A great disaster has occurred. The good news is it’s over and humanity has survived. The bad news is the disaster caused massive damage; twenty-five percent of the people on Earth were casualties and an equal amount of property was destroyed.
But in addition to the physical losses, there is the mental trauma of the survivors who lived through this disaster. Leaving aside the equivalent amounts of physical damage, which disaster do you think would cause the greatest amount of mental damage?
A man-made disaster would be something like a war or genocide, where people caused the disaster. The key factor here is that this disaster was caused by choice and it had a motive, however evil it might have been, behind it.
A natural disaster would be something like a mega-volcano or meteorite strike. It was something we understood the causes of even if it was at a scale we couldn’t control. This disaster was essentially caused by random bad luck.
A supernatural disaster is something like all the people and property disappearing in a flash of light. It might have been the act of some divine being (although it doesn’t match the predictions of any religion) or highly advanced aliens who have powers far beyond our understanding. It might even be a natural phenomenon that our science isn’t aware of. The main idea here is that something happened which we don’t understand.
One common factor in all three disasters is that there’s no guarantee that they were a one time event. Humanity will have to deal with the awareness that a disaster on this scale could occur again in the future.
And maybe you figure the survivors wouldn’t care about the philsophical implications. It’s the size of the disaster that matters not its origins.
I voted supernatural. If you know the cause is ??? You can deal with it, mentally. That’s not to say you like it, but you understand it. Something unknown will drive people insane. If you cant get your mind around it you won’t know how to react to protect yourself or loved ones.
Additionally, a “supernatural” disaster is likely to lead to a follow-up human made disaster as various factions claim the supernatural entity for their own and blame those who they believe are responsible for bringing on its wrath.
Yeah. Religion causes so much violence already with zero evidence that any of it is real. Can you imagine the insanity if a god-like thing actually brought destruction?
See, I’d go the other way. If it’s something beyond our understanding, we would probably figure, “Well, how likely is that to happen again?” Those inclined to religion would likely ascribe it to whatever cause they already believe in.
But a human disaster? We’d pretty much all blame it on Those Bastards Over There, and then we’d have to deal with them, because if they did it once, you just know they’ll do it again if we give them a chance. So, War, Paranoia, Placing Blame, Trying to Deflect Blame, all the ingredients of a good little war.
A man-made disaster of this magnitude is going to make people want to retaliate somehow. That’d cause problems in peoples’ heads for generations to come.
I went with supernatural. Humans can understand man-made crap and won’t repeat it again (until the next generation. Natural disasters while devastating have an understandable origin as well.
Supernatural is out of our control for understanding. Fear of the unknown. Superstition. What? Where? When? How? Why? Having no answers would drive the survivors crazy or into situations causing man-made disasters.
I don’t know where they fit in the poll but I think plagues and epidemics are the biggest killers. Death can be drawn out and shockingly awful. When there’s even a small Ebola outbreak anybody who doesn’t live in a cave gets the heebie-jeebies and great efforts are made to lock it down. It’s hard to imagine how bad it would get if something new gets out of control.
I’d put diseases down as a natural disaster. But I left them out of my examples because I thought it might bias the poll. A mega-disease might kill a lot of people but it wouldn’t damage much property. So I figured it would be unfair to compare the effects of a war to the effects of a plague.
Huh … I’m the only one who thinks a big meteor impact would be the most traumatic? … with the million square mile lava flow? … fuming sulfuric acid rain? …
How about a big CME? … something that would melt all the electrical wiring … every last inch of it … woot …
Another vote for supernatural. With the others, even if you can’t prevent it from happening again, you can at least make plans for what to do when it does happen. Dig a deep bunker, or stockpile canned food, or anti-radiation medicines, or whatever. But if it’s just a sudden poof and a quarter of the population is gone? What do you do about that?
Those living in cities would be screwed but lots of places would barely notice.
But I think something like a CME would do the most damage simply because very few people would die directly from it; almost all the casualties would be from the knock-on effects.
A disaster’s a disaster, but at least the first two are real. A supernatural disaster would be the realization of a fictitious event. But eventually, the underlying real-world cause would be discovered, just like we now know a lot of disasters are not due to an angry god.
Yeah, the last one surely has some cause, and we’d figure it out eventually. Even if the cause really is a vengeful deity, we’d eventually figure out what religious rituals appeased the deity, or whatever. But we’d be starting from scratch, and so it’d take a very long time to figure it out, probably longer than most folks lifetimes. So most likely, none of the survivors themselves would ever actually know.
I wonder, could today’s scientists differentiate between an event that was caused by a divine being and an event caused by something natural as yet unknown?