Seeing how people lose their shit in the face of what most will see as an act of God will be a lot more interesting than the usual geopolitical drama that always takes place in a power vacuum.
The novel and television series The Leftovers was mentioned upthread, and they were entirely about how people respond to the event (the sudden, instantaneous, unexplained disappearance of two percent of the world’s population).
What about residents or citizens of Ethiopia who are elsewhere when The Big Vanishing happens?
Why not the population of Sweden, or Guyana, or Timor-Leste, or North Macedonia?
Both of your questions have been asked and answered upthread.
Sorry, didn’t read the whole thread.
And someone else already mentioned Timor-Leste, no less!
Always a good idea to do, if the thread is manageable. This one is only 40-some posts.
This disappearance makes no sense. There’s no scientific explanation for the disappearance. There’s no political explanation for the disappearance. There’s no religious explanation for the disappearance, since there is a vast spectrum of religions in Ethiopia. The only thing that the people of such an event can say is that the universe has quit making any sense.
That the universe is difficult for humans to understand is our problem, not its problem.
This is way beyond any situation that has ever occurred before.
And today is more like it is than it ever has been at any moment in the past. Go with the hypothetical.
But yeah, it’s a power/resource vacuum. More than one group is going to want it, and fighting is likely.
It’s deliberately far-fetched to take everybody waay out of their comfort zone. All the rest of humanity in that world, and all of us here on the outside watching.
Happy Doperversary there @Wendell_Wagner.
Coffee gets pricier.
Eritrea claims all of empty Ethiopia, surrounding countries go to war.
Ethiopia’s major trading partners have a mild economic shock. The outcome depends on whether another country successfully moves in to take over their agricultural and industrial output.
Apart from that, consider the massive death tolls of earthquakes, cyclones, pandemics. In the 2004 tsunami, about 250k people abruptly disappeared. It’s true there were some knock-on consequences, and 110m is as much as 440x bigger than 250k, but it hints at the possibility that while every human life is important, many of them don’t carry much of a global impact if lost.
Reading now because of your post, thanks. I’ll save my thoughts on it for the books thread.
Hope you like it (I haven’t read it, but I knew the premise)
Honestly, not typically a jazz guy at all. To me, it all-too-often just sounds like some strung together randomness and there’s no cohesiveness like a proper song should have (and I say this as a lifelong prog rock/metal fan.)
Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate, because I dig this.
Aah, go on with you. In music, I have only one rule: If it sounds good, it is good.
On that account, I sometimes wonder if the weird little Gnossiennes by Erik Satie are liable to induce insanity with too much repetition. What if we took out the population of France?
For all of those who postulate a land grab by neighboring countries, do you really think Donald Trump is just going to sit that one out? Ethiopia would be the proposed 51st state within 24 hours and the White House would already be taking bids from casino builders.
They sure have exported this guy and his far-out jams. Numbers don’t tell the whole story.
It’d be interesting if Trump tried. However Ethiopia is a MASSIVE country. Just take a look at it’s topology.
It is almost ALL mountainous. It has land borders on ALL SIDES. It shares ethnic continuation with people on all their borders too. The USA doesn’t have the ability to meaningfully colonize or control this amount of land. If it does, Trump 100% does not have the political will to do so.
Neighbouring peoples with needy populations, long cross-border ties, and intimate knowledge of Ethiopian geography and infrastructure will expand and pour in. The USA might be able to try to control the flow of certain people/state actors in an attempt to be king-maker to whatever power balance shapes out… But The USA doesn’t have the power to stop East Africans from migrating in, out, and throughout Ethiopia. Too big, the terrain is too rough.