Could human civilization survive at its current level of sophistication

Society would no longer exist as we know it. Our current capability to produce the resources that we do is based off of a large world-wide work force that distributes these resources via trade. Some countries harvest more basic resources and sell these to countries with more sophisticated means of production that then use those resources to make a variety of products. With a 90% drop in world-wide population, most of the means of harvesting base resources as well as producing more useful goods would practically disappear at once. Worst-case scenario, the remaining 10% fight over what's left until a larger society is formed to protect their remaining resources and to attempt to rebuild the previously lost society. Democratic ideals would be lost very quickly as control and safety are prioritized over freedom and self-determination. In the end, human civilization is put back a couple hundred years, and eventually we catch up. Might be better that it had happened in the end, as the newer society isn't dependent on policies that are self-destructive in the long term.

>>50223872
I...what kind of question is it? Of course not. You'd be lucky if humanity survives at all.

>>50224006
I'm pretty sire ~740 million is enough for humanity to survive

>>50224006

You realize humanity was once only 10,000 people, yeah?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_prehistory

>>50223872
>Could human civilization survive at its current level of sophistication

I imagine civilization would even be better off.

Fewer people means less antisocial and psychotic behaviors in the gene pool, which ideally means fewer differences and fewer conflicts. There also shouldn't be any conflict over resources since there would be ample real estate to go around. Ample real estate also means people don't have to be housed together like sardines, which means less conflict with neighbors.

>>50223979

Fewer people to maintain and operate the means of production doesn't mean production will cease. It will just operate in a much smaller scope.

Look like small nations like Iceland. They have their own factories and assembly lines.

>>50224102
But since the damage is spread equally to each nation, the productive capabilities of all those affected would be drastically reduced no matter who they were.

>>50224336
So now it's just a world of icelands

Without a lot of modern equipment or easy ways to scavenge and produce more of it, most people would be farmers.
Whatever community survives would probably have very strict rules to prevent inbreeding. So even though they'd be distrustful towards strangers, they would have to interact with them some of the time.

>>50223872
The United States of America is the most-advanced nation on planet Earth.

15% of its population are employed in agriculture.

About one in seven people makes food by trade. That's not even counting those of us who have ever had house plants.

If 90% of the world died out? Well, 50% of the rest would quickly die from sanitation problems. After that? We'd be fine.

Humanity hit a bottleneck of a population no-greater than 1k, about two-million years ago. The entirety of North and South America, in pre-Colombian times? Populated by no-more than 70 people. Which means "probably a lot less." We're looking at two, maybe three families, that gave rise to every pre-Colombian civilization on two continents.

We're good.

>>50225035
>a population no-greater than 1k, about two-million years ago

Two million years ago there weren't humans, at least not homo sapiens as we know them today.

Humanity (as homo sapiens) has never had a population bottleneck as a whole, but certain parts of humanity have, for example, all of the Native Americans, both North and South, can trace their genetic ancestry to only <100 people who crossed the from Asia to America.

>>50224862

Inbreeding to the point of genetic damage is a very difficult thing to do, taking something like three or four generations of blood-related siblings pairs to get your first downie baby.

Even then, the inclusion of just a single outsider into the tree pushes that downie-baby limit even further down the chain.

>>50225176
>Humanity (as homo sapiens) has never had a population bottleneck as a whole, but certain parts of humanity have, for example, all of the Native Americans, both North and South, can trace their genetic ancestry to only <100 people who crossed the from Asia to America.
You genuinely started responding to a comment before being bothered to read two entire sentences, huh?

Well let's see what other great things you have to contribute to the conversation.

>>50224862

Dumbest comment in this thread.

>>50223872

Shit would get feudal, and after one or two generations, technology would become a mishmashed cross between medieval tech and early renaissance tech, with modern artifacts thrown in. Hell, this'd make an awesome campaign setting, now that I think about it.

>>50223872
Short answer "no".
Long answer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4tLYYXDg74

File: 2012-08-21-travel.jpg (970KB, 1895x2406px)

970KB, 1895x2406px

>>50223872

Going by our history, it'd probably be some version of the 1750's, when we were last at a population of 740,000,000

http://worldpopulationhistory.org/map/1757/mercator/1/0/25/

>>50225273

>feudal

Why? There are places in the world that have never experienced feudal government, why would they revert to something they never were?

>>50225512
Tribalism. Or tribidism. Lucky ladies. Rub-rub-hubba-hubba. Let's just pretend and do stuff.

>>50225667

Doubtful, except for places such as pacific islands and sub Sahara Africa.

Rest of the world would continue with some form of the government they have now, just on a smaller scale

File: 1467207517762.jpg (53KB, 648x484px)

53KB, 648x484px

>>50225354
>that period from 1300 to 1400 when the human population kept dropping every year

spooky shit, man

>>50226801

Yeah bro, Black Death was a bitch

>>50225334
Scholarship seems a little outdated. Would love a modern take on the thesis

>>50225334

Power Plants AREN'T designed to blow up when a certain number of people die.

If anything, things will run so much smoother with a power grid that suddenly has 90% of it's work load relieved.

File: 1456486708815.jpg (84KB, 500x335px) Image search: [Google]

84KB, 500x335px

>>50223979
>What is greentexting?

File: post apocalypse oper8rs.jpg (118KB, 1054x655px)

118KB, 1054x655px

>>50224068
>What is power vacuum?

Dude, after everyone dies, it's not going to be hand-holding and peace-waving for the next 500 millenia or something.

>90% dies
>That's more then 280 MILLION people in just the United States alone
>Military infrastructure crumbles
>Nuclear capacity is compromised
>Infrastructure is devastated
>Political discourse is completely halted
>New factions emerge in reclaimed portions of small cities
>Mostly start off as small gangs, or maybe even villages, working together to secure resources and provide protection from the outside world
>They grow larger
>Eventually, they grow so large, they intersect with the territory of another such settlement

Now there's two ways they can go about this.

>One, they can consider diplomacy. "You take up to Lewer Street and the old Firstun Bank. We'll occupy the whole of downtown. No one needs to get hurt, as long as we stay copacetic. Capiche?"
>Two? Total war. The first to secure the armory, gather weaponry, ammunition, vehicles, outfit their troops, mobilize the infantry, recruit the stragglers, and occupy hot points is now the defacto king of the city. That means they just provided their group with all the food, water, shelter, and power they could ever provide. No one will go after them and they'll never have to worry about raiders again because, guess what? They're either all dead, or they work for us now.

You think just because 90 percent of the world dies, humanity suddenly loses its competitive edge? You think people will suddenly lose interest in power and control? You think just because land is so great, they'll do everything in their power to NOT own it?

There are a lot of historical cases like this, where apparent stability is suddenly violently ruptured, and it always ends in a power struggle.

I think all fa/tg/uys should visit /his/ every once in a while. It makes worldbuilding that much more fascinating when you understand the movement behind human nature and all its follies.

>>50230137
>>Military infrastructure crumbles
>>Nuclear capacity is compromised
>>Infrastructure is devastated
>>Political discourse is completely halted

Why?

>>50230171
>Why?

90 percent of all military, nuclear operators, engineers (infrastructure, wastewater, agriculture, construction, repair, etc), medical professionals, politicians, law enforcement, and women are now dead.

The ten percent of all military men? You think they'll stick around to protect their now defeated nation? No. They'll find a way back home to be with their (probably dead) families. You think the presidential runner-up will be in any shape to run a nation when 90 percent of all his advisers, officers, and secret servicemen just died? You think he'll care about running a nation when he just watched his wife and daughter die from an illness his best men had zero chance of stopping?

You think the engineers will stick around to fix the potholes left on the sidewalk now that they're not being paid? You think they'll give a fuck about the Empire State Building when a 9.0 earthquake brings it down to the ground in 5 years?

What WILL happen is, soldiers, politicians, doctors, athletes, and social and material engineers will STILL be largely valuable in this post-apocalyptic world, but they won't be working for money anymore. They'll be working in tribalistic loyalty.

Among a group of scared refugees, the now ex-mayor will band them together to lead them into recovery. He'll find out Charlie was a doctor, and he'll get him patching up Billy's gash so that Billy (who was an ex-marine) can now take post atop the barricade Darcy (an architect) just engineered. They'll send out Wayne, who was once the star quarterback of Ridgemont High, to round up all the wounded men lying around the streets and bring them back to their base to see if they can be of use.

One of those wounded men happened to be an enlisted man who tried travelling back to Montana to see if his wife was still alive. He's very well educated about the function and properties of several spare guns.

And so on and so forth, and that's just the way it goes.

>>50230310

You seem to be thinking of a 99.9% death rate.

A 90% rate leaves us with 31 million people still alive, comparable to the US population in 1870.

>>50230692
The situation stays the same. People will want things to "go back to normal". That's all they'll ever really want. To make these ends meet, they'll take it upon themselves to establish order and control without the existence of a pre-apocalyse government, which means tribalism and war to fill a very vulnerable power vacuum.

Whether this means two factions of 10,000 people fighting one another in New York, or 18 factions of 1,000 people fighting for the ruins of Old Detroit, the result will always be the same.

There will always, and I mean this is the most literal sense I can possibly muster, ALWAYS be a power struggle in the history of humanity. A thousand years from the future, no one's going to just...stop trying, simply because someone tells them not to. Someone will always be inventing, someone will always be climbing, someone will always be running, jumping, and shooting faster and harder then everybody else, and to think that humanity would abandon their nature in the event of some natural phenomena? I don't believe it one bit.

>>50230692
Sudden mass death puts strain on any society. When the death rate is as extreme as 90% even the societies with strong internal cohesion have difficulty maintaining normal function.

Why?

With a 90% death rate the probability that the person in charge was the seventh or further down in line of succession is about ~47%. To put this into perspective, this would make Attorney General Loretta Lynch the president of the USA. Normally a chaotic succession like this would be a problem, but other parts of society would help facilitate the change. Other parts of the government would pick up the slack until the newly minted president assembled her team and got her bearings.

With the sudden death scenario described, ALL positions of authority in society would be suddenly and simultaneously undergoing this kind of chaotic succession. Even the 10% of cases where the person on top survives the staff they rely on to do their job would be devastated. The most probable result is a break down in social order. At the very minimum you have some kind of massive shakeup in the power structure.

700 million people is a fuck load. After a few weeks of instability, the surviving world governments attempt some sort of rebuilding effort. The vast majority of the survivors would be waiting for rescue forces and would gladly accept. A bunch of farmers, teachers and clerks who likely just watched most if not all of their family members die will be looking for peace, order and safety. They won't instantly turn into edgy mad-max walking dead level gangs who seem okay with massive gunfights over key buildings.

>>50223872
It would take at least a few years to get over the initial shock. The new governments would be very conservative. Parts of the world would be straight-up wiped out.
Most of the stuff would work out, but I suspect the result would be post-apocalyptic nations with clear 'hats' that seem almost like a parody of their previous national identity.

File: 1434191926523.jpg (319KB, 1599x919px) Image search: [Google]

319KB, 1599x919px

>>50231164
I highly doubt that with even SIXTY percent of the world population deceased, any formal motion to anoint the new president-elect into office would be seriously impractical.

I do not think the remaining 10 percent (or 40) would even bother to search for whoever's 7th in position to take over as president. There might not be anyone left high up enough who actually KNOWS this information off the top of their head. And even if they did find Mrs. Loretta Lynch, or GI Jane, or whoever the fug else is supposed to be president, chances are, she's either dead, dying, or travelling across the country.

With a 90 percent reduction in total population, we're talking ABSOLUTE failure of government response. There will be no party large enough to reform the US government in any shape fit to run a severely wounded nation.

The initial survivors will largely be peaceful. I cannot imagine our society going from civility to violence within just months, but after a year or two, the stakes become much higher.

Someone WILL want total control of the suburb/town/city/state, and with a surplus of functioning weapons and free ammunition, the formation of a group of raiders or thugs, it's almost inevitable. Honest groups will have to arm themselves if they don't want to be taken advantage of by these gangs, and eventually, one of them will try and seize control of as much land as they possibly could, for a number of reasons. It could be for the sake of "safety", or it could be to plan for long-term resource management. It could simply be to deny power to tribes they deem less deserving of land and power (ie. "I'd rather I be in charge than those violent savages"), there's a lot of reasons why war is inevitable.

When the government finally grows big enough to mount a nation-wide response, they'll probably be faced with tribes aslarge as they are, or probably even larger, who feel they could do the job of running the country much better than the new government could.

File: old world construct.jpg (190KB, 640x853px)

190KB, 640x853px

watch that show 'Life after humans' or what ever it's called, See how may industries of humanity go FUBAR after only a few months with no oversight. after the last 10% f workers abandon ship and try to find their families, or hell, if they keep at it trying to provide energy for who ever's left, all parts are extremely valuable now, And no one's going to be able to manufacture turbines or ballbarings to the specifications needed after the global market falls apart.

So, a fuckload of industrial buildings/storage tanks will fall apart and poison the lands around them, squandering even more of humanity's strained resources.

So really, the only chance they'll have is downgrading back to easier to maintain, if more intensive, generators and shit.

>>50231312

Did we read the same book?

The main thesis of World Without Us is that most systems are automated and would continue on without us for months/years but all have their own safety-off switches

>>50231260
>There will be no party large enough to reform the US government in any shape fit to run a severely wounded nation.

How large so you think the us government was in 1870?

This already happened to the Americas. Based on the Amazon basin, my answer is an overwhelming no.

File: 1479000053117.jpg (589KB, 1280x1919px)

589KB, 1280x1919px

Let's assume a bit different scenario: A terrible disease spreads through the population. It's not lethal, but it makes 50% of women completely infertile, and the remaining 50% can't have more than two children. It continues for three generations, then the effect wears out.
How bad do you think it would get?

>>50233027
Are you trying to imply that just because they'll be the same size a government that has just lost 90% of its highly specialized personnel is equivalent to a steadily growing group that has been building upon itself for years?

>>50224062
Aye, but 740,000,000 folks evenly spread across the globe limits mating options. Similarly, the vast majority of that number is not physically or mentall equipped to survive at an iron-age or lower level.

>>50233114

Considering most western women don't even have two kids?

Not much

>>50233135
Nah, in Western Europe fertility is always around 2 children, check it out. With this scenario next cohort would be 50% smaller than the previous one. In three generations we have only 1/8 of the original population.

>>50233016
I sistinctly remember oil fires.

>>50223872
People would not immediately realise that the disease is gone. They would be afraid of getting infected. They would hide.
When the reserves slowly dwindle and people leave their shelters, they'd do what they can to get things back on their feet.
Society would be kinda similar, but with less consumption, and a lot more humble. A lot of effort would go into preventing this from happening again.

>>50233114
That would be a fucking godsend.
Research spending would go up, as we try to understand and stop whatever is happening. It would cause a lot of chaos in low income countries, might destroy a few shitholes if we're lucky.

File: Germany_fertility_rate_graph[1].jpg (37KB, 600x519px) Image search: [Google]

37KB, 600x519px

>>50233133
>Aye, but 740,000,000 folks evenly spread across the globe limits mating options
Depends on how intact public transportation remains. If 90% of the population disappears overnight, I'm sure most people would find the means to move to the nearest metropolis. Unless you live in fucking Siberia, in which case I hope you enjoy walking and have a good sense of direction. Humanity will persist eventually.

It also depends on how these deaths are concentrated. 90% could mean everyone outside of Europe and a handful in Europe die. That'd be a lot less impactful (for the surviving Europeans) than 90% of the population dying evenly across the globe.

>>50233152
>Nah, in Western Europe fertility is always around 2 children
KEK, no! Only France and Ireland hit that (and in the case of France, we know who's having the babies). Germany is even as low as 1.3 per woman, DESPITE having (in total numbers) the largest Muslim community in Europe (and that's prior to the refugee crisis. By now they might have twice the number of Muslims of the next most Islamized country). When look at the native population, in every country in Europe (even Ireland.. barely) more people die than there are born.

>>50233264
Damn, I could swear I've seen different data, maybe it had some other way of counting it. Looking at the world bank data you're right.
With - 1.7% yearly growth in Germany we may finally see the end of overpopulation.
Thanks anon for showing me how wrong I was.

File: z-TIhFrs[1].jpg (18KB, 249x249px) Image search: [Google]

18KB, 249x249px

>>50233531
>With - 1.7% yearly growth in Germany we may finally see the end of overpopulation.
Germany alone has about 1% of the global population. Europe as a whole somewhere around 10%. India alone cancels out Europe's population deficit entirely. And that's ignoring the America's (stable), China (stable) and Africa (growing like it ain't nobody's business).

And let's not forget that, while Germany's native population is shrinking, Germany's overall population is growing. We won't see the "end of overpopulation". It's entirely an African and Indian problem.

lrn2basicdemographics

>>50233264
Part of the reason for that is the sheer cost of having a child plus housing on the level needed to comfortably raise a family. If housing was relaxed massively then childbirth rates would shoot up.

If 90% of the worlds pop died no one would go back to work. Last thing I'd do if I survived a plague is put on my uniform and pop off to my job. People would band together in dumb little communities and farm and shit

>>50233658
>People would band together in dumb little communities and farm and shit
Hate to break it to you, but that's working.

>>50233016
Not that anon, but did you miss the part about how New York subways will start to flood and break apart after two days of no oversight?

>>50233724

America existed before the New York subways, I'm sure she can continue to exist without.

>>50233746
Wasn't the point of the post but thanks for playing

>>50230137
>>Dude, after everyone dies, it's not going to be hand-holding and peace-waving for the next 500 millenia or something.

Unless we were thrust into a global thermonuclear war that destroyed all major governments and any plans for continuity of government, why would anything change? OP's scenario involved a plague, not a global conflict. Humans wouldn't suddenly go batshit crazy or regress to some feudalistic way of life just because there was a population decline.

>>50233778
A sudden 90% population decline is likely to be pretty psychologically crippling no matter how it comes about. People don't just get over losing 9/10 of everyone they've ever known, even in passing. People are not rational actors when everyone around them is dying.

>>50233769

Point of the the CHAIN of posts was that civilization's systems of technology are essential to the civilization's survival, and as was pointed out earlier, the essential ones are sell-protecting.

You brought up an unessential system, and I pointed it out.

Not my fault you can't backread more than one post, chuck

File: Ag_workforce.png (72KB, 1393x824px) Image search: [Google]

72KB, 1393x824px

>>50225035
>15%
Uh buddy, the 40s called, they want their statistics back.

File: 1340433133397.jpg (103KB, 384x313px) Image search: [Google]

103KB, 384x313px

>>50223872
Eh, it depends. The sudden loss of that many people to plague would likely totally fuck up the world for a while maybe permanently.

However if we discount panic caused and probable wars and power vacuums and such, there is really little that would change. Only a fraction of the world's population is really involved in maintaining most of the vital systems of the world, and much of that is concentrated in a relatively small population groups in first world countries. While the loss of many of these people would be pretty traumatic, there would still be many people who could continue their jobs, and with reduced demand for almost all services and goods the reduced population could still likely fulfill their needs and even grow.

This is partially because of how heavily we have mechanized and automated much of the work we do, but it's also partially because much of the world population is these days involved in nonessential work. I mean we have the leeway that someone can get paid to just look pretty and promote a brand of superfluous products and get by, say compared to back when most people were farmers and were concerned with producing enough food to survive another winter. Those people if lost wouldn't cause too much harm, and if they aren't lost they can be retrained to fill some of the vacant essential roles.

But yeah, again the real problem is with the sudden and traumatic loss that would do untold damage to the hopes of modern world survival, not the actual problems of running a world with a reduced population.

>>50237932

Might be helped that since this is a plague and most inherent immunization is family based, for you survive it's more likely your family members survived as well.

>>50233778
My point is (and this seems to be the part everyone is so keen on missing), a worldwide event such as this would INEVITABLY lead to a very large power vacuum that people would INHERENTLY exploit through active conquest or diplomatic maneuvering.

As communities band together to find safety within numbers, they'll eventually get so big, they'll come into conflict with the interests of a similar community within the same suburb/district/city/state.

Historically speaking, do you know what happens when two different societies intersect each other's territories? It's either war, or commerce, but frankly speaking, those that come into power may not always be "good" people. Hell, they don't even have to be "good" to segue into total war. As long as they're simply "unstable", or "desperate", or maybe even "suspicious", those are all grounds for eventual war.

Not all Kings are as wise as King Solomon. Sometimes kings come into power because no one else wanted to lead the way and they just happened to be chosen for one reason or another.

Raiders and thugs are NOT the most problematic scenario these survivors will encounter. Of course raiders and thugs will be dangerous, and like the Barbarians to Rome, if they don't do something about them, eventually they will grow powerful enough to overturn everything they've built up, but the biggest concern will be dealing with the other communities that build themselves up a few miles away from you (which might actually be run by a raider or a thug int he first place anyway).

And when the US Government DOES finally gain enough strength to try and reclaim all of America, what's to say the people who've finally put themselves in positions of power will simply LET the US government take over for them? Isn't that cause for war, or at the very least, strained diplomacy?

>>50223872
Yes, as long as it's only whites and Asians left alive.

>>50240971

Tbh a great depopulation would do wonders for Africa

>>50237932
thank you for salvaging this thread.

depending on why everyone died you'd probably get a major existential crisis but logistically things would be fine...better even depending on where you lived.

>moves to California.

>>50223872
I think so, provided enough general scientists survive and infrastructure too.

A lot of people actually think it would be beneficial, cos muh Unabomber.

Humanity would definetly survive a 90% (even bigger) population drop- we're fucking great at adapting quikly and survival instincts kick in pretty quick as well- civilization as we know it would certainly break completely... but the chances of a big part of it surviving here and there would be big, and recovering to the same status would take way way shorter then the time it took to get here.

Too fucking much is dependent on unsustainable systems outside of the current model, but at the core not that much of our current philosophy trully depends on it.Consumerism for example dies but not the idea, capitalism survives and would rise again pretty quick since we've been born into commerce. humanity going backwards is actually pretty unrealistic since knowledge builds on- even if a number of generations don't have the time and convenience to think about higher concepts they already have those concepts from thousands of years of thinkers, science, literature and so on- and considering whatever caused the population drop affected the population only theres still plenty out there that resists time(printed books for example) that wouldn't even be a rare commodity since we have so much stuff and so little people remaining to use it.

On a breakdown alternative models are a sure thing to rise and have an opportunity- i mean, all kinds of societal systems know and unknow would appear; But by one generation or two they would be pretty similar to the ones we know- they are prone to natural selection as well- unless better models appear (and those are likely- we live in a enviroment that is negative to change, such a breakdown would create an opportunity for our current level of knowledge to try things differently).

>>50241747
But all of this is moot because the circunstances of this population drop could change everything. If people are desperate, melancolic, thirsty for war... how sudden or slow it happens... The circunstances make a huge fucking lot of impact.

How much savagery, union, disunion, chaos, fight or fligth over conversation and etcetera... how things breakdown could change everything.

Its too vague as a scenario for any reasonable 'forecast'.

>>50241778
Oh, and i almost forgot: WHO SURVIVES and in wich proportion would make all the difference as well.
Who would be those survivors? Scattered across all classes, nations and fields?
Across all ages?

War leaves the old behind. Sickness tends to leave the young. The circunstances leave more of the upper class or lower classes.
Scenarios where it happens suddenly are all or mostly cases where very specific niches would survive- for example those living far away from urban centers. Lifestyles, beliefs, culture... it all would make a difference. Heck if most of the survivors are those who aren't into our current lifestyle or live in backwards communities heck, yeah, our current civilization (way of life) would be at risk of never surfacing again.

File: 1328386620394.jpg (135KB, 1024x691px)

135KB, 1024x691px

>>50233778
>Unless we were thrust into a global thermonuclear war that destroyed all major governments and any plans for continuity of government, why would anything change? OP's scenario involved a plague, not a global conflict. Humans wouldn't suddenly go batshit crazy or regress to some feudalistic way of life just because there was a population decline.


Are you legitimately autistic or something, or do you just not have an social connections at all and assume everyone else just does what they are 'supposed' to do. No, they do what they do because they care for certain very specific people in their lives. The vast majority of people who arn't basement dwelling spergs, hermits, or higher level ascetic monks base a vast part of their personal identity on that bubble of people around them, on their family unit, how they mesh with their religious and social community.

You remove those people, even if it was something as painless as a 'they all disapeared when nobody was looking one night' and NOT the OP scenario of 'watching almost certainly painful and agonizing death by disease coupled with paranoia and survivors guilt' you'll have mass hysteria and the complete collapse of people's motivations and identities. You'll have people wandering the streets aimlessly in fucking fugue states or randomly committing suicide on a regular basis for months if not years.

The mailman may be alive, but he's not going to deliver your goddamn letters because even if he could get gas in his fucking car he doesn't give a shit about your fucking junk mail because he watched his daughter, his mother, his wife and finally his son pass away in his arms while he could do nothing, over the past few weeks and when he was finally ready... death never came back for him. He can't help you, because he doesn't even know who or why he IS anymore.

>>50242193
Fucking this. The amount of people who don't understand basic human behaviour/psychology in this thread is appalling/scary.

>>50242557

Here's your (you)

>>50243036
t. Grognard Neckbeard Who Knows Nothing

:^)

>>50242193
You've never had anyone in your family die, huh? Both sets of grandparents still alive? Lucky.

>>50243137
That's nowhere near the same thing, you fucking faggot.

I think a lot of people are looking down on human ability to bounce back from a disaster.

If the deaths are truly uniform in such a way that we maintain an equal percentage of engineers and doctors and other educated professionals in most industries as we do right now and we also have access to reading material from libraries, there is no reason why the survivors couldn't band together and start their own civilization with a standard of living comparable to ours after figuring how to maintain an electrical grid and find ways to harvest materials locally that used to depend on imports from other countries, and even then only in cases where we suppose that the international grid has gone dark and we're stranded on our land, which might not necessarily be the case.

The biggest hurdle would probably be finding ways to overcome the psychological scarring that would inevitably occur and be present in every single individual for an entire generation. The will to live would probably win out in a lot of cases, but even then such a massive extinction level event would leave a massive cultural footprint for centuries to come.

>>50230137
>I think all fa/tg/uys should visit /his/ every once in a while. It makes worldbuilding that much more fascinating when you understand the movement behind human nature and all its follies.

/tg/ used to be /his/ and we did a better job of it too.

>>50243276
I'm the guy that's proposing society would attempt to fill a large power vacuum with either war or diplomatic maneuvering.

I'm not saying humanity is "doomed" in any sense of the word. In fact, humanity will do just fine. But I highly doubt we'd be back to the same standard of living pre-apocalypse in just a matter of years. It'd take a hundred years AT THE VERY LEAST, and even then, i'm going to assume 100 years is a long shot.

>>50243338
Well we sure as hell lost that ability now.

>>50243137
>You've never had anyone in your family die, huh? Both sets of grandparents still alive? Lucky.

There' dead man, but I've still got plenty of people left alive in my family and circle of friends.

It's not 'oh boo hoo some people died I saw a body or two' it's "I very probably don't have any meaningful relationships left to rely on and if there is by chance one or two people I care for left alive it's entirely possible I'll never be able to contact them again what with the complete collapse of modern communication and transit.

1 in 10 isn't even enough a good enough statistic to actually bury all the dead, most of them are going to rot where they died!

>>50243276

What human ability? Do you have some weird narrative of the past?

>>50243452
>I'm not saying humanity is "doomed" in any sense of the word. In fact, humanity will do just fine. But I highly doubt we'd be back to the same standard of living pre-apocalypse in just a matter of years. It'd take a hundred years AT THE VERY LEAST, and even then, i'm going to assume 100 years is a long shot.

Without oil, we can never recover. There's nothing else that can provide the energy a modern world demands.

>>50243471
>complete collapse of modern communication and transit.

Why?

Telephone lines don't just stop working as soon as a certain number of people die.

With a 90% decrease in the consumption of gasoline, the "stockpile" in your average gas station is going to last quite a while.

>>50243486

Have you read any of the books that have come out concerning the Second Congo War?

First thing that comes to mind, though there's countless examples throughtout the modern world of how far living standards can fall and people still bounce back.

Human beings can handle more than you give them credit.

>>50243522
>Telephone lines don't just stop working as soon as a certain number of people die.
Yeah they do. They have to be monitored and maintained constantly.

You're hoping that the 10% that survive are skilled? You know how unlikely that is?

>>50243554
>Have you read any of the books that have come out concerning the Second Congo War?

No?

>First thing that comes to mind, though there's countless examples throughtout the modern world of how far living standards can fall and people still bounce back.
State a few.

>Human beings can handle more than you give them credit.
Individuals, to a degree, yes. Populations of them? Not so much. How'd easter island fare?

>>50243506
>nothing else that can provide the energy a modern world demands
Has nuclear been handwaved away?

>>50243581

Nuclear EROEI 5:1.

Oil EROEI 20-30:1

Nuclear is too costly in comparison. If were assuming that people are building them without oil-based equipment, then it becomes even less likely that anyone will ever build new ones.

The modern world happened because of oil's low energy investment and high return, not because of some magic singularity of humans becoming newtypes or some shit.

>>50243555

>You're hoping that the 10% that survive are skilled? You know how unlikely that is?

I imagine of the millions alone in America that survive a 90% plague, yes, there'll be enough skilled workers to pick up the pieces and begin teaching others the secrets of their trade.

Being skilled in telecommunications management doesn't make someone more likely to catch the plague.

>>50243632
>there'll be enough skilled workers to pick up the pieces and begin teaching others the secrets of their trade
10% scattered across the continent with no means of communications?

>>50243506
Yeah, but we certainly won't go "extinct" or something. We'll just find other alternatives, and if those alternatives might take us a thousand years (however unlikely that may be) to get up to our current standard of living, then so be it.

>>50243522
Communication wouldn't be a problem. Reliable communication with the right people at the right time would be a problem.

Electricity will go down after a month, and cellphone carriers will be rendered useless in weeks. Do you travel around some foreign city on a bicycle, screaming your lungs out with a megaphone trying to find your maybe-not-dead parents? Do you post billboards all around the downtown area telling them to come meet you in the bronze statue every afternoon? And do you really want to advertise who you are and where you're going? What if someone goes crazy and tries to kill you for some reason? Do you really want to make yourself such a vulnerable target for crazy people and raiders?

>>50243522
>>50243555
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Gasoline can expire, and there's not going to be a new shipment of the stuff anytime soon. If you want your group of 100 or 200 or 300 or whatever to survive, you're going to want to control the gas station of X street, Y street, and Z street, which means your group is going to have gasoline for longer. But what if that group of 200 people ALREADY owns Z street? This is why conflict will be inevitable.

There's a LOT of resources to salvage, but any reasonable leader of a group will want more and more and more until he has MORE than enough to help his tribe survive; other tribes be damned.

>>50224777
>Is that a bad thing?

>>50243653

And in 100 years the only ones still alive will be the ones who can actually farm.

>>50243670
>Yeah, but we certainly won't go "extinct" or something. We'll just find other alternatives, and if those alternatives might take us a thousand years (however unlikely that may be) to get up to our current standard of living, then so be it.

Permanent pre-industrial tech level. If anything happens to civilization right now that will be the only result. Coal will still be in abundance, but without oil we cannot make the transition back to the modern world.

>Electricity will go down after a month
I'd say closer to a week at best.

>>50243631
Not only that, but without oil, no plastics. Sure if you knew how to recycle plastic you can get some extra use out of it. However plastic degrades horribly after recycling it once or twice, requiring freshly made plastic to take its place.

Frankly I don't see how modern society can snap back without oil readily available to refine, especially since most if not all the easy deposits have since long been tapped out.

>>50243653

>10% scattered across the continent with no means of communications?

31,000,000 people in a single country with a communications system still in place because the plague does not specifically target telephone repair men?

Yes, seems quite plausible.

>>50243670
>Electricity will go down after a month, and cellphone carriers will be rendered useless in weeks.

But they won't?

Alan Weisman gave the communications systems a longer life span the power grid, and that was with a 100% plague.

>>50243712
>I'd say closer to a week at best.

Even with NO ONE running the system, it'd still be a year at minimum before the system started to have faults (t. Alan Weisman)

I think that before we talk about anything else we should set in stone what kind of pandemic we're talking about.

I don't know enough to start talking about viruses and infectious diseases, but given that we're talking about survivors we should make it clear that there are diseases that target one demographic much more frequently than others.

What happens to isolated populations that aren't immediately touched by the disease? What happens if america successfully quarantines for a year or two before the disease hits? What if it only targets specific ethnicities or targets men more frequently than women?

What about tracing the timeline of the spread of the disease? The areas hit first would probably be hit worst but also have the chance to recover faster than those where the disease burns slowly due to people who are susceptible taking measures to quarantine and keeping it alive.

How do we tell infected people apart from uninfected? How do we tell if someone is immune to the disease or susceptible to infection? What if it mutates and becomes even more aggressive as it burns through the world?

Does it pass through physical contact? Bodily fluids? Mosquitoes? breath and miasma?

Or do we just suppose that 90% of people completely at random and without warning disappear overnight leaving 10% to fend for themselves?

>>50243723

I think the only people arguing that the modern world could exist without oil are those that believe in the bed-time story of the singularity.

>>50243522
>With a 90% decrease in the consumption of gasoline, the "stockpile" in your average gas station is going to last quite a while.

As an emergency fuel technician, lemme tell you, das bullshit.

Gasoline only has a shelf life of a couple of months at best without special treatment, diesel is better but you've still got to treat the stuff for storage, but I'mma let you know right now, if it all collapses to a 90% Kill Plague I don't think I'll be out to service the hundreds of emergency fuel tanks on the cell towers and comms stations you know what with the power priority going to lab containment, and hospital power... and even then after all but one other randomly chosen member of my family dies I literally won't have the manpower or the total skilleset necessary for maintaining my own operations either (even if I somehow had the heroic willpower necessary to work myself to death for distant strangers.)

>>50243740
>31,000,000 people in a single country with a communications system still in place because the plague does not specifically target telephone repair men?
What percentage of the population are currently telephone repairmen? Why would they keep doing their jobs and not try to survive in other, more practical means?

>But they won't?
Based on?

>Alan Weisman gave the communications systems a longer life span the power grid, and that was with a 100% plague.
Who? A senior official of a power company?

>Even with NO ONE running the system, it'd still be a year at minimum before the system started to have faults (t. Alan Weisman)

A bachelor's degree in literature tells you about infrastructure how?

>>50243712
>Permanent pre-industrial tech level

Perhaps. I must admit, I can't reliably make an argument for, or against this hypothesis, but the idea is not unlikely. Though I like to think humanity would be smart enough to pick up the pieces and EVENTUALLY rework themselves into oil refinery before 1000 years or so. After all, we're not starting over from scratch. There are books and manuals, and however confusing they might be to the layman, someone WILL get it eventually, painfully if necessary. It's just the nature of humanity to strive for accomplishment.

>>50243740
I must admit, I know nothing of this Alan Weisman guy, but if what you're saying is true (though I am slightly skeptical), then that would be an immediate advantage to humanity that I have not accounted for.

>>50243768
What he said. Our system is much more fragile than you think, intended to work on a guarantee of "best-case-scenarios" that, frankly, we cannot afford to assume in our current predicament.

>>50243822
>Though I like to think humanity would be smart enough to pick up the pieces and EVENTUALLY rework themselves into oil refinery before 1000 years or so.

Refine what? There's no surface oil left. You think we'll reinvent deep-ocean drilling before the internal combustion engine?

>>50242193
People lose their entire world in wars all the time, look at the ongoing conflicts in the middle east. There's interview after interview about people who have seen their entire extended families get executed and yet those people don't just lay down and die because of it. People who lose their families in genocide don't just kill themselves en masse after the fact. Despite massive casualties to epidemics like Spanish flu (hitting some communities with a mortality rate of over 50%), society didn't grind to a halt permanently and people just lie in bed doing nothing. Humans live for themselves, not for others. The survival instinct is the strongest drive anyone has.

>>50243822
It's not that we couldn't refine oil, it's that we use the oil we have today to reach oil we need tomorrow because we didn't have the science to do so yesterday.

We have basically run the easy reserves of fossil fuels dry (the stuff you use to bootstrap your way up to the higher level challenges) if the supply stops now, it probably stops for good.

>>50243902
What if I live in venezuela?

>>50230004

Greentexting does not substitute for a coherent explanation.

>>50243888

Then they come over here and live off of welfare the rest of their lives.

Is that the recovery you imagine?

>>50243888

The only examples of a population losing its primary source of energy are North Korea and Cuba.

Neither are doing well technologically or economically.

>>50243956

But neither could be described as having any sort of "civilizational collapse"

File: fac.jpg (20KB, 343x284px) Image search: [Google]

20KB, 343x284px

>>50243506
>But dude without oil we're doomed.

Mate, we have several ways of producing electricity and fuels without oil. Hydro, wind, and solar are all fairly competitive today, even with Oil still being pretty much abundant.

Oil is just like primo at being high energy density for weight and just laying around in the ground requiring nothing but some asshole to come dig it up. Of course we use it still, but there's nothing stopping alternatives from more or less filling the shoes of oil. Even say during a collapse where everything goes tit's up, there are hydro and other types of power plants that will run for years to come that could provide a starting point for further production of energy.

>>50243888
In those cases of war and local genocide there still exists a functional 'support system' of people, of a world that is still going.

I am not arguing that humanity ceases to exist as a species, we can easily survive that... but all political foundations, scientific progress, and social structures cease to exist and need to be peiced back together or re-invented whole-sale. You're going to see entire religions and philosophies die and spring to life as humanity rebuilds the way it views itself.

Hell, you're likely to see book burnings, cultural revolutions, the 'Army of 8' or 'Children of the Pox', fundamentalist and transcendentalist spiritual awakenings in the face of all of man's science and learning being useless in the face of a completely random plague.

>>50243936
That very rarely happens though. Out of millions displaced how many thousands get to even get on wellfare for a short time? Not many.

>>50243956
NK has built nukes, and cuba managed to keep their living standards at the 1960s level for quite a while.

>>50243936
I don't even understand what argument you're trying to make with that kind of statement.

If refugees displease you so much look at europe after world war 2 for another example of people losing their entire families and communities and still functioning, if that doesn't suit you then I'm sure you can find at least one major starvation event that left several thousands of people orphaned or as the sole survivor of their family/community managing to live fulfilling lives on the basis of not wanting to die.

>>50241284
>>moves to California.
plagued by earthquakes and ON FIRE half the year? seems great.

>>50243976

Depends on how you define it. North Korea is a good place to live?

>Mate, we have several ways of producing electricity and fuels without oil.

At extreme losses compared to oil, yeah. I can drive across the country for a bag of chips too.

>Hydro, wind, and solar are all fairly competitive today
You need to stop believing everything reddit tells you. Hydro and Wind are mostly tapped out and nearly worthless, and solar is a net energy loss eveywhere but the equator.

>Oil is just like primo at being high energy density for weight and just laying around in the ground requiring nothing but some asshole to come dig it up.

Yes it has an extremely high energy invested for energy return. it was 100:1 at the start of the century. Solar is negative, and wind and hydro are at best 10:1.

How many hydro dams did we build before internal combustion engines? How many giant windmills? We had tiny little dams and tiny little windmills for grain, because that was all the energy available could support.

Without oil. nothing else is attainable. Everyone will be too busy trying to stockpile enough food to not starve through the winter. We will never have the manpower to do physics again. Oil was the only reason that was ever possible, it caused us to need fewer people making food.

>>50244010
>all political foundations, scientific progress, and social structures cease to exist and need to be pieced back together or re-invented whole-sale.
I really don't see why, for the most part governments have redundancies and compartmentalization that would make it unlikely that a total collapse would occur, "Scientific progress" would likely stall for the time being, but everything needing to be reinvented? Seems like hogwash to me. Even in the absolute worst case scenario mankind's data stores have never been so redundant Every city on earth has a library and several stores containing more knowledge than one would find in a center of learning a thousand years ago.

OK admittedly maybe society and people in general might start to view itself differently in the wake of such a disaster and new religious interpretations might become the norm, but I don't see the whole "Rocks fall killing society, start from scratch, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars" thing.

>>50244031
>That very rarely happens though. Out of millions displaced how many thousands get to even get on wellfare for a short time? Not many.

Most. It's why welfare is broke in the USA.

>NK has built nukes, and cuba managed to keep their living standards at the 1960s level for quite a while.

So it took them 80 years to recover to 1940's tech?

>>50244049
I'm trying to think of a situation where people recovered without outside help. All i think of is shit like Easter Island's apocalypse.

>>50243880
Explain to me, since I legitimately do not know the answer to this question. Are you telling me we have NO surface oil left WHATSOEVER? Not even in Texas? Not even in Alaska? We COULD NOT, even after we've picked ourselves off the ground and established a new government, scrounge up enough readily-accessible fossil fuels to start making available deep-ocean drilling?

>>50243880
>>50243902
Also, forgive me. I said "refining" without actually knowing what it is. It's like when normies call gun magazines "clips" because they don't know any better. What I meant to say was just "oil acquisition", for lack of a better word.

>>50244132
>Explain to me, since I legitimately do not know the answer to this question. Are you telling me we have NO surface oil left WHATSOEVER? Not even in Texas? Not even in Alaska? We COULD NOT, even after we've picked ourselves off the ground and established a new government, scrounge up enough readily-accessible fossil fuels to start making available deep-ocean drilling?

That's correct, and no, i cannot see any possible way of powering such a venture.

>What I meant to say was just "oil acquisition", for lack of a better word.
Production is generally what that is called. Production is the crux of the peak oil argument.

>>50226585
Unlikely. Being forced into such a stressful, uncertain situation with a tiny fraction of the starting population is a nice breeding ground for all kinds of centralized governments, and centralized governments always, invariably, take on the trappings that we associate today with feudal society--a noble class and a peasant class, with the latter being treated like dirt and having very little social mobility.

It's happened every time a more-centralized government took over from Rome to Stalin and Hitler to Great Leader and his progeny. Or, hey, look at Chelsea being groomed for Congress.

Oh, sure, most of those examples didn't have the direct linear inheritance of titles, but a position "somewhere" in the nobility *was* almost always inheritable.

So, yeah, places that never had strict European feudalism would still devolve (further) into a looser form of feudalism.

>>50244092
>At extreme losses compared to oil, yeah.
You make it sound as if it's orders of magnitude worse, it's not that bad, and in lieu of oil it still work.

> Hydro and Wind are mostly tapped out and nearly worthless.
Hydro in the first world is already tapped out, but it ain't fucking worthless considering it produces up to 6 percent of the US's power. And wind is certainly not tapped out yet especially if we no longer concern ourselves with bullshit like "it blocks the view" or "it kills birds!".

>and solar is a net energy loss everywhere but the equator.
If we are only talking about silicon type cells and using outdated methods of production maybe, in the pipline there are several novel production methods that look to provide energy positive results. That's of course not to mention liquid salt and other plants that work well in specific regions like deserts.

>We had tiny little dams and tiny little windmills for grain, because that was all the energy available could support.
We also didn't have half of the scientific and engineering knowledge before then. You can't just attribute everything to oil.

>Without oil. nothing else is attainable.
That's absolutely ridiculous. you discount every other possibility because we no longer have the luxury of the methods of first resort? Absolute tripe.

>>50244182
>That's correct, and no

Must admit. Am highly skeptical of this as well. Years of watching National Geographic and reruns of Joe Dirt tells me we have pockets of oil just sitting around in Alaska and the American South. If not America, then certainly somewhere in Saudi Arabia or Tehran, SOMEONE will gather enough surface oil that could then, in theory, be used for deep-ocean drilling.

>>50227034
Want a perfect example of his thesis?

He spent many years in the '90s and early '00s trying to come up with a way to create sort of an encyclopedia of the history of invention online, using the newfangled concept of hyperlinks to allow a reader to jump from invention to invention and learn how they fed into each other. However, he foresaw this as a massive undertaking, and was never able to acquire the funding necessary to develop the user-friendly interactive framework, much less to hire the army of workers needed to hand-enter and verify all of the raw data needed to make it work.

Then, along comes a simple piece of freeware designed to let people collaboratively build a web page... and, a few million bored subject matter experts (or not, on political topics) later, you can get lost for hours on the science and technology side of wikipedia, clicking from invention to science to historical figure to trivial bit of knowledge.

>>50244296
>You make it sound as if it's orders of magnitude worse, it's not that bad, and in lieu of oil it still work.

It is orders of magnitude worse. You have to put in ten times as much money into renewables as you have to put into oil to get the same amount of energy out. For agrarian/preindustrial post-apoc civilizations, that's a very tall order when they can barely provide enough food for everyone and everyone is needed to grow more food and not do science. That's more or less the reason things happened in the sequence they did over the industrial revolution into the modern era. We find easier shit first.

>ain't fucking worthless considering it produces up to 6 percent of the US's power.
But that electricity is limited to certain regions, and you can only transmit it so far before you lose most of the juice. So it's basically nothing on the regional level without oil, and maintenance is very energy intensive.

>If we...That's of course not to mention liquid salt and other plants that work well in specific regions like deserts.

Forgive me for being skeptical of "in the pipeline" things. Either way, it's extremely expensive and energy intensive, and i cannot imagine a pre-industrial society making them.

>We also didn't have half of the scientific and engineering knowledge before then. You can't just attribute everything to oil.

Yes i can, because we only got that scientific knowledge when we stated using petrochemicals for farming and could move pop off of food and onto science. Without oil, you cannot spare sufficient people and capital for something that turns out nothing useful 99% of the operating time.

>That's absolutely ridiculous. you discount every other possibility because we no longer have the luxury of the methods of first resort? Absolute tripe.
You need to be willing to adjust the narrative of history you hold.

>>50233114
Horrifying

then terribly optimistic for the generations that survive. Expect a rise in teen preg in order to up the dwindling population numbers

>>50244305
It'll be a long, long time, but it's possible. It'll start wars almost immediately, if not just from the pursuit of such a thing.

it'd be a neat setting.

>>50229726
The first point is correct.

The second point is patently untrue.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

With a sudden loss of 90% of the population, power demand and supply would be completely unbalanced, taking the entire grid down.

That said, large parts of the infrastructure would be physically intact, but with only 10% of the qualified technicians left, it would be very, very hard to get anything above local community grids next to power plants going... and that only works until the plant runs out of locally-stored fuel.

>>50223872
You guys have heard about the Ebola recurrence in African Right?

That would be a good place to start

>>50233129
This.

Other anon, don't forget that 90% is the *starting point* for this scenario.

You have 10% left. How many of those know how to grow enough food to feed themselves a year later? How many know how to grow enough food without using modern powered equipment and fertilizers, which will be depleted rapidly?

You're not starting with 100% of the 1870 population, where almost everybody was raised from birth with the skills that they would need to survive in that environment, with that level of technology... you're starting with 10% of today's population, who have long since replaced that knowledge with other things.

>>50244182
>even if that's only mostly true about surface oil

Christ man, that's a real Logistical nightmare. I'm from Houston the Oil capital , and I'll tell you we need Oil

>>50230004
Why is every possum I see always cross eyed?

File: 1434192772191.jpg (230KB, 1452x1100px)

230KB, 1452x1100px

Serious question. What will happen to all the unoccupied farmland in the American midwest?

>No pesticides
>Bugs have a field day
>Birds eat bugs
>Native bird population grows
>Birds disperse seeds in feces
>Within months, feral patches of rice, wheat, corn, and peas overtake large parts of ex-GMO plantations

This means people will come back to these fields expecting neat rows of wheat and corn, but instead be met with shaggy patches of rice and wheat that have instead cannibalized the ground their wheat was living on.

They'll have to rearrange the entire field once again to get peak efficiency, which wouldn't be too difficult, especially with newly commandeered machines, but it could be done.

My prediction.

>Those caught in the agricultural belt will be band together in their own tribe
>They'll be farmer's wives, sons and daughters of farmers, ex-farmers, and the occasional farmer who managed to survive the plague
>All of them are quite knowledgeable on the subject of agriculture
>All of them can rebuild their old farmlands quite easily
>Since the land is so large and barren, they are often uninterrupted, except for the odd hitchhiker looking for his family or the occasional band of thugs and raiders, who they easily fight off (large open land to identify any suspicious hordes, miles before they actually come by, early training with guns and good knowledge of the land, as well as a tight-knit group that watches out for each other's backs)
>The entire breadbasket becomes these farmer's kingdom
>When word gets out about this, people go to them for food, and they become very, very rich
>Though they are a highly exclusive group, people hear about them from all over the country and various family members come to live with them
>I guess the Farmer's Association of America officially becomes one of the most powerful "kingdoms" in all of America

What do you think of my prediction? And "no", this isn't ironic. I actually believe something like this might happen.

>>50244449
>It is orders of magnitude worse. You have to put in ten times as much money into renewable as you have to put into oil to get the same amount of energy out
That's one order of magnitude, and that's based on the earliest investment cost, not current ones, it's much tighter now.

>For agrarian/preindustrial post-apoc civilizations, that's a very tall order when they can barely provide enough food for everyone and everyone is needed to grow more food and not do science
And why are we assuming that everyone has gone back to farming? I mean first of all, even long before oil, or even steam, people had already begun to specialize and move into cities while a smaller dedicated group of farmers managed the crop. It's extremely unlikely that even during catastrophe somehow everyone is going to forget the basics of agriculture that we have known for centuries that would allow a small subset of the population to feed the rest. Secondly I am still unclear why you think that there will be a total collapse to near barbarism in the first place.

>But that electricity is limited to certain regions, and you can only transmit it so far before you lose most of the juice.
The losses of properly maintained HV lines is minimal excepting extremely long distances, but let's ignore that and the question of maintenance and who to transmit to and all that. The point was not to supply the entire country from a few points on the grid, but rather that even without oil there still will be places with power who can make advancements even if somehow everyone goes full retard farmer. One could use that power to expand their power generation capacity, or even do something such as working on creating alternate forms of stockpileable transportable energy dense fuels.

>>50244695
>>50244449

>and i cannot imagine a pre-industrial society making them.
The point, again, is not that a preindustrial society makes them, but that they are already in existence and do provide non-negligable amounts of power. And that we don't have to fall back into a "pre-industrial" society when we can instead utilize these forms of energy production.

>Yes i can, because we only got that scientific knowledge when we stated using petrochemicals for farming and could move pop off of food and onto science
Okay then, who came up with the science required to understand how to utilize oil, if before we had it we had no time for science and could only dutifully tend our fields? Science has been done long before oil, and it would continue to be done without it. Oil is not a gift from Prometheus, it was very important to our development yes, but it was by no means required, if it were we never would have gotten to the point we could have used it in the first place.

>>50243740
I have no idea who that is, but sure, as long as cell towers have generators, they'll last for a few days, possibly even weeks, after the grid goes down.

And then what? 90% of the remaining 10% have to start learning to farm right away in order to survive past the second year. Cell phones won't exactly be high in priority.

So the ideal situation for when this happens is to belong to a community where every individual already possesses a high degree of independence and could feasibly provide for themselves and teach others how to do so as well. Farmers and hunters and those living with enough distance between themselves and the major cities such that any survivors would almost certainly perish if they tried to make the journey on foot.

Worst case scenario would be a complete breakdown of trust due to fear of the disease, the survivors probably aren't sure if they're immune or if they just haven't caught it up until then. You'd have strangers shooting each other for fear of transmission and tightly knight communities descending into superstitious scapegoating after the collapse of the government.

The most heavily affected areas would be bad, but the areas where it hits after people start wearing masks and quarantining would be hell after supplies run low and violence breaks out. Best thing to do would be to fuck off to the most remote corner of the earth where you could depend on natural resources for survival like fishing and wild berries and such.

>>50244691
Yupe, this is pretty spot on. One point; Inclusion would largely be based around how able and fit you are / what special knowledge you can bring. discrimination breaks down when you absolutely need something

But don't forget the next innovation to come around. Beer, becomes the newest form of payment

>>50244695
>The losses of properly maintained HV lines is minimal

hahaha lul no. You're right for a certain degree, but we will eventually loses those lines before we get back to a point of being able to maintain / use them again

>>50244691
Well first of all rice doesn't grow on the ground, it grows in marshes and lakes and partially submerged mud paddies.

Second of all I don't think dispersal of seeds works like that, usually plants have specific modes of transportation that occasionally include species that they are adapted to, but a random bird cracking open some seed doesn't seem like a very probable dispersion method. And then there's the problem of many types of hybrid sold for food are sterile.

Thirdly while I don't know how pests effect monocluture crops, I know that if they suddenly had enough food to spike in population, then it is likely there would be almost no crops left. And such a sudden spike would likely not drastically alter bird populations.


I don't really know about the rest though.

>>50224062
"we're all descended from 10,000 people" is not the same as "there was only 10,000 people then". Some lineages end.

>>50244766
Well that's why I said "let's ignore that" since the improbabilities involved with maintaining the individual parts of the power grid is unlikely even in the best of circumstances.

>>50244296
I have to disagree with you about hydro. Hydro is awesome--it's just so limited that it can't really expand any longer.

In a Mad Max or Emberverse setting, hydropower, even if only in the form of watermills (possibly with Pelton Wheels instead of the old overshoot design), would play a big role for any community that had it available.

>>50244668
Older possums can develop fatty tissue which pushes their eyes together. Younger possums usually won't have it.

>>50244514
>implying
This is a plague scenario, not rapture or some shit. There would be plenty of time to turn off the coal and gas plants, leaving ten percent of the country on mostly sustainable energy - wind, water, and solar don't take fuel, so between the three types we'd have enough power. Of course, we'd need something to smooth things out. There's a fellow I met in Massachusetts who has a good chemical solution to grid-level power storage, but he has no business sense and his only funding is basically gifted by Bill Gates so it's not happening for at least a decade probably.

>>50244850
>Good chemical solution
Flow batteries?

>>50244691
Sort of. We're talking 90% initial die-off here (evenly distributed), which is harsher on farmers than most real-world scenarios, where urban casualties would exceed 95%, but rural casualties could stay below 50% (more stored/available resources, less immediate and total dependency on the grid and economy, less population density to protect against contagions, etc.).

In a real-world scenario, yes, you're largely right. The main question for any given community of farmers is whether the urban locusts can reach them and overwhelm them before becoming casualties.

In this completely hypothetical textbook scenario that we're discussing, civilization actually gets kicked in the pants harder, because the survivors include a smaller percentage of farmers and a larger percentage of hamburger-flippers, gender studies majors, and welfare recipients, none of whom are skilled or knowledgeable about self-sufficient living with primitive technology.

>>50244862
No, those will never be sufficiently scalable, there's just too many problems that drive costs too high. I'm talking about Donald Sadoway and his magnesium/antimony setup. It's great technology, great chemistry, but he either has no idea that production and R&D require different kinds of hiring processes, or he just can't manage to hire anyone competent for production and is making shitty attempts to spin it.

>>50244880
even then farming communities are comparably self-sufficient compared to major population centers.

Even if the initial deaths are distributed equally, the farmers would manage to band together and survive fairly well after the initial confusion clears up, the major population centers would still house millions of people who will soon run out of supplies before turning violent. The smart innawoods guys would run for the hills but plenty of idiots would try to stick it out and fall victim to whatever kind of conflict arises from the dwindling supplies and rising panic.

But this would mostly depend on how quick this pandemic spreads and how fast it kills. If people can see this coming and prepare you'll have a much different scenario on your hands.

File: 1434192394097.jpg (248KB, 800x1132px) Image search: [Google]

248KB, 800x1132px

>>50244850
Holy shit. I hadn't even thought of that.

NEW PROPOSAL FOR THOSE ALREADY INVESTED IN DISCUSSION WITHIN THIS THREAD:
How much mercy will be provided to the future heirs of the US government (or any other government, for that matter) in the form of pre-apocalypse preparation?

In other words, before 90 percent of the population kicks the bucket, how many powerplants will have been shut down or retrofitted for civilian use? How many layman's manuals will be created so that the future generation of humanity will be able to properly run a nation? Before we all die, will the President release all the prisoners and retrofit stadiums and empty fields so that the future survivors will have easily-accessible mass graves?

HOW MUCH PREP DOES HUMANITY GET BEFORE WE'RE ACTUALLY LEFT ON OUR OWN?

This is something I hadn't even properly considered. If it took just one year from initial discovery of the virus to the eventual death of 90 percent of the population, before everything goes to shit, how much could the government get done to prepare us for the shit that's about to go down?

>>50244850
Read the OP. It's a sudden drop of 90% of the population, spread evenly. That's not very realistic for a plague scenario, especially the last part, but I'm running with it, since that's what anon asked for.

And when it comes to "sustainable" energy, all of those require manufacture and maintenance. Solar has non-trivial issues with manufacture, wind has non-trivial issues with maintenance. Either could work for an individual or family in a bug-in scenario, but when you try to expand that to a community, much less a nation, it just falls apart due to the inherent inefficiencies. Hydro is far better than either, and can be harnessed at many different levels, from "saving" existing dams to building a Pelton Wheel out of spoons, an alternator, and a long garden hose with a funnel. It can also perform large amounts of mechanical work as well as generate electricity, which is a big deal in a society that just lost the grid and most of the population.

And grid-level power storage? Yeah, right, wake me up when he comes up with a cost-effective method for storing Terawatt-hours at a time.

>>50244691
You won't have usable gasoline, as was already pointed out. Also, remember all those pests and diseases modern agriculture had difficulty controlling without constant adaptation? Now you're facing those strains with late 19th-century tech.

>>50244090
You'd be surprised what people tolerate when the weather is warm and the soil is fertile.

>>50243338
We were never good at /his/, you just didn't know enough history back then to know how bad at it we are.

>>50245038
Ah, good point.

Follow up question. Could modern cattle be put to work in the fields? Do they have the right temperament for it? Are they so genetically tampered with, they can no longer walk?

Also, does anyone know any pre-industrial methods for chasing off pests like birds and insects?

>>50245030
Forget the government, there are resources out there already, from Ye Olde Wikipedia to groups that put together basic knowledge of such things as basic industry and chemistry from natural or salvaged resources. Start there, and see if you can get enough of a picture to work out a path to recovery in such a scenario.

>>50245082
History is mostly just a constructed story loosely incorporating real events and their interpretations anyways. Who's better at that stuff than /t-fuggin-g/

File: A what am i reading.jpg (2MB, 4400x4387px)

2MB, 4400x4387px

>>50245131

>>50245085
"Yes, but..."

Most domestic cattle are still bred and born the old-fashioned way, and the most popular breeds are docile enough that they could be used IF raised and trained from birth (you really need to raise and "fix" steers--have fun with that--to get the muscle power you want). It's far less likely that you'll have much luck getting a yoke onto an untrained adult.

For pests, you mostly want natural predators.

For more information on low-tech farming, do some research on Amish farming practices. They do about as well as you possibly can without modern technology (and it doesn't hold a candle to modern yields, but in these scenarios, it's really about the best you could hope for, and far better than what settlers used to accomplish).

>>50244449
>You have to put in ten times as much money into renewables as you have to put into oil to get the same amount of energy out.
Yes, but the money is already put in and it takes a lot less logistics to tap into a solar plant that's already there than to get oil going. Of course it's a huge step back, but it's something.

>>50244691
A lot of that land is only fertile because people fertilize the fuck out of it. If you stop that, corn is going to die way back and you'll have to resort to the indignities of crop rotation and leaving fields fallow for two years or more in between plantings. You're not going to see feral corn doing well at all without heavy maintenance, it'll be taken over by weeds. Wheat and oats are hardy so they'll still be around, but intermingled with tons of non-edible grasses and forbs. That's for the good areas, mind you. The worst will become desert because not enough nutrients for anything to grow.

Also your scenario sounds way too utopian to be realistic. Such an organization is unlikely to survive its own politics for very long.

>>50245033
"sudden" for a disease means "a few years", not "instant".

>>50245163
Everyone tells stories anon, history is just the stories a bunch of people in the past told to explain shit. Today with cameras in every hand and thousands of eyes of every event we still sometimes don't know exactly why certain events happen, why people did what they did, what they thought, or even if they did anything at all. Now think back to in the past where there was like a couple of people in charge of recording history, sometimes from hearsay, you think they actually recorded the 100% truth? Nah, instead they recorded an internally interpreted construction of the event that was consistent with their world view. These days we try to vet things, but we never really can besides stuff that leaves real historical evidence. So with history you'll never get the full truth, you only get the stories people write down about how they thought the world worked. It's why history is so compelling, it's a grand story that stretches back as far as we can recall.

>>50245193

A solar plant will last for at most 25 years with highly trained maintenance crews. The batteries will maybe last five.

It won't be there by the time people turn to it.

>>50245085
>Are they so genetically tampered with, they can no longer walk?
Definitely not.

>pre-industrial methods for chasing off pests like birds and insects?
Scarecrows and prayer, respectively. Old fashioned farming had land use much more mixed so there was habitat for insectivorous birds, which mean that (barring locust plague) there wasn't generally a huge boom in insects on the numbers that modern farmers need chemicals to combat.

>>50245225
>it will take more than five years for someone to go "hm, maybe we do something about our electrical infrastructure"
Your sense of time-scales is fucked.

>>50245257
>>it will take more than five years for someone to go "hm, maybe we do something about our electrical infrastructure"

People won't be able to think about anything other than growing food for a few generations, not years. Nobody will give a shit about electricity.

File: morrow.jpg (20KB, 249x320px) Image search: [Google]

20KB, 249x320px

Well if you had any warning

(oic related)

>>50245257
You're extremely exaggerating the ease at which we could return to, and then rebound from, a pre-industrial society. You're like those people who say, "Why can't NASA build Saturn Vs anymore? If we had the tech and blueprints then, and kept them, it should be easy, right?" However, as the designers say in response, if you wanted to build a late 60s engine, you would have to completely recreate the 60s industrial base which allowed it to happen. Those pre-cad designers were going to the moon using slide-rules, for fuck's sake! The Saturn V could only be built using the knowledge and engineering tech of that era, which does NOT translate well. Rebounding from a pre-industrial society would be even more difficult than that, since most people left would starve or die of other diseases (hey, remember cholera?) within 5 years.

>>50245221

And this is the tell.
No one knew where he came from.
No one knew where he went.
but this was our time with him.
the Captain.

File: 626px-Mississippian_cultures_HRoe_2010.jpg (121KB, 626x599px) Image search: [Google]

121KB, 626x599px

>>50223872
Not likely. The highest number that I have seen for a state/proto state/culture to have lost of its population ( barring ready replace from outside sources) and not be extremely effected is 65%. Even with outside replacement I have seen no figure past 80% population drop were society does just not fall apart. The scales of economy, the division and specialization of labor, etc is tooled to a given size. It can be adjusted to a great degree but it has limits.

The examples that I have seen of 90% or greater population drop also have a break down of the culture to a very high degree. Language, religion, identity all just fall away. When a event of that nature happened to the Mississippian culture there was only one group in that carried on mostly as before. That would be the Natchez people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natchez_people

>>50245341
The majority of people are going to be focusing on that. But you know, food takes a lot of work twice per crop that you get out. That's twice per year for many things, you've got three or four periods of hard work per year in regions where solar works really well. Of course it's not easy, but people will have time to do other things, and after food and water, electricity is going to be the nest priority.

>>50245371
We're not going pre-Industrial at all. The industrial revolution has already happened, the knowledge exists. Of course social complexity and quality of life would drop drastically. But there would be places, even if it's not everywhere, that the old tech is maintained to the extent that a modern first world country now would only drop to maybe a second world level in terms of what's available to the elite. And from the elite, it can spread out. I think it could be only two generations until quality of life rebounds for most people, and in that time there would be some new innovations as well.

>>50245423
>The majority of people are going to be focusing on that. But you know, food takes a lot of work twice per crop that you get out. That's twice per year for many things, you've got three or four periods of hard work per year in regions where solar works really well. Of course it's not easy, but people will have time to do other things, and after food and water, electricity is going to be the nest priority

Three generations down the road all the knowledge of how to do those things is gone.

>>50245437
>the plague will destroy all textbooks and technical manuals
You'd have to also fiat in a cultural destruction of technology, like Canticle for Liebowitz. But in a situation where the infrastructure isn't destroyed and the information isn't systematically eradicated, it's going to come back. Of course it will be in a lesser form, but it would still be something that can grow back and return.

>>50245514
>>the plague will destroy all textbooks and technical manuals

No, the elements will, over two or three generations. How many thousands of miles will people travel casually in this world?

It won't come back for thousands of years, if ever.

>>50245539
Oh, so the plague will destroy our libraries? It'll seek out and destroy everyone who thinks knowledge is worth preserving, and will do so universally in every part of the world?

>>50245548
>Oh, so the plague will destroy our libraries?

What the fuck is wrong with you? Exposure to the elements after the buildings fall apart will destroy them,

>>50245573
>buildings will fall apart faster than people will think "hmm, books might be worth saving"
"The elements" aren't some magical force that works instantly. Hell, the greatest libraries are in stone buildings anyway so there's hundreds of years before they have major problems.

>>50245611
>>buildings will fall apart faster than people will think "hmm, books might be worth saving"

People will likely burn the books for warmth before reading them.

>Hell, the greatest libraries are in stone buildings anyway so there's hundreds of years before they have major problems.

All it takes is a broken window and the moisture will destroy the books. And like i said, looters will go through it for anything they can burn for warmth or fuel.

>>50230004
who are u quoting ????

>>50245548
It doesn't need to. You can't use them, just like you can't build a shiny new Saturn V ever again.

Let's say you have hoarded a bunch of manuals on steam engine design. Great! Now you just need:
>source of iron
>source of coal
>source of copper
>synthetic rubber or equivalent
>oil for lubrication
>lots of water
>trained crew
...which you've got on hand. Right. No, we're going pre-industrial for centuries. Since you mentioned Canticle, I'd like to point out that after 600 years, that world was still pretty medieval

>>50245635
>People will likely burn the books for warmth before reading them.
So you've never interacted with human beings in your life.

>All it takes is a broken window and the moisture will destroy the books.
Or with paper, I see.

>>50245675
>So you've never interacted with human beings in your life.
I'm beginning to think that is your general issue.

>Or with paper, I see.
Don't you have an artificial trump protest to attend?

>>50245661
>I'd like to point out that after 600 years, that world was still pretty medieval
Because that scenario was nuclear, all major infrastructure was destroyed and then they fiated a movement destroying books and knowledge. And a popular movement destroying knowledge could indeed be a real problem, but that's in one place at a time, the whole world won't react the same way.

>>50243276
>If the deaths are truly uniform in such a way that we maintain an equal percentage of engineers and doctors and other educated professionals in most industries

>Assume population drop is even worldwide (no country is hit harder than any other)

Just going to point out that in real life pandemics places with higher population density got hit harder then places lower population density areas. Even if nation wide it always comes out to 90% some places inside a given nation would be harder hit. IE cities, the places were live and work professionals. Even if we discount that locelised fanimes would likely happen in cities during and right after words. Why? The food distribution system would go down, at lest for a time. Only places like NYC would be effected in a best case event. Worst case much of the Northeastern sea board.

>>50245706
Why cut down trees when there are libraries full of easily burned books?

It's about survival.

>>50245735
Sure. So if there's a bad winter in a cold area, some libraries might get wiped out. Cold areas are fucked anyway. In non-shitty parts of the planet, you've got better things to burn than paper which generates fuck all heat (compared to, say, wood) and needs to be replenished constantly.

>>50245781

In non-cold areas it would be used as a fuel source.

>>50245786
For what?
Nigga, you're overestimating people's desire to destroy knowledge for little payoff.

>>50245796

Are you kidding? Did you really just ask "what use is fire?"

>>50223872
Human population is on a massive scale now. I would assume a 90% redux would just mean people will converge into several cities while still retaining a moderate level of technology.

>>50245811

Cities are worthless without technology. People will go to where they can grow lots of food.

>>50245806
You know you can make fire with things that aren't fire too, right? And it burns hotter and brighter and better in every way? Paper fire is better than nothing if you really need a fire, but it's shit if you have wood. Of course coal is better than wood, but we have forests of coal and we don't have dozens of now-empty houses built of coal on the land we want to farm.

>>50245811
That's a terrible assumption. Read the thread, and realize that most post-apoc fiction is unrealisticly optimistic.

>>50245818
Yeah, but technology doesn't die from plague. The number of people who can maintain it in a small region is much smaller than the amount that can maintain it in a big region.

>>50245833

Yeah it does if there's not enough people left to grow enough food to sustain the population. You cannot do both at that point.

>>50245824
Moving a pile of books takes less energy than felling a tree. As long as it's easily available people will use it.

>>50245786
>>50245806
are you baiting or are you genuinely stupid?

Even disregarding all the readily available coal/oil/gas(which won't go bad instantly), there are literal tons of wood available. And since consumption would go down dramatically (since, y'know, 10% people left), there's no reason to start from burning books.

We won't regress into Mad Max instantly. And a sizeable portion of humans would care about not fucking over future generations over a short-term gain which isn't even gain because books SUCK as fuel.

>>50245877
And you base this off your 16 years of life experience?

>>50245864
>Yeah it does if there's not enough people left to grow enough food to sustain the population.

And there's much less population to sustain.

>>50245888
Ah, so you ARE baiting.

>>50223872
>general spread of liberal, democratic ideas
If recent politics is any indication, the world is unlikely to stay at that level anyway.

>>50245890

Keeping a person alive for a year takes a shitload of work. So every person has to work year round or everyone dies. There's no time for caring about books or keeping electricity flowing.

>>50245864
>Moving a pile of books takes less energy than felling a tree
If you're going by energy you get from it rather than just volume, I'm actually not sure that's true. Books are pretty heavy.

>>50245897
>baiting or generally stupid

Look, if you can't act like an adult, you can't expect us to treat you like one.

>>50245818
>>50245826
Well, like i said, human population is massive now. 90% reduction is nothing. Currently, huge region of farmlands can be ran by just several people. Also, a large number of foodstuffs are being processed into something else like cosmetics etc, i think the number is around 50-60%.

>>50245918
>Currently, huge region of farmlands can be ran by just several people.

with an immense industrial base supporting them.

Without that, every person has to work all day every day.

Your body outputs about 100 watts per day. What is the average energy use in the USA? How many energy slaves have we grown accustomed to working for us?

>>50245929
>every person has to work all day every day.
For two seasons of the year. And it's not like our irrigation will disappear. Oil prices will go through the roof but there'll still be some tractor use before things recover.

>>50245907
>>50245929
You guys are vastly overestimating how much work it takes to feed a single person, or even a small family. Unless you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO use all those huge fields to their full capacity (which you don't have to do since there's a lot less humans around and farming doesn't have to be centralized), you can do away with community farm plots pretty easily AND you'll have enough free time left to do all that caring about future stuff.

>>50246010
>For two seasons of the year.

Fuck this. I'm done arguing with a hillary supporter this stupid.

>>50245929
Again, massive population. USA have like, what? 200-300 million people right now? That number will become 20-30 million which is still a shitload of people. Our farmlands now are much much more efficient than ever. Within a decade, our oceans will also recover much of it's contents.
We will still be living in comparably modern society, that's for sure. The things that will get axed are probably the amenities and luxuries that we took for granted. Factories and industrial outputs will be focused on working equipments. Most of entertainment and jobs relating those will be gone.

>>50246022
addendum:
Honestly, the one guy earlier in the thread was right - psychological impact of 90% of people dying would be much worse than any logistical problems. So if world would collapse into a neanderthal shitole, it would be because of that, not because we all will suddenly become as helpless as a hipster outside of his coffee shop.

>>50246061
More than 300. There's 50 million yankees alone.

After the initial scaling back (five years max, in areas where political turmoil isn't too bad) we're going to see plenty of entertainment and things coming back.

>>50246026
>t. someone who never grew his own food.

You pretty much:
>dig some holes and put in crops you want to get in the summer/autumn
>wait
>git dem crops
>dig some holes and put in crops you want to get in the spring/summer
>wait
>git dem crops
>repeat

>>50246097
Now imagine store-bought seeds, irrigation systems, pesticides, herbicides, and advanced fertilizers don't exist. It's not that simple.

>>50246188
Why? Do they all just spontaneously poof out of existence?

There's enough stuff to last for at least a generation, more than enough time to sort the possible problems out. And unless we have Rapture scenario, there's enough time for survivors to adapt the infrastructure.

>>50246235
Assuming everyone currently outside the agricultural areas is dead, there just might be enough to last a generation, sure. Then the survivors can work on solving the problem of a complete lack of industrial and technical knowledge that created the agricultural revolution. But wait! They also get to do it without any fossil fuels. Also, the next generation is mostly illiterate and can't help with the research. Good luck!

>>50242193
Consider reading accounts from within cities like Leningrad during its siege, people tend to cling to their daily routines like a lifeline during particularly harrowing times.

>>50246303
You are assuming all the dead people are the productive ones.
Sure i won't argue that everyone is doomed if the surviving 10% are the neets, lazy shits and kardashians.

>>50246303
Anon.

Hate to break it to you, but not all people on the earth are basement-dwelling neets. Because really, the whole sum of humanity's knowledge suddenly going poof is a rather silly assumption.

And even if ALL fossil fuels get sent to heaven together with people (i dunno, maybe that lump of coal was Coal Jesus?), there's still methane, alcohol, other fuel readily useable with some redneck engineering.

>>50246303
At least here in Finland we could just go to the elderly and ask for them to reminisce about their youth. Then we could just use their knowledge as a template for survival.

While the amount of activity not directly involved in survival would be scaled back it would not cease completely. During the winter you often don't really have anything to do outside (other than pointlessly burning calories), so you might as well stay indoors and read something useful. During the summer everyone will be busy as hell during the harvest. Apart from that there are periods when there basically isn't anything left for you to do besides waiting. It is during these periods that people would work on projects to improve the standard of living for their families and communities.

Illiteracy would not happen because it takes next to nothing in terms of resources to teach a child to read, but the ability to read and write is highly beneficial for an individual. Literacy is good if you want an organized society, so it would almost certainly be promoted by the newly organized societies.

I don't see why we wouldn't have sweeping societal reforms as the result. Our modern liberal and democratic society developed along the industrial revolution, and is meant to administer and control huge masses of people. With much smaller communities there's no particular need to stick with it - some might out of habit, others wouldn't.

>>50246649
Ultimately this depends on the types of people who survive this particular catastrophe and would most likely vary by region.

Although I do believe most areas would opt to try and continue the systems they've known for most of their lives.

>people in the US start looting killing and pillaging everything they see
>society is divided between rowing road barbarian gangs that fight over the diminishing resources
>future is bleak as everyone only focuses on hording ready resources and methods of production

Meanwhile in the rest of the world:

>people who are not brought up in culture that indoctrinates them that their wellbeing is dependent on fucking over as many other people as possible
>society adjusts to sudden abundance of resources available as infrastructure critical jobs are being given priority in being filled
>societies understand that not fucking over your neighbour makes them less likely to think of fucking over someone else
>crime as low as never seen before as people have meaningful jobs to do and they can feel like they are needed which boosts self worth of everyone
>new golden age for humanity dawns

File: Bait Black.jpg (161KB, 625x560px)

161KB, 625x560px

This is your threadly reminder to not respond to bait posts

File: feelsgood.png (18KB, 256x256px) Image search: [Google]

18KB, 256x256px

>>50246723
>tfw Yuro

>>50245888
Wood-anon is right. Books are a generally poor source of heat because of how quickly they burn. You'd have a small fire for ~5 minutes before you had to add more fuel, which is pretty shitty.

You'd have a better return taking the actual shelves that the books are on and burning those instead. Even then, 90% of the houses in your local wherever are empty now. That's furniture, siding, floors, etc. which are all up for grabs and which all make better fires than paper ever could. If books are used for anything they probably get torn apart and used for insulation; stuffing clothes, filling gaps in walls, stuff like that. They'd get used for kindling every now and then but you don't need a whole book for that, just a few pages to light your actual fuel up.

This is all assuming you don't just go chop down your neighbor's tree.

>>50246723
This post reeks of self-hating American.

>>50246784
also: it kind of assumes the book-burners are illiterate. if you wanted to burn library books for warmth, would you pick 'basics of farming' or the thirtieth copy of twilight?

>>50246864
Nah. Just someone that is tired of the shitty fallout fanfic that this kind of threads attract from the defeatist doomsday preppers

>>50246892
The way I see it libraries will provide for toilet paper for generations. How many copies of Twilight you really need, after all.

Most of you aren't realizing the worst problem. The psychological toll of having your families die would be horrible. Especially once every government started blaming each other for the spread of the plague, dusting off old grudges to point fingers at each other. It would probably escalate into some kind of global conflict while people were still dying of disease.

>>50247222
>The psychological toll of having your families die would be horrible

Its horrible, but its not really a game changing factor, sure people will look for someone to blame, but people are surprisingly hardy when push comes to shove.

>>50247222
that was addressed in this thread, but global conflict happening just because some people are/go crazy enough is a good point. There probably will be containment measures though, which could mean both survivors getting not only medical, but psychological help.

If this shit ever happened I want to be that dog trainer wandering america city to city surrounded by a swarm of dogs trained with different functions as I help myself to everything.

>>50245715
This is the best case scenario, if mostly city folk die. They are basically useless to the species anyways, engaged in whatever tickles their fancy, caring nothing for the resources they consume for inane purposes.

>>50223872
Toll the bell, watch the days go by.
All is well, the twenty-third century dies.

>>50224029
740 alone is enough IIRC it would take a couple hundred people to restart population growth without inbreeding problems.
Of course, the more you have left the faster the growth.

Im more interested in seeing what happens to the "worse off" countries with huge populations like china and india.

I can imagine india turning into some sort of blight town given their terrible hygiene, superstition and poor education ratio.

Once everything is figured out the survivors are gonna be too fucking busy learning the jobs of the people that died, or learning jobs that have some value if they're artists or baristas. Human workers will be the most valuable commodity that's not a tractor.

If it follows typical epidemic patterns, most of the city folk will die and things will get on just fine after all the farms stop partying.

If it somehow does the exact opposite and all the farmers die, leaving city folk, the species dies. By the time these useless faggots learn to farm food, it will be too late to get a harvest in before starving.

>>50223872
>general spread of liberal, democratic ideas
this is a personal preference, anyone who thinks otherwise is a wannabe dictator.

>easy worldwide communications
Even if the entirety of the internet infrastructure exploded, it ain't hard to make cables. That is literally the bottleneck. No plague is going to make the survivors forget about technology.

Let's look at a group of people who are incredibly well shielded from any epidemic, depending on timing:
Submarine crews. Any sub crew that was at sea before the initial infection will survive 100%. That means that NONE of their varied experts will have died.
We are virtually guaranteed to have these experts at our disposal before too long. This could very well be part of the reason to even USE submarines, people aren't as stupid as you think, y'know.
So, now we have a small supply of some pretty educated dudes, including:
Machinists!
Nukes! (the guys not the bombs, although maybe them too)
Operators of various military gear! You know that sonar will be handy for fishing!
Anyone know if you can actually legit stun small fish with a modern sub's sonar? I heard that but it's probably BS.

Surface vessels will probably fare well too. That gives us a smattering of radar operators.
1/2

>>50248072
2/2

These radar operators are probably best used in other paces, but they sure will be handy. Maybe they can operate weather radars, I'm not sure now similar they are but weather is gonna be hella important.

But one thing these sea vessels have in common? Excellent radio gear.

So yeah, all in all, we lose a LOT of potential progress due to less free time for science etc.
But we won't slip back into the dark ages, no fucking way are people gonna give up smartphones and porn just because plague. We know that these things are possible, and that life sucks way less if the have them.

Honestly, I think you'll find that 10% of the population can be governed by 10% of the government, fed by 10% of the farmers, and protected by 10% of the military. Assuming that the military is even needed, since our population is so depleted. Expect to see free land everywhere, for people who will put it to use.
>You wanna be a farmer lil Timmy? Sounds good here's a million dollars and an advisor. Plant as much as ye fuckin' can boyo. Oh, and you own Idaho now.

>>50248190
>So yeah, all in all, we lose a LOT of potential progress due to less free time for science etc.
What I mean here is not less free time, 10% of the scientists will have the same AMOUNT of free time. What's lacking is the sheer number of man-hours, due to a 90% loss of workforce.
Expect less than 10% of current progress, unless some real fuckin' gee-whiz people survive.

>>50245635
>looters
Literally why? There is no fucking need to loot.
You have the rescources of ten people, yours for the taking, no need to LOOT A FUCKING LIBRARY THAT HAS ONLY BOOKS. THERE IS LIKE, NO FUCKING COMPETITION LEFT.
YOU DENSE SACK OF SHIT.

>>50223872
I think the most imminent danger of the aftermath is all the billions of bloating human corpses lying around.
Even if the last 10% of humanity are immune to this super plague, they are certainly not immune to the disease that these rotting corpses will be attracting.

>>50248190
You are the most oblivious person I've ever met.

>>50246723

This reads like north korea's twitter

>>50223872
It depends on *who* dies in each country. Losing 12 million people in NYC is going to affect America's chances of survival WAY more than losing 12 million farmers and skilled craftsman (read: welders, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc).

>>50223872
Once the dust settled, we'd likely see a temporary, and pretty massive increase in living standards.
The fact is, huge depopulations (like the Black Death) means short-term that all of the wealth left behind is now in the hands of fewer people.
Some things are only sensibly produceable on a huge scale, and those things may cause trouble if they cannot be scaled down, but for most things, fewer people just means you produce less.
Markets are malleable.

What you would probably see is a gigantic drop in service-sector jobs, and a gigantic amount of job availability in a lot of the sectors that ACTUALLY produce something useful.
Also, big fucking wage increases.

Source for this: Google economic history, the Malthusian trap. The black death literally led to 150 years of unparalled wealth and middle class comfort for labourers in medieval England and all across Europe.

>>50246097
Fuck no it's way harder than that.
Modern agriculture:
Prepare soil
Seed and Fertilize, either order
Spray for weeds, can be before seeding
Spray fungicide and maybe insecticide when plants are flowering
Spray for weeds
Maybe spray for weeds again
Harvest
Work soil for next year and to get rid of weeks

Most modern farms are of optimal size for the number of people working that the jobs needed take all available time.

Without chemicals and machines?
Till land to remove weeds and prepare seedbed.
Plant seeds.
Till land to remove weeds
Till land to remove weeds
Till land to remove weeds
Till land to remove weeds
Repeat several more times until crops are ready to harvest.
Harvest, hoping bugs and fungi haven't done too much damage, and you can get it stored before winter.
If time, till land to remove weeds.

We currently farm about 2000 acres, but our garden is pretty equivalent to the old way. Working full time spring to fall I could maybe see us doing 40 acres, 80 if we cold get a biodiesel or ethanol production to run a small tractor.
If the other farms around us do the same, we could maybe keep the local town supported.
That's before 90% population loss, but I think the old ways would be pretty linear in number of people working vs number fed.

>>50246235
No there's enough to last approximately one season. It's inefficient to make more than is going to be used in a year, so they don't

>>50246235
Also fyi if an ammonia plant (the plants making nitrogen fertilizer) has to shut down, it's unlikely to ever be able to be started again. If it's an emergency shut down definitely not. You might be able to salvage enough parts from the plant to make a smaller one, but these things are only designed to stop once and permanently.

>>50223872
Read The Stand, the part when they gather at Boulder, Colorado

>>50245888
God damnit. Why are you such a shitty poster?

>>50245918
If you read the entire thread, you'd realize that we've come to the conclusion that without gasoline (which is a major contributor to modern success), it'd be very difficult to sustain the level of production of which you speak.

The FIRST major breakthrough for the remaining 10 percent would be obtaining a source of electricity through either gasoline (which expires within months), solar panels, windmills, or, through some divine miracle, nuclear power.

>>50246303
Holy shit. You just reminded me that illiteracy will be a legitimate concern in this hypothetical scenario. I'm positive it won't rise above 10 percent, but the fact that even 8 percent of the population might be raised illiterate is still a terrifying thought.

>>50223872
California would be fine

I'm not joking. 12% of our electricity is from hydroelectric sources, and our main water sources such as Hetch Hetchy are gravity fed. We have an extensive agriculture industry that is already more than capable of producing food for the state. Hell we even got oil.

And because a disease would affect urban areas more, the deaths would mostly be dipshit liberal art majors.

>>50247990
I'm imagining two scenarios based on my Highschool history lessons.

One, the lower caste Indians rebel against the lighter-skinned elite ruling class and subjugate them for cheap labor and general abuse.

Two, they intellectuals flee from the country, creating a vacuum of power wherein an eventual hierarchy is established through violent domestic struggle.

Humans tend to follow a sort of a trend when it comes to these sorts of things.

>>50248294
We kinda-sorta not-really discussed this earlier in the thread.

We decided it would be a large part of the survivor's jobs to clear the dead away, but for the most part, it will be accepted that there are simply far too many bodies to move with so few people left that only in heavily congested areas will any real work be done (prisons, hospitals, apartment buildings, houses). The rest of the bodies hiding out in studio apartments, parks, fields, deserts, and generally any large, open places with a sparse number of corpses will just be left to rot.

>>50224062
That bottleneck is actually the cause of most of our modern ethics. Everyone was required for humanity to survive, so the weak were helped.

>>50251509
>already more than capable of producing food for the state
Well, capable, but right now what's growing is fruits and nuts and things, not the kind of food that has a high output per acre, so it might be hard to live on until some things get replanted.

>liberal, democratic ideas
>sophistication
>not sophistry

>>50246723
>Eurofags
>Responsible for like 90% of all war deaths throughut history and the majority of all atrocities
>The raison d'etre of half of their economic and political system is "to prevent another eurofag free for all"
>B-but our culture is so love and peace man, not like those Americans who've had like one or two minor wars within the continent

That's a larf.

>>50254611
>90% of all war deaths throughut history

You mean China

>>50255107
Maybe if you only consider in proportion to population. The ching chongs massacred each other all the time but their populations were smaller during most of the warring periods and the Chinese have historically played pretty fast and loose with death estimates (I think one time the court actually estimated that 90% of their population had died in the war when that was almost totally improbable).

>>50255262
Yeah... nah. China has had some seriously insane amounts of war deaths even taking the lower estimates available.

>>50240971
>The aftermath after the /pol/ crowd unleashes a bioengineered genoplague.

Setting ideas?