So if there was a event like you see in apocolyptic / zombie movies where the vast majority (let us use 99% as our number) of the human population on the planet in a very short timespan died, and the vast majority of those corpses go unburied and decompose where they died – how toxic would the enviroment be for the survivors?
Is the danger from airborn pathogens?
What about transmission of nasties by insects contacting the corpses then contacting survivors or the survivors’ food supply?
Would water sources such as streams and rivers get a large load of pathogens from the rain run-off from streets full of bodies?
I guess the question has a range of answers. In the best case, you could assume that most people would perish inside of structures or vehicles if there was a timeframe of feeling poorly that had them seeking shelter. That would likely negate the factors mentioned above – enclosed space, limited insect access, no rain run-off. Or the other end of the spectrum would be if 99% of the population just dropped in their tracks one afternoon when the largest number of people are out and about.
So what do you think, how hazardous would the envorment be, and for how long?
I think that it would be quite easy for the 1% of survivors to get to some space far and away from the decaying corpses. The Earth is a huge place. 7 billion humans sounds like a lot, but is but a tiny speck on the planet as far as actual people’s body mass is concerned. As long as the survivors stay in a reasonably corpse-free place, they should be fine. Just sterilize/boil all water you drink, stay a mile away from corpses, use sanitizing wipes or other things to clean, and wash and cook all food properly.
I’ve wondered what would happen if 99% of people died by having all their body fluids evaporate. It seems to me you’d end up as a 25% pile of dust, which would blow away.
There’s probably far more biomass that already rots and decays within a stone’s throw of our commutes than even 99% of humanity. I don’t think it would do anything significant in terms of the environment, and anything it did do would probably be beneficial.
Are the 99% chosen randomly, or did the 1% survive because they are in some way more capable of surviving? Is there a geographical component, or are the dead and survivors distributed uniformly among the populace?
Those places are sparsely populated for reasons. Too hot, too cold, no water, etc. Where would all those sanitizing wipes magically come from, in the middle of the Sahara? Where would the remaining 77 million people get clean water, food, electricity, shelter? How would you “cook all food” with nothing to cook it on or with, assuming you could even obtain the food?
Assuming the one percenters (hey, I like that) are dispersed proportionally, is that enough people to operate the existing infrastructures? Do we have enough surplus/stored goods available to survive until we can make/grow our own? I don’t know the answers to these questions. My Baltimore metro area would be down to about the attendance of an Orioles game, would that be enough if we co-operated closely?
I strongly doubt the 1%ers could manage the infrastructure. The chances that there is 1 power plant operator and one water plant operator exactly where they are needed seems remote.
I had heard in one of the life after people movies that the power grid would only stay up for a matter of minutes. Without human intervention when the first power plant automatically trips out, the cascade will force all the other plants to disconnect from the grid automatically to protect themselves. And then they will shut down and there won’t be remotely enough people to bring the grid back up. And few things will be more useless than a large power station and no grid. I doubt those plants can be run at low enough power to operate themselves and 1% of the local load. So, no power and therefor no water, heat or light in a matter of minutes.
Start looking for the emergency generators! They will help the 1%ers until the fuel supplies run out.
Yes, indeed there probably is. I wondered if we basically acted like concentrators of nasties particularly suited to “prey on” humans. The kind of things they say everyone has a little bit of in their systems all the time, but which isn’t usually dangerous to a healthy adult.
But looks like you are safe unless you come into direct contact with the corpses.
The survivors don’t have to go to the middle of the Sahara. They just have to collect in some totally livable relatively rural area and clean it up.
New York City would be an unimaginable hellhole of rot, but the survivors can go upstate and find a small city that’s the right size for the remaining population and bury the bodies that are there and rebuild.
There would be add-on losses and catastrophies caused by failed infrastructure, but the remaining 1% would likely be much better off than people were in the past when the population was 1% of current because lots of knowledge and durable goods would survive.
You’d cook food and boil water by heating it. This isn’t rocket science. Even if the power is out for a long time, firewood exists and is plentiful in lots of places. There would be plenty of shelf-stable food to scavenge in the near term, plenty of fields gone semi-wild and good hunting in the slightly longer term, and plenty of good land to cultivate in the much longer term. A lot more of us would be farmers and the standard of living would drop, but life would go on just fine.
The most dangerous thing after this would be the breakdown of civil order and government. There would be crime and violence and war as people fought over control.
This POV is very head scratchey for me–control of WHAT, exactly? Seventy million people left alive in the entire world and they’re gonna congregate in order to kill more people? Makes no sense. So someone else got to some resource first–sheesh, just wander on down the road and a few miles away (in most of the US anyway, and probably Europe too) there’ll be another stash of the exact thing you covet. Much easier to pick the bones than to make more of them.
There would still be three million of us in this country after the cataclysm. Scattered in many parts of it, true, but not so much along the east coast. If people banded together for protection and resource sharing, there would be lots of saved/stored resources to get us through the early days while we organized for when they ran out. I would focus on getting the power grid up and running and establishing diplomacy and trade relations with nearby survivors. Mo’ people equals greater efficiency of labor and better access to wider varieties of goods.
I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea of power hungry assholes using their might to gather even more power for themselves (The Postman!). Would societies organize themselves around monarchical type leaders? Or would they naturally share that responsibility as well? I’m a democrat by nature, people becoming kings at the points of guns just confuse and anger me.