even paranoids sometimes are under a real threat. 
And if you follow my advice, and are careful not to touch your face anywhere between the time you leave home and the time you scrub when you get home, you have a real chance of avoiding the flu this winter, even if you don’t get vaccinated. But if you’re over 50, or have a chronic health condition, please get vaccinated. Pretty please. And do as much hand washing as possible.
Oh, yeah. The waterless handwash you can buy in a drug store that contains alcohol is pretty decent. Like soap and water, benefits depend largely upon how thoroughly you scrub, and whether you are religious about doing it after you’ve touched stuff that’s in public access (bookstores included).
edwino, are you a path bacty, immuno or pathologist? You sound fairly authoritative.
Um, tygerbright? I wash my hands only after using the restroom or otherwise dirtying them, I handle doorknobs with my bare skin on a regular basis, and I’m not vaccinated against the flu. And judging from the fact that I’ve never gotten the flu in 27 years of life, I’d say there’s still a real chance that I’ll avoid the flu this winter.
Also, “as bad as SARS” somehow fails to inspire any terror in me at all. I’m pretty sure that civilization can survive a loss of 0.00002% of the population.
But back to the original topic, areas of specialized knowledge would suffer greatly. For instance, there are currently only about a thousand professional astronomers in the world. If we’re talking about a death toll of 90%, we’d be down to only a hundred, which might not be enough to sustain an academic environment worldwide.
Universities would also suffer, even with a moderately low death rate. Suppose, for instance, that we lost a third of the population. That means that a third of the professors at any given university, and in any given department, are gone, too. And that would mean that you could teach a third less classes. Now, the classes would admittedly be smaller, and for larger, multi-section classes you could consolidate. But if you had three different classes, each with 20 students, before, you’d now end up with three different classes, each with 13 or 14 students, but only two professors. Nor could you necessarily consolidate those classes with other universities, since the nearest other university offering a particular class might be hundreds of miles away. And so many of the surviving students won’t be able to become fully qualified in their fields, and we’re back to the situation others have raised where the loss is targeted against academics.
tygerbryght
I am a MD/PhD student in molecular genetics planning to do ID (eventually). I get the flu vaccine every year but I can’t bring myself to become a hand-washing fetishist. I use a lot of the Purell hand sanitizer around the baby and I wash well after the bathroom and after dealing with lab stuff (and of course I wash very well in the hospital). But if the flu is gonna get me, well, that’s evolution. Perhaps when I hit 50 or start getting chronic lung problems then I’ll get more worried.
Perhaps you can enlighten me, but I seriously doubt that your levels of handwashing are really going to do much more than scare people. IIRC from ID classes, most viruses don’t live very long outside of the body. Flu depends on aerosol inhalation for most infections. I found one cite from 1982 that influenza may live on surfaces for as long as 8 hours (rarely) and 2 hours (commonly), but most studies ignore this route of infection.
I’d be much more worried about fecal/oral or mucosal bacterial and viral transmission from using a public bathroom, and this is taken care of by a thorough hand wash or by sanitizer. Given the relatively low incidence and morbidity associated with fecal/oral transmitted diseases in the US and most non-third world countries, I can’t work myself into a lather about it (har har). For flu, the big risk seems still to be aerosols. Going out in public, you are always walking through a cloud of previous sneezes, coughs, and exhalations. It is unavoidable unless you are thinking about wearing a HEPA mask everywhere. With airborne transmitted viruses like influenza, I think you are just SOL no matter how little you touch your face or scrub when you get home.
Back to the OP,
The word “civilization” is quite nebulous. Ignoring the human nature arguments I made in my last post, there are a lot of pieces to our civilization that would not survive a 10% reduction in population, let alone a 50% or a 75%, as Chronos points out. But most people would not define “high energy accelerator physics” or “fruit fly eye development” as crucial parts of our civilization. My field would probably cease to exist, which is why I’m happy to state that I can still stitch people up due to my medical training. Probably get an appendix out in 2 or 3 tries.
At some level, though, those niche fields (fetish message board moderator, high-risk demolition insurance adjuster, world class show-jumper) do add interesting new dimensions to our civilization and an en masse loss of those fields as people migrated to crucial areas because of labor shortages and necessity would cause a lot of noticeable change. There would be inevitable loss of knowledge as the survivors age and die before the at generations necessary to replace a 50% loss of population. I think we would have noticeable technologic backsliding with even modest losses (less than 25%) in industrialized countries.
Any sudden alteration in the entire world population will have related affects on the conduct of civilization depending on the nature of the causal phenomenon. Even in the high single digit range, a sudden world wide catastrophe with a victim count in the hundred million range is going to affect politics. If it’s genius aliens using adjusted pseudo random disintegration weapons, world military power becomes the overwhelming interest of every nation with even transistor radio technology. The cold war arms race would be a quaint historic anecdote.
Any disease which communicates rapidly enough to kill a half billion people in anything less than a decade would significantly alter world trade practices well in advance of the collapse of civilization. Military enforced quarantine would be only step one. War would be fairly widespread, causing its own addition to the statistics. Food distribution would be altered far more than the amount caused by loss of productivity from farm workers. Finding a way not to join the doomed percentage would encourage many types of destructive behavior, by both the forces of chaos, and the minions of law and order. The horsemen do not ride alone.
I would like to point out that the United States has recently started two wars over the deaths of only three thousand people. Imagine the military response our leaders would be able to justify if twenty million died. If they died in a way that was not obviously, and demonstrably ordinary in means, the panic factor would be magnified. If it was something natural, it would, of course not be confined to humans, unless it was an incredibly virulent, and long incubating disease. I suppose an airborne variant of HIV might fill the bill, if it didn’t get diagnosed until it has spread fairly far. However, even it that case, someone, or rather some category of someones (preferably someone else, of course) would be blamed, and exterminated by vengeful survivors, or their “civilized” social organization surrogates.
Opportunists will survive in the same percentage as the gullible, leaving enough room for all of man’s favorite follies. The actual day to day work of “saving civilization” would receive endless public posturing, and very little actual day to day work. And of course those already in more critical need of civilization for unassociated reasons, such as chronic illness, prior poverty, or being the member of an already despised minority would die in larger numbers than the strong, the wealthy, and the powerful. The random event might take only forty percent of the poor, but the remaining sixty are going to be at ground zero for what is quaintly described as “disruptions in social services.”
Now, if a gradual decrease is achieved, and an obvious, and inevitable cause is easily perceived by a preponderance of the surviving social order, it might be possible to have an organized and rational adjustment to the difference. But that takes a real master design in your plague/meteor swarm/climate change scenario, and it obviously isn’t going to act randomly among humans, without affecting the ecology. The aliens are definitely out, since they cause massive behavioral changes, simply by existing, even assuming the disaster is obviously unintentional.
So, the example of the OP is not possible, because its nature will overwhelm the simple effects of a sudden loss of population.
Tris
Plenty more here
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m forming a postapocalyptic militia and roving from one isolated settlement to another, pillaging what I need and dividing the spoils while playing one lieutenant against another to ensure that no one is powerful enough to challenge my position.
My only chance for survival is if Mel Gibson disappears as well.
True, and I naturally tend to look at these things from a physics perspective. But the same thing would happen to the engineering and agriculture departments, too. And while gravitational wave detectors might not be an essential part of our civilization, or at least a part which could be put on hiatus until we recover, things like understanding of crop rotation and bridges which can support semi trucks are crucial. You wouldn’t need for knowledge to disappear entirely for it to have big effects regionally. There would probably be plenty of folks left who understand agricultural science, for instance, but would any of them be left at that land grant college in Iowa where the farmers send their kids?
I’m not big on the pillaging, but I don’t mind reaping the benefits. Do you perhaps have an opening in your postapocalyptic militia for a long-haired woman to drape on things and provide witty commentary?
OK, taking a slightly inverse take on your position – just how valuable might a particular survivor be?
Let’s take 1 actual person in my family, and designate him as a survivor. This person grew up on a ranch, and thus knows husbandry, crop growing, hunting, and basic mechanics. He is a military veteran, and knows how to fly 7 types of aircraft (but is not current in any of them). Majored in physics (meteorology concentration), and has a minor in US history. Changed careers and now works in the CIS industry as a network administrator. Is state certified to teach at the private college level in CIS, general science, and liberal arts. Is 40 years old, and in reasonable health (overweight, needs glasses, plays golf). Is active in church and organizational boards, and knows Robert’s Rules of Order.
I’d say that if 50% of the local population were lost, this person is probably being called upon to run thing. Anything less than that, then he can probably name his salary in several industries.
Hmm… I rather killed that thread, didn’t I?