This scenario has come up before. But even if 99% of humans die, that still leaves 76 million people.
But after a while technological infrastructure would break down because there isn’t enough human capital to work the machines. I would assume. Plus population density would collapse which would mean a lot of cities end up abandoned while the survivors move to more congregated areas.
So what % of people can die off but civilization (nation states with technological infrastructure and economies) still survive?
In Russia from about 1900-1950, lots of people died. They had a civil war, WW1, the Spanish flu, the Stalinist purges, famines and WW2. But society still survived.
I think the percentage would vary according to WHICH humans died. The extermination of an entire city like Calcutta, for example, would have far less impact on civilization than losing a city like, say, New York. If you preserved the United States, western Europe, and Japan, you could probably exterminate the rest of the world and still maintain our civilization for the most part.
This is true. But my assumption is that it would be random. So if 99% of people died the population of the US becomes 3 million and the population of Africa becomes 12 million.
I remember reading that all the major cities are a couple days away from complete starvation should truck & train food deliveries be interrupted ; for any reason. So there’s that to consider.
In other freak-worthy news, a couple weeks ago my entire suburbian neighbourhood (along with some of Paris itself) got its power shut down for about 30 minutes due to some technical snafu. Really put things in perspective when nothing works. No lights, no fridges, no phones (because the cell towers are dead too) ; but also no automatic doors (be it for garages or shops), no street lights or traffic lights, no elevators, no door codes/interphone thingy, no ATMs, shops all having a timeout because the till doesn’t work… It was a pretty surreal experience to go “well, ok, I’ll just… wait, no, that’s dead too” for half an hour. Civilization ending ? Probably not. But modern life would get real complicated, really fast if the power went down for good.
Except all the manufacturing is done elsewhere, as is much of the food-growing outside of corn and soy. Hope you didn’t enjoy your clothes too much. Or, yanno, the gas in your truck, which happens to mostly come from abroad. Which brings us right back to the food delivery thing ;).
A propos of nothing : while writing this I looked up US import/export of oil. Y’all import 0.67 Mbarrels from Mexico a year, and export 1.06 right back to Mexico. The hell is up with that ? Is this some kind of Brownian motion live demo or somesuch ?
50% Die off: 3.65 billion Humans (1960’s levels, hardly a dent), 165 million Americans.
90% Die off: 730 million Humans, 33 million Americans.
Some things would be set back in some areas. New research would halt.
99% Die off: 73 million Humans, 3.3 million Americans.
A lot of things would just plain shutter for a generation or two, but the knowledge would continue to exist and be waiting for them.
This is silly. With absolutely no food you’re going to get hungry and dizzy after a few days, but you don’t just drop dead. This is a constant mistake people make in survival situations, prioritizing getting food over more immediate needs, like shelter and water.
Rule of threes: you can survive 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food.
Obviously “shelter” is a wild card here, because on a partly cloudy spring day you don’t need any shelter at all. But cold and heat can kill you very quickly if you’re not prepared. You’re much more likely to die from hypothermia or heat stroke than you are to starve to death.
Anyway, starving in 3 days is not going to happen. And bulk weight of food needed to keep people from starving is really small compared to our existing transportation infrastructure. So even if transportation is reduced to a trickle it’s going to be a long time before people are literally dropping dead.
I think you need to also account for how fast they’re “wiped out”. Losing 50% of the population overnight might do it, as this would likely lead to local collapses of key parts of the civilization, which would then put pressure on what remains, leading to further collapses, since the remaining parts will already be under a lot of extra stress.
But lose that same 50% over a few years, and you’d have time to adjust. It would still be hard, but with planning you could survive.
Also, such things are not likely to be ‘across the board’ either. The Black Death killed somewhere between 30% and 60% of Europeans, but it was 70-80% in some areas and much less in others. Part of that was the repeated exposures and volume of the sick too. Italy and the Silk Road areas were almost wiped out. India less affected (although they and China were more affected by the 1900’s Black Death).
A 90% death rate plague would likely kill off 96-99% in areas with poverty and poor sanitation, while perhaps 30% or more survive in other areas.
I agree with the OP I think what how much it takes for society to collapse is one aspect of society that post-apocalyptic fiction underestimates.
The example that occurs to me is Germany at the end of WW2. Admittedly the timeframe is pretty short, but in terms of number of people killed, and the damage to infrastructure the collapse of the third reich is easily comparable to most fictional apocalypses. But society did survive, it wasn’t completely anarchy.
Another consideration is what it would take for the military command structure to collapse. I think this is underestimated even more than the civilian government. The whole US (and presumably former soviet) military apparatus is set up to survive a nuclear war. The “plan of record” for front line US units in Europe if the cold war turned hot, saw the them take 90%+ casualty rates.
The counter point to what I posted above is how well society would hold up by day three of no food. No one is dying that at that point. But that doesn’t mean society is doing so well.
The oft quoted figure (by a British official on the committee in charge of farming and food supply in the UK) Is that society is “9 meals from anarchy”
The point being that it would not take some massive apocalyptic catastrophe for that to happen. The way the worldwide food supply is setup relies on very small stockpiles being constantly renewed by cheap reliable transport networks. If one part of te network breaks down, even temporarily, the system is not very durable. The water network could be intact and the houses still standing, but society would be in trouble.
Though I would say there is a difference between unrest caused by lack of food (as shocking as it would be for modern western society) and complete societal collapse. Food riots were a regular occurrence in western societies before the modern era.
On average, it looks like most of the sort of “higher level” occupations where people have to really have an understanding of how things work at a basic level are in the 10-99,000 range.
Whereas jobs that are more sort of “anyone can do that”, like retail salesperson, maid, office clerk, etc. are in the 1-5,000,000 range.
Based on that, I’ll say that roughly 1 in 50 people are holders of arcane knowledge. That would mean 6,000,000 people. If each field has roughly 50k workers in it, then that would imply ~120 fields of specialty. (If anyone wants to go through the BLS metrics and figure out something less guesstimatey, be my guest.)
We would like to make sure that most fields of specialty have 0 survivors. I’ll guess that 80% or higher is necessary to really kick civilization in the teeth, since there would be some amount of crossover between fields and we need to disrupt that.
In my simulations, I had to kill 99.9994% of everyone in the US in order to achieve that. That only leaves 1800 people.
Assuming 99% drop out at random, 88.6% of 12 member Boards of Directors of Fortune 500 companies and heck charitable organizations would lose all their members. The Presidential line of succession has 18 members I think, plus the President himself. .99^19=82.6% chance of losing them all.
Such a disaster would require a lot of improvisation, probably top-down.
Yeah, but how many people literally have absolutely no food in the house? Maybe we’re atypical, but when we go to Costco, we get a crate of tomato sauce, boxes of granola bars, cereal, crackers, or whatever. So we have a pantry closet and shelves with all sorts of random food that we don’t eat every day or even every week. If all transportation was stopped tomorrow, we’d have weeks of food. It might not be great opening a can of tomato sauce and eating it with a spoon, but it’s food.
I know there are some people who have a bottle of ketchup in the refrigerator and half a box of cereal on the shelf, and some ice cubes in the freezer, and that’s it. And if the restaurants and convenience stores shut down, they’ll be hungry tomorrow. But how typical is that really? Absolutely no food at all? Most people are more in the middle. They have some cans of soup, some packages of macaroni and cheese, a tub of frosting, a jar of peanut butter, a couple bags of frozen vegetables in the freezer. They’re not going to go hungry in 3 days, even if they’re eating peanut butter and frosting with a spoon. A week later and they’re going hungry.
All this isn’t taking into account the food that’s in the grocery stores and on restaurant shelves.
My point is, food riots in 3 days is not realistic. That’s going to take months, when the stores of food are gone, and it’s clear that nothing more is coming in.
But why exactly is nothing more coming in? People are just dropping dead from a global genetically engineered Flu-Ebola pandemic, right? How do you get a good riot going when everyone is dead or dying? And the more people who die the more food is left for the survivors. OK, then we’re dealing with next year, and the harvest that didn’t get planted because the farmers were dead. Now we’re dealing with the secondary die-off. But that’s not food riots in 3 days.
And that’s pretty much what happened in the aftermath of the Black Death. First the farmers died, then there was a famine.
But it also depends on just how many die and how fast people organize and react. Do the pigs, chickens and cows die off from this plague too? How fast can people get to them to stop them from dying in their coops and barns? How close are people to granaries full of unprocessed corn, soybeans and wheat?
Modern society changes the rules quite a bit from 700 years ago. But it is still subject to a large amount of variables that we cannot guess at up front.
The “nine missed meals from anarchy” is suggesting unrest after three days of missed food. I was not saying that would happen three days after whatever crisis prompts an interruption to the food supply.
It would be longer than that, but wouldn’t as longs months necessarily either. Say the crisis is a “smaller” pandemic, like the Spanish Flu. That would kill less than 5% of the worlds population. But the transport links we rely on for food would completely grind to a halt. No one is getting in a truck to deliver fuel/food/fertilizer once the first million people die, and once one part stops the whole network breaks down. There are not months of food stock piled in urban centers, after a few weeks you have your nine missed meals. The government/military could step in to take over the distribution network. But once you are talking about the whole country, not just a single city or region that I am skeptical that will
A deadly superflu pandemic is bad, sure. But it doesn’t mean shutting down all transportation, if the alternative is everyone dying of starvation. You give the truck drivers and train engineers hazmat masks and suits and gloves and tape and buckets of Purell.
Yes, there’s extreme economic disruption. But that doesn’t mean you can’t ship grain from Ohio to Boston anymore.
The good news is that our food production and distribution system is highly inefficient. Yeah, getting fresh produce from farm to table requires tricky logistics. Bulk corn, wheat and soybeans aren’t that tricky, if the goal is to prevent literal starvation.
Clarification : I meant that the *reserves *of food in any major city don’t extend past a couple days. A week at most. Not that people would drop dead if they went two days without a Big Mac.
That’s the food available in supermarkets, restaurants, schools, food banks etc… plus the major distribution warehouses (typically in the near suburbs). I guess people’s fridges and freezers might extend somewhat longer, but not much. The amount of food that has to be trucked in daily in a city like NYC or London would make your head spin. NYC, for example, imports some 30 million tons of food per year apparently. So, 80.000 tons per day, give or take a few thousand tons here and there. That’s a **lot **of trucks.
And there is no way in hell NYC goes on for months with only a trickle of food coming in.
If 99.9994% of everyone died, there would be plenty of canned and dried food left in the city for everyone. It’s when all or most people are all alive that for shortages in cities are an immediate issue.