OK, a follow up to my earlier Independence Day thread.
Here we are on Earth. Go us! There are some super heroes around, the occasional annoying invasion from space and so forth.
Then suddenly 50% of all humans vanish. Just turned to dust. I mean GONE. It appears to be random, so some families just vanish (poor Clint) and some are completely spared. But, on average, half of every nation, creed, genotype and so forth are simply gone. Los Angeles County suddenly has only 5.08 million people. Congress has only 217.5 members and half the country is unrepresented until the following election.
What are the short term effects? The death rate will be higher than 50%. Planes in the air losing pilots and other miscellaneous things where missing a person can be catastrophic.
What are the long term political and economic consequences? Is there more reliance on robotics? Does average standard of living go up or down? I’d bet there are some unexpected reactions from the world through something like the snap.
The Black Death, the Mongols and Poland in WW2 are some real world examples of large amounts of people killed suddenly, or in a short period of time.
Or the New World when Europeans arrived.
The effects seem varied. Europe recovered pretty quickly, and was probably better off, the areas the Momgols attacked, like Iraq, never did, and the America’s saw a whole scale population replacement.
Fair enough on the cheerleader pyramids. Splat. There must be other oddball things like that.
Well, if you consider 150 years to replace population ‘quick’, then I suppose so. But it did lead to an end to feudalism through scarcity of labor so that was good. Would something similar happen here? Does Wal-Mart suddenly think offering $15/hour is a good idea? Or does the lack of demand bring on a collapse of big box stores?
Europe during the Black Death was a continent of subsistence farmers, with trade mostly defaulting to non-essentials.
That reality is available almost nowhere on earth. In western society, few farmers grow their own food.
All systems will initially break down. Every supply chain has to be rebuilt. Some systems in some places will recover faster than others, leading to large population movements. People with critical knowledge will be prized. Others will be kept out at gunpoint.
The resulting chaos is not predictable. Our technological society took decades to build up and will take decades to rebuild. The more so since the years after the Snap would see a huge drop in the remaining population as hunger, conflict, and disease take out huge numbers.
Which will the public believe more? the Rapture happened? Or a purple prune face from another galaxy snapped his fingers and wiped half of humanity out?
If the electricity stays on then humanity has a fighting chance. If i were in charge I’d tell people to go to work, carry on as usual and in your off time look to your neighbor for aid and to lend assistance. Band together while an official aid dept is put together,
When they’ve already seen first hand evidence of aliens and superpowers, they would probably be ready to accept whatever explanation trusted figures like Cap and Tony would give them.
The world population has almost trebled since 1950, so I think the long-term impacts are going to be minimal.
From a population point of view, massively over-populated countries like India and China will benefit immensely having hundreds of millions of fewer mouths to feed. Britain too, as it currently imports half its food.
The short term is another matter. I don’t think farming will be too affected simply because farmers - particularly arable farmers - can do so much more now with far fewer people and so will be able to take on vacant farms. And transport is a low-skill job. But in other areas there will be massive issues. I think overall it will depend upon leadership and the willingness of people to make and accept decisions. So Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North America should be fine.
We could construct systems that would be staffed by, and would service, half as many people. But those aren’t the systems we have right now, and it would take time to construct the new systems. And in that time, many, many more people would die.
Take the water system, for instance. The water company has some number of employees. That number is pretty close to the number they need to keep the system working, because if they had more people, they’d reduce the number to cut costs. And that number of people is enough to service the area that the water company serves.
Now Thanos snaps. Suddenly, half of those workers are gone… but every mile of pipe remains. The job hasn’t shrunk much. You could cut off the pipes to outlying areas, to turn the big water system into a smaller water system… except people still live in those outlying areas. People aren’t going to just all agree to move in closer to the city center, at least not immediately.
Now repeat that same process for all of the other utilities. And for the supply chains of food, fuel, and other essentials. And for social networks, both electronic and the old-fashioned kind. And every other human system.
There would be very little infrastructure damage (some, but far less than a war, or even a plague or a famine where people are taking longer to die and are more keen to do significant damage on their way out, either out of desperation to hold on another day or minute, or out of maliciousness attitude towards their death). We’d lose some people in key places, but no one is irreplaceable. There wouldn’t be all that much that needs rebuilt, just a bit of reallocation.
It’d suck, people would be sad at their missing loved ones, there’d be some inconveniences that persist for a period of time, but I think that this would just be a stumble, not even a trip, much less a fall.
People can work more than 8 hours per day, and safety/quality work can be delayed temporarily with moderate (but not necessarily catastrophic) consequences. So I think utilities could survive in the short term on a combination of heavy overtime, cutting corners, and (obviously) reduced demand due to half the customers. And in the meantime TPTB could pull retired workers, hire new ones from non-essential industries, etc., to maintain the power on and the water running for the long term.
yeah it would be something like in the hbo series ……Now imagine if it was just all the religious end of world people …then we can be done with that type of religion and move on in society
Funnily there’s got to be a tipping point where a certain pct. is the most catastrophic and then after that it goes down. For instance The Stand gets it right in that the most valuable currency is doctors and those with knowledge that help the survivors.
I think some here are not appreciating the magnitude of such an event. Although the Thanos Snap would kill 50% of the world’s population instantly, much more of the population would die as a direct result, some immediately, some later. For example, many more people (passengers and crew) would die in the resulting plane crashes if the pilot and copilot died than simply those who died because they were “snapped”. The same as a result of train derailments/crashes, as well as the many thousands of car crashes throughout the world that kill passengers who would not have otherwise died. The immediate death toll could actually be 55 to 60% globally.
Also, certain societies without adequate infrastructure and resource redundancies could possibly collapse, or fall quickly into chaos as unprepared and uneducated populations try desperately to figure out how to maintain services, in addition to those who seize opportunities and make things much worse by taking control and filling the various vacuums of power, and through whose ignorance cause many additional deaths over time.
I think such a supernatural occurrence would cause not only an unmitigated disaster but one that is inevitably unmitigable, and would set us back at least a few generations technologically as well as other ways.
And societies throughout the world would be fundamentally changed.
Also, the psychological damage would be unimaginable - virtually every family would suffer at least one death, and with all of humanity in the same state, there’d be no social support systems available to the bereaved. You’d have an entire planet suffering from various levels of PTSD.