A 90% death rate leaves 700 million left, not 70 million. And 10% of the UK population gives us a bit over 6 million people left, which was the population level in the early 1700s.
And I reckon that a 33% reduction in population would not adversely affect our current level of civilisation. Granted there would be a year or so of readjustment.
Perhaps civilization would develop at accelerated rate – as it had after the Bubonic plague.
Nevertheless, every human has paramount value.
What the heck does that have to do with anything in this discussion?
It all comes down to what remains of infrastructure more than really any other factor, IMO. Especially if it happened over a period of months to years we could probably handle 90-95% population loss and still maintain a fairly comparable level of civilization with probably a lot less global interconnection. A more rapid decline could cause a bigger civilizationional hiccup but the survivors would have a huge supply of resources to live off of for a few years before they had to figure things out for themselves. On the other hand, something that killed only 30% of the population but decimated the infrastructure could do enough damage to cause the 70% that survived to have revert back to fuedalism and anarchy with much more potential for conflict and chaos.
A state with 4 million people will still have 200 thousand survivors if they loose 95% of the population. Plenty to still have some people who know enough to wire up some windmills and solar panels, read x-rays, plant fields, etc. Assuming they are okay with a little graverobbing and forced socialism most people won’t see a huge change in their living situation WRT survival and day to day needs. Sure it might be a world without regional airlines, endless action movie sequels, NASA, fireworks and World of Warcraft, but I think most people would adapt just fine.
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Well, I’d argue here that such IS a huge change in their living situation. The very fact that they’re going from WoW and such to needing to worry about survival and day to day needs is a huge change in circumstance.
I’d also say that a lot of the items that make day-to-day living feasible just won’t be sustainable with that strong a die-off. Windmills, sure, we could certainly work up windmills a la Holland. But solar panels? We’d be consuming them, not maintaining them. Most use some form or other of extremely rare elements in their manufacture. Those components will be irreplaceable without an international supply chain and very high tech manufacturing.
At a minimum, we’d die back to the 1700s with muscle- and steam-power doing most of the work as the existing supplies of technology eventually die off.
Sure, but there is a lot of infrastructure in place that will last for generations. They couldn’t build Grand Coulee Dam in 1700, and after a 90% pandemic we wouldn’t be able to build it again, but we should be able to maintain it. So there you go, tons of electric power.
We wouldn’t return to a literal steam engine economy. Or rather, if we were at the point where we needed to rebuild steam engines because we couldn’t build or maintain internal combustion engines we wouldn’t be able to build worthwhile steam engines either. Sure, we’ve all read stories about time travelers who go back to ancient whenever and start building steam engines.
But the problem with steam engines isn’t the idea of steam engines. It’s the metallurgy and machining to build steam engines that can work efficiently without exploding. You need the steel mills and coal mines before you can build the steam engines, and you need the steam engines to build the steel mills and coal mines. If you can’t keep your old vintage IC engines running, you’re not going to be making new steam engines either.
Yes, there will be massive technological disruption. But it’s going to result in a mishmash of modern advanced tech and human muscle power, not a literal recapitulation of the industrial revolution. Keeping one combine harvester running is a lot less work than managing an army of serfs out harvesting wheat with sickles.
I can easily think of a situation where a 50% kill-off would completely devastate the human race within 100 years.
Also note that the “rare earth” in rare earth magnets aren’t actually that rare. Yes, currently China is producing the vast majority of these metals. That’s not because China has the only rare earth deposits in the world, but because China is producing them so cheaply compared to other countries that other suppliers have just shut down.
But I agree that solar panels aren’t going to be the answer. Our existing electrical generation will still exist, and demand will be much lower, so we won’t need new generation for, you know, generations.
You all underestimate the complexity of our supply chains and how brittle they are. To get your foof to market, you need heavy machinery. That means you need the parts to build the heavy machinery or repair it. That means you need factories to build the parts, which means you need people to build the factory equipment, which means you need people to supply the raw materials to uild the factory equipment… And so it goes with every product you use.
If we had our population reduced by 90%, the survivors might be able to keep the machines running for a little while. But eventually things will break down, gasoline will go bad, roads will fall into disrepair, and we will slowly work harder and harder just to get our food and shelter. Eventually the high tech dies, GPS stops working, and we find ourselves regressing back, probably to the steam age or earlier.
I don’t know jow many of you really get uust how interconnected supply chains are now, and how specialized companies have become. One large manufacturer I worked with recently has a supply chain consisting of 50,000 companies. One factory alone has at least one rail car of intermediate goods moving on a track somewhere every day of the year, 24 hours per day.
Kill 90% of the people in that supply chain, and that company is finished. It has no idea how to make all the things that go unto its products. That scenario would repeat all across th economy. And once food started getting scarce, people would be getting pulled from the remnants of other industries just to keep their families alive.
My guess is that we would need at least a couple of billion people to maintain the technological society we have today.
I disagree.
Such complex supply chains would not be needed. Sure the company in your example would be finished, but so what? The need for that company would likely not be there.
And remember that the rate of human repopulation will be significant. It will only take 2-3 generations (absent wars etc).
I highly recommend for everyone to watch the documentary series* Life After People* which shows what would happen if **all **humans just vanished at once.
Another thing is that if a majority of the population dies off, many or most of the survivors aren’t going to just stay where they are, IMHO. They will move to centralized areas that can be maintained at reasonable levels of “civilization”. For instance I would expect a large community around the Hoover dam distribution area where there would be enough technical experience to keep one or two generators in operation to supply their needs with the rest shut down as spares. Someone with a better knowledge of infrastructure will be able to suggest other locations to act as civilization hubs to begin the process of rebuilding.
How can you say that, when you don’t even know who I am talking about? And they are not at all unusual. Most companies have huge supply chains. And just-in-time inventories. break the supply chain, and production grinds to a halt.
Will it? Who says? How many children will people have when they are starving? What will the child mortality rate be, without modern hospitals and equipment?
I think it’s more likely that the 10% who survived might slowly collapse to whatever level a pre-technology civilization can sustain itself at. Given that 90% of the population worked in food growing or distributing industries at the turn of the 20th century, despite having a healthy industrial economy, it might not be many.
Because which industry doesn’t matter. A 90% die-off takes us back to the 1700s and we managed just fine. And there were world-spanning trade routes back then.
Because they won’t be starving. The UK produces food for ~30 million people. That’s five times the postulated number of survivors. Yes, that will go down after the die-off but farming is not rocket science and there will still be motor vehicles available for harvest and distribution.
Pretty good actually, as long as people remember basic hygiene. Look at the population explosion from Semmelweis onwards. And hospitals will still function, though not to the same degree as today. If there’s one thing at which humans are good, it’s breeding.
I am more optimistic.
I strongly doubt that we would repopulate in 2-3 generations. Right now we’re doubling what, every thirty years? Let’s use this chart. It shows world population growth from 0.9B to 1.65B between 1800 and 1900. So using 1800s technology we saw a growth of 83.33% over 100 years. Bump that up to 90% for math’s sake and to represent a better understanding of healthcare - germ theory, hygiene and such - though lack of drugs would take it’s toll as many of those are manufactured in places where you can’t get them during a 90% die off.
Anyway…using those numbers…
APOCALYPSE!!!: 700 million
A+100: 1.330B
Using 25 years as a generation - long, in this scenario, I think - we’re still well short of target in four generations.
So an outcome that takes us back to the 1700’s is fine? By the way, it would be the 1700’s except without the trade routes, the knowledge for how to build the technology of the time efficiently, etc. We tend to think that as moderns we could easily do what pre-modern people did, but there are vast sums of knowledge that have been lost to history because they were no longer useful. Things like how to plow a rocky field without power machinery, How to plant crops efficiently without modern irrigation, fertilizer, and advanced seeds. How to keep a crop from spoiling after its down and during the time it takes to get it to market, without rapid transport and automated combines and grain terminals.
Farming isn’t rocket science? Have you ever farmed? Do you know anything about it that allows you to make that statement? Output will not just ‘go down’. It will crash by maybe a factor of a hundred. Most Britons would have to work the fields to survive, leaving no one left to maintain all the high tech stuff and provide all the consumer goods. And you can’t even go back to an agrarian life because much of the land that used to be used for farming has been reclaimed for other uses.
And will there be motor vehicles? What makes you so sure? Gas has a shelf life for a couple of years. Very quickly there will be no gasoline. Do you know how much effort it takes to operate a modern refinery? How much equipment? How much ongoing repair? How much ENERGY? Who is maintaining the power grids? Who is mining the coal, or repairing the windmills? Who is mining the copper needed for the windings for the generators? How much is oil going to cost when we can’t run supertankers, when the ocean platforms shut down, etc? Would we even have enough people to maintain all that infrastructure while also trying to maintain all the other infrastructure we need? Are people going to be spending their effort maintaining roads when other important jobs are waiting?
Who is working in the ball bearing factories? Who is working in the mines needed to provide steel to the ball bearing manufacturers? Who is training the process engineers required to build the factory? Who is building the chip fabs required to make the chips that go into the control systems that run the factories? Are we going to do away with all that? If so, then we go back to 1700’s factory work? Where 30-50% of the population that wasn’t producing food had to work in inefficient factories? It would seem that either way, we need a LOT of people.
Oh, and we’ll be back to 1700’s technology, but without a lot of the 1700’s resources that we expended in that era such as large hardwoods for ship beams, or would have to build up again. We’ll have to build and train an entire new population of horses, and then we’ll need stables, blackmiths, horse trainers, vets, etc.
Have fun without modern pharmaceuticals, without modern diagnostic equipment, etc. Hospitals go through huge amounts of inventory in medical supplies. Whose going to be making them? Where do those shiny stainless steel needles come from? Who is maintaining the MRI machines? Who is building the parts needed to maintain the MRI machines?
But I’m more realistic. The modern economy is a global-spanning, highly complex network. The oceans are filled constantly with huge container ships, and the skies full of transport planes moving goods around the world, just to keep the economy moving. Supply chains are highly distributed, and no one has the knowledge to build a single product from start to finish. Wipe out 90% of the people engaged in all these activities, and the result will be mass starvation and a rapid reduction of living standards until we hit some new equilibrium. War is almost certain, and there would be all this lovely weaponry still lying around and a worldwide disaster would create both the means and the motive for bad actors to take advantage of weakened neighbors.
I wouldn’t be surprised if such a calamity resulted in a scavenger society that remained somewhat technological for a generation or two until everything was used up or too degraded to use, then we’d revert even further back until we built up enough population to sustain a high tech world again.
I remember an economist being asked how long it would take to get back to modern civilization in an ‘Adam and Eve’ scenario under which the two of them had access to all our modern knowledge, and even our entire infrastructure. The answer was, “about as long as it took the first time.” And that seems right to me. By the time they bred a population large enough that it didn’t have to work 24/7 just to survive, the infrastructure would be long gone and much knowledge lost. And even if people knew that such a thing as a semiconductor existed, they’d still be in no position to build them until a host of enabling technologies were first built, and you need so many people for that, that your real limiter is population size and not knowledge.
Aaah got it. Thanks !
I might even argue that it’ll take longer. The first time through, we had easy access to ores and other raw materials. Most of the easy stuff is already worked into buildings and such and converted to alloys that are truly hard to reverse engineer. Imagine having to bootstrap to advanced metals instead of moving through copper and bronze and iron.
Why would we be reverse engineering anything? All of the knowledge is documented in textbooks and other paper formats. Teachers and other people capable of teaching will survive the culling and pass their knowledge onto the new generations. Sure, there will be fewer students mastering advanced math and science, but the information will be kept and protected by people planning for the future.
Because it’ll be impossible for a blacksmith to work steel from I-beams into plows and nails?
It’s not that materials won’t be there. But they’ll be in a form exceedingly harder to work with than our forebears had.