I don’t think cloning is going to happen, because if it were a valid way of sustaining life, life would have already offered it by now.
Please. We’ve got at least medieval knocked. Paved roads and electricity came in a lot later than most people realize. Most places didn’t get modern sewage treatment until after 1960.
No oil coming from overseas? We walk. No electricity? We deal. Maybe burn biogas to power small generators. Need copper to keep the species going? Tear down four out of five old houses and grab the pipes. Not enough? Nine out of ten.
Not that any of this happens without pain and wailing and gnashing teeth. The learning curve for going local could be nasty. There will be a secondary death toll as women die of starvation or cold or lack of antibiotics.
No, no one is saying that. (Or saying that women are nothing but a source of eggs, over in the mirror thread.) This is a thought exercise, not plans to off you, personally, and it isn’t meant to belittle anyone.
Czarcasm says that all men will die within two years. It’s his scenario, he gets to decide. But that’s not something that’s going to be obvious to the people IN the scenario. Even if it gets forcast, the call is still going to be to sink resources into solving The Problem. Every last bit of changeover is going to have to be framed as “this will give us more resources to work on The Problem.”
We would be working on The Problem ten, twenty, thirty years after the last man has died. Even if some sort of stop-gap works, even when no one alive has ever seen a man, we will work on The Problem because a cure is still the species’ best shot.
There’s two tiers to coming through the scenario, though, and the stopper is finding a way to make more people of any kind. As a thought exercise, there is no way around thinking about a reproductive solution, because that is key. And there is no biotech fix that’s as easy or as reliable as sperm banking. If we lose the ability to make liquid nitrogen in year one or two or four of The Problem, we’d better have enough cannisters sealed.
As to the tier of getting a working social system going to support central areas where specialists can work on The Problem and dole out fertilized eggs, thinking about that is much more complicated and a lot harder to predict. If you really have a list of things that women can’t ever do, then discuss that. Don’t just throw up your hands and say stone age - factor your knowledge into a solution.
LA has oil wells, oil refineries* and a harbor. Once you scrape off the suburbs, the soil is fertile. I’d bet LA would be one of the central preservation areas. I totally agree that there will be a lot of processes and methods lost. But starvation can be very motivating.
*My uncle worked for one of the oil refineries. After he retired, they called him back as a consultant because something had broken down and they’d discovered that there were no central records of what controlled what. If they hadn’t been able to hire a retiree with hands on memory, they would have had to shut down and reverse or re-engineer.
There’s one factor that’s missing - overwhelming grief at the loss we women would suffer. Posters touched on it in the Man’s World thread, and I’m surprised no one’s mentioned it here. It isn’t just that half the human population dies off. It isn’t just that heterosexual romance will go the way of the trilobite. It’s that all those individual human beings whom I love, the ones who help make my life not just bearable but meaningful, will die. My father? My brothers? My friends? All of them dead? Even if I could recover from that loss, what about the boys who were my students, the ones I got to watch as they grew into gawky teenagers? What about the generous and kind strangers I bump into every single day of my life? What about the old men with wisdom and the young men with strength? What about the goofy guys I adore? The silent ones I study? The brave, the articulate, the creative, and the charming?
Sorry. You can quibble about engineering and crowd psychology all you like. I would resign my part just as soon as I understood what was really happening. A life with no men is not a life worth living.
Since the only place I mentioned scutwork was with respect to turning chicken carcasses into the sorts of chicken pieces we’re ready to cook, I assume that’s what you’re talking about. The raw materials in question are chickens, and bulk transport consists of trucks. Refrigeration is also involved.
Phouka, Thumbs up; I totally agree.
The scutwork is relevant so far as chickens are, which is not very. The raw materials I’ve been referring to repeatedly through this thread are, among other things, the metals, rubber and petrochemicals that you need to keep that bulk transport going. Even if you can muster enough female freight mechanics to keep a fleet of trucks in running order - doubtful with only two years to recruit and train them, even if everyone realizes the need on Day One - your lack of spare parts, diesel and grease means they won’t last five minutes.
Meanwhile, since chickens aren’t primary producers, what are you planning to feed them on? Your cereal crop is the stuff of history because your tractors and harvesters aren’t running any more (see the truck problem), so no more chicken feed, and you’ll never raise enough animal protein and fat just by turning chickens out to scratch in the yard. Even if you could raise chickens and get them to the city (probably on a dedicated strip of blacktop known as the Henway, just for the entertainment of strangers ), their shelf life sucks donkey balls even with refrigeration (for which you need the Electricity Fairy) and woman does not live by chicken alone.
phouka, point taken, but I think we can take it as a given that most of the people in this thread - not even the ones who are airily bidding men bye-bye once they’ve obligingly cum into a flask a hundred times or so - are not in fact sociopathic and are leaving the emotional problems as unsolvable, and addressing the logistical problems to discuss whether it’s even technically feasible to keep anyone alive assuming anyone wants to.
That’s the way I take it, also. I have no doubt that I would be missed…but in no way would I want someone to miss me so much that they would rather die then go on without me.
Dude. (1) Freight trucks don’t break down every five minutes. They are somewhat better constructed than the Chevy Vega. (2) Spare parts are easy. You only have half as many people, and you’re not going to bother with trucking stuff in and out of Fargo or Cheyenne. You’re going to have a considerable surplus of vehicles you can cannibalize for parts. Hell, that’s gonna apply to parts for anything, right up to power plants.
Other than that, I’m not gonna bother with every damn thing you’re getting into because there’s a limit to how nitpicky it’s worth getting into in an argument anymore. But I’ll just point out that if you’re gonna say this
, I’ll just note that I’ve already discussed electricity enough that suggesting I’m relying on the Electricity Fairy just undermines your cred.
I suspect that many if not most of the women would wind up having severe psychological scars caused by the deaths of their sons, fathers, husbands, boyfriends, and any male they cared about.
Humans will be extinct within a maximum of 140 years. While that may seem grim, it’s 40 years longer than for the other case of only men surviving.
There may be a slight chance that the survivors could keep sperm deep froze for 20 years and not a chance in hell of 40, but I’ll take that as the very outside limit. Then take an extraordinary life of 100 years for the last of the children born 40 years post catastrophe, and you have the last of the Mohicans.
Even if it didn’t matter which sex, if 50% of the world were to die then the world economy would collapse. Governments could not collect taxes and would cease to function, starting with the third world countries and then the industrialized nations. Companies would go under, too many borrowers would default and banks would go under.
Japan would be completely toasted. There are so few women in company management, government and administrative agencies, politics, banking, finance, and engineering that the society would collapse even before all the men died. With the lowest rate of working women, households are completely dependent on the husbands’ salaries.
The Japanese government is operating on an already unsustainable debt level. The only thing keeping it from becoming another Greece is that the debt is held locally.
Women comprise only a few percent of upper management corporations. With the chaos of all the men dying, there simply would not be time to train enough people. The large corporations are dependent on smaller companies which are also all men. The supply lines will fail. Goodby the Sonys, Toyotas, Nissans and Panasonics.
The train and transportation system would fail as would utilities. Not enough engineers or managers.
With women comprising less than 20% of doctors, health care is going to take a serious hit. No medicine either, as pharmaceutical companies would not survive either.
With the intertwined nature of the world’s economy, once major countries such as Japan start to fail, it would be Game Over for the US, even if the US were somehow to avoid a similar fate, which I couldn’t see how it could.
Women and children would have to try to survive on subsistence farming, with greatly reduced trade, manufacturing, medicine, doctors, etc.
Mass deaths from starvation and lack of adequate medicate care would compound the problem.