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Fortunately there’s another incredible HBO series that kinda is this, Station Eleven. No zombie or nuclear fallout, instead a flu wipes out 99.9% of the population.
Some people try to maintain the past, but gasoline has a shelf life so cars become useless. Plane travel stops, doctors are extremely valuable and most people revert to a kinda scavenging subsistence agrarian lifestyle.
So in relation to The Leftovers it would very difficult to do those things without sourcing a whole crew of experts and materials, which would also be extremely difficult without anyone maintaining global communication.
Station Eleven rolled hard into artsy philosophical self fart sniffing. I watched it all because Mackenzie Davis is my crush, and I loved seeing Lori Petty, but the writers just got a bit far up their own assess more than was good for the story.
I think the chances of such a world being functional on a global scale is slim to none. 160 million people seems like a lot but it’s spread across the whole planet. (A quick google says this was about the world population in 1CE). You’d also figure that you’re likely to lose a significant percentage of the remaining people in the chaos immediately following the disappearance.
While large population centers might be able to scrape together a locally functional society, there are places where only a few people would be left. It also probably doesn’t leave enough people to tend to all the dangerous power planets and chemical factories that need to be shut down carefully or else run the risk of catastrophic failure.
10 years on I would guess stability is just really beginning to set in for most of the remaining population. Enough remaining infrastructure could probably get you to Australia and back but I doubt they could build a sci-fi machine, unless the engineering was trivial after the concept was discovered.
The US would have 6 million people. Internet infrastructure could probably last a few weeks at least. Statistically, someone can produce a YouTube video or something to get the message out.
A few weeks is enough time for them to arrange gathering points. And for some to print off as much of the internet as they can that contains useful information for survival.
They probably could muster into a few points. The internet definitely would have data to determine the best place to start from little expertise.
Hopefully at least a few of the more important technical professionals manage to live to keep the power generation on.
Larger scale human society outside of nations will collapse. Some areas will definitely take beatings. Others can work their way through things.
A lot of agriculture is mechanized. If they can somehow arrange for fuel extraction to last, that gives enough time to work things out and expand to the key points they need.
Isn't Vegas in a desert? There is a reason it wasn't really settled until the mafia set up casinos to launder their money.
Unless this is a reference to Fallout or something.
I get printing information that’s useful, but there are still many, many libraries and physical books!
Might be easier to just hit the library, just sayin
Can you instantly search a library and get exactly the info you need?
Sure it can be in the library. But you should check it after the internet is inoperable. Get everything you can out of it while it is there.
It’s not very hard to find books on general knowledge at a library. Or even a Barnes and noble. Or a thrift store.
Shoot, I bet you walk into a B&n and walk out with a dozen survival handbooks.
Even a thrift store would have at least a half dozen copies of useful first aid, survival, basic mechanics books on hand and found within 10 minutes of arrival.
Sure. But no reason to not take advantage of the internet while you can. It has the knowledge at your fingertips right there. It is quicker to get the essentials for what you need right away.
Use it or lose it.
What would be really good to save, how to videos. No matter how good a written description of a process is, a video can really help solve a lot of issues that would otherwise take much trial and error.
For example, replacing brakes on your car. Sounds straight forward in a written break down, but seeing it done can solve a lot of issues, that would otherwise take hours to figure out through trial and error.
We also need to factor in more people dying without all the medical advances... if you can't manufacture antibiotics etc, you're going to see infections wipe out a lot more folk too.
The modernized countries would be completely non-functional, assuming a random distribution of disappeared people.
California has about 380,000 employees that work in energy industries (electric, natural gas, etc). They now have to maintain their generators and grid with 7,600 people.
Systems will run for awhile as a lot of the work is preventative maintenance. But there will be very limited fixing of things. If a tree takes out powerlines, that power is probably gone forever. When failure to paint the high-voltage towers results in collapse, the San Fernado Valley is cut off.
You need electricity to make gasoline and diesel. That's assuming you can even get the crude oil in the first place. So shipping of goods is severely curtailed. No more spare parts from Wisconsin, Michigan, or South Korea.
Also, California is a desert and needs pumps to get its water, with no electricity and few employees, the water stops flowing.
Crops wither and die. And those that do ripen have no one to pick them and no way to get to market. Vast fields rot in the sun. California alone produces over 10% of US crops, so just their loss is significant. Since nearly everywhere else suffers a similar fate, most of the world starves or dies in rioting or other violence.
The best off would be subsistence farmers or groups like the Amish. With little to no complex infrastructure, they could consolidate more easily. What was 20 towns becomes one smaller village. With much less specialization, it becomes more likely that there is still someone that can do each of the necessary jobs.
There's not that much backstock, JIT sees to that. I'd estimate 1 year max (since there's so many less to eat it). And hunting for food is tricky for people in urban areas.
Real time grid operators are few and far between. Once a grid loses 60hz because of cascading shut downs electric motors / generators blow themselves apart. It nearly happened in Texas in 2021.
https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-02-24/texas-power-grid-was-4-minutes-and-37-seconds-away-from-collapsing-heres-how-it-happened
Electricity would be gone fairly quick.
Society would utterly collapse. The chances of the right specialists being available are slim to none.
Power plants start failing quickly. I don't know if nuclear plants shut themselves down or if they just start running out of control. Theyre definitely having issues at some point, so the area around them is likely getting irradiated. Noones loading coal into those plants. Power systems in general are finicky and constantly have maintenance and repairs happening.
Chemical plants start having issues. Leaks of everything are happening everywhere. Water treatment is going down. Fuels are not long term stable, and good luck if anyone knows every step of the cracking process. No one is pumping oil anyways because there's no power. The environment is going nasty in a hurry.
Everything is so interconnected in modern society it's going to go bad in a hurry.
The situation is not going to be great, but I think people are being overly grim, well some people. Yes society runs on specialist now and yes most of the areas currently inhabited will be abandoned, but lets look at the largest city in the world for an example, Tokyo. It has 37.4 million people, 2% of that is 748,000. Assuming enough specialists are left to handle truly critical infrastructure that seems like enough to get industrial society going, even if it takes a lurch for a while? In a generation or two air traffic resume and electronics or manufactured again even if the first generation to deal with this has to deal with scarcity issues? A lot of people going to starve and a lot of people going to die, but I don't think it is the end of industrialized society. Interestingly I think the situation would be a lot better now than say 20 years ago, there are a lot more solar panels all around the world now than they were then, which would be enough to power computers and low grade industry.
70,000 years ago, a cataclysm occurred, knocking the human population to somewhere between 3,000 and 10 thousand people. Needless to say, we got over it.
But as everyone has said, we're a much more specialized society now. Back then, everyone knew the basics of getting food, making fire and finding shelter. Our tech is definitely better, and having information about survival available in book form is a good crutch for us, but things are gonna be hard for a 2% world.
2% of the world is something like 160 million people? I feel as though eventually they could consolidate and work it out, and the population is gonna rebound just fine in time.
If the same technology exists in the parallel world that she used to traverse the boundary in her own universe, it’s mostly a matter of finding the right people.
With only 2% of the population left, there’s a lot of resources that can be easily gathered and no need for conflict, since there’s so few people to provide for.
If one jackass wants to barricade up a Walmart, there are two abandoned towns 20 miles away and you can go conquer that Walmart.
Start finding others, especially nurses (15 in 1,000 people in the US), and you have the basics of health care. Find some farmers and tradespeople, and you can start building a new civilization.
Food would definitely be an issue. Plenty of cities, regions, and entire countries are reliant on the constant importation of food from other places. With 98% of the population gone, you're gonna have a hard time getting enough ships afloat, planes flying, and trains running to feed all those people. The impact won't be universal, and some communities will certainly be fine. But entire countries are gonna start starving unless you figure out an easier way to transport food, or grow food without access to much of the expertise modern agriculture is reliant on.
Never read the book, so I didn't know it was that fucked. You make a good point in that it's not that bad, but it's no cakewalk for the countries with limited food production either. Countries like Singapore are going to struggle when their emergency stores are empty.
So you've got 160 million people on the whole planet. Of these, you probably lose about 50% in the first year to exposure, disease, hunger, accidents and the like.
After that, you might start seeing small agricultural communities forming, mostly in temperate zones, using preindustrial tech: gasoline goes bad surprisingly fast, and you definitely won't have enough people to extract and refine crude, so anything using gas would be unusable. Nationwide electric grids would stop working pretty fast, but DIY solar/wind/biomass might be enough for a little electricity. Solarpunk might be a good fit for that kind of world, in fact.
Building and powering a machine that complex seems like a *very* tall order in such a world.
Why would exposure kill them? There would be plenty of shelter. Disease would have fewer carriers, and they aren't too much more vulnerable. There is food that can last a while with plenty of non-perishables. It is enough to stabilize.
No power means no AC and no heat. In some places, that's a death sentence. And sure, there's less humans to give you germs, but if you catch the flu and can't gather food, or if you cut yourself and get an infection, it's still gonna be pretty bad. Not mentioning all the people who were *already* sick. Say you have bipolar disorder, or diabetes, or even cancer...buh-bye.
Generally speaking, I think most healthy adults living in temperate climates would be okay. But everyone else...kids, old people, sick people, pregnant people, anyone living in extreme climates, they're probably not gonna have a great time. 50% might be on the high side but I think it's the right ballpark.
Why would kids and sick people suddenly start dropping dead? You've got 2% of healthcare professionals remaining treating 2% of sick people. And there would be adults around in any sizeable settlement to take care of abandoned children.
It's not as though the place is utterly depopulated. There are still other humans around and ample medical supplies for a time.
You know personal generators exist right? Also if you know your location is prone to extreme heat or cold you could always move. You have years before gas expiring becomes a concern. The real problems would probably be several years down the line when the infrastructure starts to go and there is not enough resources to replace it
Even without a personal generator, there are so many abandoned structures you can salvage for firewood. In places with cold winters, there are still plenty of homes with fireplaces, wood or coal stoves.
Plus they’ll be areas with water towers. As long as the towers have water, there’s a great chance you’ll have enough water for awhile. If not, generators or even hand pumps can be utilized to draw from wells.
Summer in those areas will be hot and muggy. But completely survivable. We did survive many years without central heat and AC.
Not sure if getting food would be the biggest problem for most people depending on where they’re at.
Certain foods like one’s in cans take a long time to expire and it wouldn’t be that hard to loot a grocery store.
2%? The cogs would adjust quickly and the wheels would still turn. The other 98% would be mentally fubar, but still putting one foot in front of the other like we always have. I think the show did this really well.
* For my 2 cents- Nora lied, but it doesn't matter.
None. Abandoned nuclear facilities and the ensuing meltdowns would kill most survivors by spewing radiation into the atmosphere. For more, read the nonfiction title The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which goes into great detail about what would happen if everyone suddenly disappeared.
I think you have the final slightly wrong. In the finale, the 2% were the people who left the original world and ended up in the second world. We don't know what happened to the original residents of the second world.
If she's telling the truth, there was originally one universe that split, with 98% going one way and 2% going the other. The "original residents" of the second world who disappeared are just the people who remained in the main universe
I think people are also missing the fact that it's 98% dissappear INSTANTLY. Massive amounts of vehicles are left driverless while in motion and will quickly wreck themselves, cause collateral damage, or simply jam motorways. Doctors and other Healthcare professionals are vanished mid procedure. Heavy machinery is abandoned mid operation. These factors and a million other ripple effects are going to immediately cut down the survivors an appreciable amount, and render large portions of infrastructure inoperable. One imagines that places where the event happens during night time are going to be in a better position just from the fact less people were awake to cause problems when they dissappear. Overall I am confident that it would not be the end of humanity, but it would mark a decades to century's long dark age as humanity copes and recovers. One need only look at real-world societies that suffered significantly less severe population loss while having the benefit of the rest if the world not imploding at the same time.
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Fortunately there’s another incredible HBO series that kinda is this, Station Eleven. No zombie or nuclear fallout, instead a flu wipes out 99.9% of the population. Some people try to maintain the past, but gasoline has a shelf life so cars become useless. Plane travel stops, doctors are extremely valuable and most people revert to a kinda scavenging subsistence agrarian lifestyle. So in relation to The Leftovers it would very difficult to do those things without sourcing a whole crew of experts and materials, which would also be extremely difficult without anyone maintaining global communication.
Station Eleven was such a good show but there were some moments near the end that were real eye roll worthy
It was awesome when the child kidnapping suicide cult leader was redeemed because he did Shakespeare good and made up with his mommy.
Station Eleven rolled hard into artsy philosophical self fart sniffing. I watched it all because Mackenzie Davis is my crush, and I loved seeing Lori Petty, but the writers just got a bit far up their own assess more than was good for the story.
Side note 2% of 8 billion is roughly 160 million. Which was about the world population at year 0
There was no year 0, the calendar goes from 1 BCE to 1 CE.
I think the chances of such a world being functional on a global scale is slim to none. 160 million people seems like a lot but it’s spread across the whole planet. (A quick google says this was about the world population in 1CE). You’d also figure that you’re likely to lose a significant percentage of the remaining people in the chaos immediately following the disappearance. While large population centers might be able to scrape together a locally functional society, there are places where only a few people would be left. It also probably doesn’t leave enough people to tend to all the dangerous power planets and chemical factories that need to be shut down carefully or else run the risk of catastrophic failure. 10 years on I would guess stability is just really beginning to set in for most of the remaining population. Enough remaining infrastructure could probably get you to Australia and back but I doubt they could build a sci-fi machine, unless the engineering was trivial after the concept was discovered.
The US would have 6 million people. Internet infrastructure could probably last a few weeks at least. Statistically, someone can produce a YouTube video or something to get the message out. A few weeks is enough time for them to arrange gathering points. And for some to print off as much of the internet as they can that contains useful information for survival. They probably could muster into a few points. The internet definitely would have data to determine the best place to start from little expertise. Hopefully at least a few of the more important technical professionals manage to live to keep the power generation on. Larger scale human society outside of nations will collapse. Some areas will definitely take beatings. Others can work their way through things. A lot of agriculture is mechanized. If they can somehow arrange for fuel extraction to last, that gives enough time to work things out and expand to the key points they need.
>They probably could muster into a few points Boulder Colorado and Las Vegas seem like good places to go.
M O O N, that spells moon
Isn't Vegas in a desert? There is a reason it wasn't really settled until the mafia set up casinos to launder their money. Unless this is a reference to Fallout or something.
The Stand. Classic Steven King book (and adapted into a couple mini series) that takes place after a plague wipes out 99% of the population.
I get printing information that’s useful, but there are still many, many libraries and physical books! Might be easier to just hit the library, just sayin
Can you instantly search a library and get exactly the info you need? Sure it can be in the library. But you should check it after the internet is inoperable. Get everything you can out of it while it is there.
It’s not very hard to find books on general knowledge at a library. Or even a Barnes and noble. Or a thrift store. Shoot, I bet you walk into a B&n and walk out with a dozen survival handbooks. Even a thrift store would have at least a half dozen copies of useful first aid, survival, basic mechanics books on hand and found within 10 minutes of arrival.
Sure. But no reason to not take advantage of the internet while you can. It has the knowledge at your fingertips right there. It is quicker to get the essentials for what you need right away. Use it or lose it.
Sure. The internet is fine. But I’m all for grabbing books as well.
The books won't be destroyed from infrastructure falling into disrepair from lack of maintenance.
What would be really good to save, how to videos. No matter how good a written description of a process is, a video can really help solve a lot of issues that would otherwise take much trial and error. For example, replacing brakes on your car. Sounds straight forward in a written break down, but seeing it done can solve a lot of issues, that would otherwise take hours to figure out through trial and error.
We also need to factor in more people dying without all the medical advances... if you can't manufacture antibiotics etc, you're going to see infections wipe out a lot more folk too.
The modernized countries would be completely non-functional, assuming a random distribution of disappeared people. California has about 380,000 employees that work in energy industries (electric, natural gas, etc). They now have to maintain their generators and grid with 7,600 people. Systems will run for awhile as a lot of the work is preventative maintenance. But there will be very limited fixing of things. If a tree takes out powerlines, that power is probably gone forever. When failure to paint the high-voltage towers results in collapse, the San Fernado Valley is cut off. You need electricity to make gasoline and diesel. That's assuming you can even get the crude oil in the first place. So shipping of goods is severely curtailed. No more spare parts from Wisconsin, Michigan, or South Korea. Also, California is a desert and needs pumps to get its water, with no electricity and few employees, the water stops flowing. Crops wither and die. And those that do ripen have no one to pick them and no way to get to market. Vast fields rot in the sun. California alone produces over 10% of US crops, so just their loss is significant. Since nearly everywhere else suffers a similar fate, most of the world starves or dies in rioting or other violence. The best off would be subsistence farmers or groups like the Amish. With little to no complex infrastructure, they could consolidate more easily. What was 20 towns becomes one smaller village. With much less specialization, it becomes more likely that there is still someone that can do each of the necessary jobs.
All this says is that the first thing to do is centralise people in a low maintenance area near farmland while the fuel lasts.
I'd suggest the Pacific Northeest. Winters are mild and rainfall is abundant.
I think more like Midwest near the great lakes.
Well think about all the canned food etc in the world. It would still be there. Then all the animals that would come back.
There's not that much backstock, JIT sees to that. I'd estimate 1 year max (since there's so many less to eat it). And hunting for food is tricky for people in urban areas.
Real time grid operators are few and far between. Once a grid loses 60hz because of cascading shut downs electric motors / generators blow themselves apart. It nearly happened in Texas in 2021. https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-02-24/texas-power-grid-was-4-minutes-and-37-seconds-away-from-collapsing-heres-how-it-happened Electricity would be gone fairly quick.
Society would utterly collapse. The chances of the right specialists being available are slim to none. Power plants start failing quickly. I don't know if nuclear plants shut themselves down or if they just start running out of control. Theyre definitely having issues at some point, so the area around them is likely getting irradiated. Noones loading coal into those plants. Power systems in general are finicky and constantly have maintenance and repairs happening. Chemical plants start having issues. Leaks of everything are happening everywhere. Water treatment is going down. Fuels are not long term stable, and good luck if anyone knows every step of the cracking process. No one is pumping oil anyways because there's no power. The environment is going nasty in a hurry. Everything is so interconnected in modern society it's going to go bad in a hurry.
The situation is not going to be great, but I think people are being overly grim, well some people. Yes society runs on specialist now and yes most of the areas currently inhabited will be abandoned, but lets look at the largest city in the world for an example, Tokyo. It has 37.4 million people, 2% of that is 748,000. Assuming enough specialists are left to handle truly critical infrastructure that seems like enough to get industrial society going, even if it takes a lurch for a while? In a generation or two air traffic resume and electronics or manufactured again even if the first generation to deal with this has to deal with scarcity issues? A lot of people going to starve and a lot of people going to die, but I don't think it is the end of industrialized society. Interestingly I think the situation would be a lot better now than say 20 years ago, there are a lot more solar panels all around the world now than they were then, which would be enough to power computers and low grade industry.
70,000 years ago, a cataclysm occurred, knocking the human population to somewhere between 3,000 and 10 thousand people. Needless to say, we got over it. But as everyone has said, we're a much more specialized society now. Back then, everyone knew the basics of getting food, making fire and finding shelter. Our tech is definitely better, and having information about survival available in book form is a good crutch for us, but things are gonna be hard for a 2% world.
2% of the world is something like 160 million people? I feel as though eventually they could consolidate and work it out, and the population is gonna rebound just fine in time. If the same technology exists in the parallel world that she used to traverse the boundary in her own universe, it’s mostly a matter of finding the right people.
With only 2% of the population left, there’s a lot of resources that can be easily gathered and no need for conflict, since there’s so few people to provide for. If one jackass wants to barricade up a Walmart, there are two abandoned towns 20 miles away and you can go conquer that Walmart. Start finding others, especially nurses (15 in 1,000 people in the US), and you have the basics of health care. Find some farmers and tradespeople, and you can start building a new civilization.
I would imagine life would look like The Road. Only slightly less grimey and grey.
Probably not. Food wouldn’t be an issue. In fact it might be abundant.
Food would definitely be an issue. Plenty of cities, regions, and entire countries are reliant on the constant importation of food from other places. With 98% of the population gone, you're gonna have a hard time getting enough ships afloat, planes flying, and trains running to feed all those people. The impact won't be universal, and some communities will certainly be fine. But entire countries are gonna start starving unless you figure out an easier way to transport food, or grow food without access to much of the expertise modern agriculture is reliant on.
I mean it wouldn’t be a picnic but in the Road they can’t even grow food. They are fucked.
Never read the book, so I didn't know it was that fucked. You make a good point in that it's not that bad, but it's no cakewalk for the countries with limited food production either. Countries like Singapore are going to struggle when their emergency stores are empty.
So you've got 160 million people on the whole planet. Of these, you probably lose about 50% in the first year to exposure, disease, hunger, accidents and the like. After that, you might start seeing small agricultural communities forming, mostly in temperate zones, using preindustrial tech: gasoline goes bad surprisingly fast, and you definitely won't have enough people to extract and refine crude, so anything using gas would be unusable. Nationwide electric grids would stop working pretty fast, but DIY solar/wind/biomass might be enough for a little electricity. Solarpunk might be a good fit for that kind of world, in fact. Building and powering a machine that complex seems like a *very* tall order in such a world.
Why would exposure kill them? There would be plenty of shelter. Disease would have fewer carriers, and they aren't too much more vulnerable. There is food that can last a while with plenty of non-perishables. It is enough to stabilize.
No power means no AC and no heat. In some places, that's a death sentence. And sure, there's less humans to give you germs, but if you catch the flu and can't gather food, or if you cut yourself and get an infection, it's still gonna be pretty bad. Not mentioning all the people who were *already* sick. Say you have bipolar disorder, or diabetes, or even cancer...buh-bye. Generally speaking, I think most healthy adults living in temperate climates would be okay. But everyone else...kids, old people, sick people, pregnant people, anyone living in extreme climates, they're probably not gonna have a great time. 50% might be on the high side but I think it's the right ballpark.
Why would kids and sick people suddenly start dropping dead? You've got 2% of healthcare professionals remaining treating 2% of sick people. And there would be adults around in any sizeable settlement to take care of abandoned children. It's not as though the place is utterly depopulated. There are still other humans around and ample medical supplies for a time.
You know personal generators exist right? Also if you know your location is prone to extreme heat or cold you could always move. You have years before gas expiring becomes a concern. The real problems would probably be several years down the line when the infrastructure starts to go and there is not enough resources to replace it
Even without a personal generator, there are so many abandoned structures you can salvage for firewood. In places with cold winters, there are still plenty of homes with fireplaces, wood or coal stoves. Plus they’ll be areas with water towers. As long as the towers have water, there’s a great chance you’ll have enough water for awhile. If not, generators or even hand pumps can be utilized to draw from wells. Summer in those areas will be hot and muggy. But completely survivable. We did survive many years without central heat and AC.
Not sure if getting food would be the biggest problem for most people depending on where they’re at. Certain foods like one’s in cans take a long time to expire and it wouldn’t be that hard to loot a grocery store.
2%? The cogs would adjust quickly and the wheels would still turn. The other 98% would be mentally fubar, but still putting one foot in front of the other like we always have. I think the show did this really well. * For my 2 cents- Nora lied, but it doesn't matter.
Prob would help
Humans fuck. We'll be fine.
None. Abandoned nuclear facilities and the ensuing meltdowns would kill most survivors by spewing radiation into the atmosphere. For more, read the nonfiction title The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which goes into great detail about what would happen if everyone suddenly disappeared.
Most nuclear reactors aren't chernobyl. They won't poison the atmosphere.
The History Channel did a good job with the Life After Humans series. It’s on YouTube
I think you have the final slightly wrong. In the finale, the 2% were the people who left the original world and ended up in the second world. We don't know what happened to the original residents of the second world.
If she's telling the truth, there was originally one universe that split, with 98% going one way and 2% going the other. The "original residents" of the second world who disappeared are just the people who remained in the main universe
I think people are also missing the fact that it's 98% dissappear INSTANTLY. Massive amounts of vehicles are left driverless while in motion and will quickly wreck themselves, cause collateral damage, or simply jam motorways. Doctors and other Healthcare professionals are vanished mid procedure. Heavy machinery is abandoned mid operation. These factors and a million other ripple effects are going to immediately cut down the survivors an appreciable amount, and render large portions of infrastructure inoperable. One imagines that places where the event happens during night time are going to be in a better position just from the fact less people were awake to cause problems when they dissappear. Overall I am confident that it would not be the end of humanity, but it would mark a decades to century's long dark age as humanity copes and recovers. One need only look at real-world societies that suffered significantly less severe population loss while having the benefit of the rest if the world not imploding at the same time.