There will be no one left to complain about the election.
There are health care workers above 70. And many former health care workers over 70 who can get back to work. Also, having old people to teach skills is a much better situation than children having to learn everything from books.
Same with every other type of work. There are enough people over 70 to keep the expertise alive, and teach their skills to children. I imagine lots of children will end up being apprenticed to 70+ year olds to learn their trade.
I find my myself actually slightly more optimistic in this scenario than many of you. I think it’s possible some level of human civilization could continue at very low level of technology if enough of the older children could learn quickly. I’ve seen plenty of competent 11 year olds doing work usually reserved for adults.
For very round numbers this scenario kills off 80% of humanity and leaves 20%; 10% at each end.
If the bodies disappear so we don’t have the mass burial problem we’ll be off to a much better start.
The last couple posters are right that 70 isn’t one foot in the grave. Lots of those folks work at pretty sophisticated jobs. Or did recently. OTOH, not too many 70 year old former office workers will do well with a horse drawn plow day after day. The capacity for hard physical work just isn’t what it was for most.
In various other threads over the years we’ve established that small populations can’t keep high tech society running. It takes a lot more than the 10% retirees and the 10% kids, of whom only 10% of the 10% are old enough to know their multiplication tables, to keep the lights on.
So you essentially crash back to the 1700s, supported for a year or so on the rapidly spoiling largesse of the current grocery store and Walmart supply chain.
The oldsters need to get organized and work quickly. They have 5-ish years to do most of the work and also to teach the youngsters everything.
A problem is that a lot of otherwise useful functional adults would suck at suddenly being 1700s adults. As one example: I know linen cloth originates as flax plants and cotton cloth starts from cotton plants and wool cloth starts from sheep. After that I know zero of the details. I doubt I could identify a flax plant in the wild. What tools and processes do I/we need to re-invent to go every step of the way as they did in the 1700s? Damn good question. Certainly more rural and crafty folk will be more useful than computer programmers, radiologists, and jet pilots.
In addition to recovering pre-industrial age tech, we’ve got about 5 years to prepare the eldest of them, now 17, to assume command of society at the same time as they’re restarting reproduction of the species. They need to learn about law and justice and building a society and all that stuff. If not they’re probably doomed to kill each other off before we get a big enough population going again.
Tall order. Damn tall order.
The OP is basically the antecedent premise of The City of Ember. Shit hits the fan and they send the elderly and wee ones underground to keep them safe. Presumably they meant to join them later, but couldn’t.
I checked to see who’d be President of the United States in this scenario, and didn’t have to go very far down the line of succession: Joe Biden, who’s 73.
From what I hear, if we all disappeared, all those nuclear power plants would soon melt down from lack of upkeep. So the world would have all sorts of radioactive clouds and fires and all that going on. Are there enough age 70+ people with the expertise to stop this from happening and maintain whatever additional infrastructure we need for the upkeep?
I’d be around for a while, until my meds run out, and nobody’s producing them anymore. Then it’s a slow, painful death as my organs start to fail. Or a quick suicide.