Hello all,
For this scenario, I'd like for all of us to assume a plague that hits worldwide that allows .5% of the population to live. That means 4,200 people in New York City, and 160,000 throughout the whole country. Small cities, like Boulder CO, are left with 50 people.
For everyone to drop within a week or two, what plays out? 4000 people in NYC? What do they do? 50 people in Boulder? What are behaviors like?
Give me your ideas on the first year, and maybe ten years in. Would love to hear your two cents.
>>911016
>not diy
Please keep your IDS HABBEDING fantasies to /k/ and /pol/.
Thanks.
>>911021
Sorry. I always come to /diy/ when it comes to what I think of as brainy stuff. I agree this is not diy, I just like how your brains work.
FYI this isn;t /k/ either. They just want gun stuff. To pol I go.
>>911016
I think you have your numbers wrong. There's about 300 million or so fuckers in the US; 0.5% is 1.5 million not 150,000. Let's go with your numbers and assume a plague that leaves 0.05%.
You just read The Stand, didn't you?
>>911076
Ha! Love The Stand. Didn't just read it, but I've read it a few times over the last 25 years. IT plays into this scenario, for sure. No, mostly I'm thinking about my own book, and kinda the potential for something like this to happen. Since there are so many options for SHTF, I just figured I'd pick one to force the answers to relate. It makes it easier for me.
Can;t believe I messed those numbers up.
So, sure, let's say .05%. It does change things pretty drastically, in my mind. 4k in NYC compared to 40k makes for people to act differently. I just wonder how...
Year 1: Everyone bands together to help the survivors as best they can, in a epic show of compassion and humanity. For real. In every major historical disaster, this is what people have done. This behavior will begin as soon as established support groups (families, governments) die. Death crosses all borders and rewrites all loyalties.
Year 2-10: After the non-perishable food supplies wear out, the remaining population shrinks again from starvation. Somewhere from 1/2 to 1/10 remain, depending on location and what survival/food creation skills the survivors happen to have. The numbers are a complete ass-pulling guess on my part, but seriously you want to hope that you end up in a group with some Boy Scouts or something.
Anyone who survives past the first 2-3 years will start living in tribal communities and revert to a hunter gatherer lifestyle. Technological scavenging will be used for resources like knives, tools, shelter, etc, but machines and technology as we know them today will cease functioning. Without the expertise and infrastructure (spare parts, factories, tech support, etc) everything that runs on gas or electricity will be bricked within a few years.
First 100 years: Now we get to a toss-up scenario. Where the survivors smart enough to keep teaching reading and writing? If so, civilization may have a chance. Expect a mish-mash of technology to develop, focusing on local skills and easily maintained devices. These would range from pre-industrial (water wheels, etc) to simple electronics from scavenged material. Kind of like Africa today.
Ironically, the poorest nations (Africa, etc) will be the best off, since their people already have the needed skills to live off the land. As long as they avoid a genetic bottleneck from population loss, they'll probably hardly notice the end of civilization.
If no-one preserves reading and writing, it's back to the Stone Age Plus Trash for several centuries, which is pretty boring.
>>911091
Aweesome! thank you for your thoughts and the time.
You have no fighting. In your opinion, there aren't a bunch of people getting weapons and trying to take what they want? in years 2-10?
>>911094
Violence would be minimal. It would certainly exist, but not to the degree everyone expects. I didn't discuss it at all cause of post limit.
Year 1 expect nothing but desperate crazy people. History confirms this. The "I need guns and a bunker to fight off the hungry hordes coming for my food" fantasy is just that. Every documented disaster from Pompeii to San Francisco earthquakes shows people banding together and helping each other.
Year 2-10, it's just not a priority. It'll happen, fights over hunting grounds or an old grocery store. But there won't be much of it, and the goal isn't to defeat the enemy, just drive them off and get the resource you want. These are people who barely know how to farm, gather, or hunt food, aka city folk. Food will take all their energy, everything else including fighting comes second or lower. So in the scheme of things, it's really not going to affect things much. Also, these are people who will remember the plague, inflicting more death won't be on their to-do list. Things may get more interesting with Generation 2 though, as both those elements are now gone. At this point, the sheer amount of space means conflict won't be needed often.
If civilization restarts, you'll definately start getting wars. I'd probably look at old mesopotamian history, with city states and proto-nations etc, for a guideline of what that'd be like.
If stone age, then there'd be your typically inter-tribal conflicts for eternity. Mostly raids and skirmishes, no empires or wars of destruction. It's too easy for the loser to just leave and build a new grass hut in the next valley over. Not until agriculture is reinvented and resources are stockpiled and invested in - that's when the real conflicts start.
>>911094
Stuff like The Walking Dead had a lot of violence between the survivors because there was an omnipresent threat which required weapons (killing the undead) and the government turned on the population destroying a lot of trust. With a disease deadly enough to kill over 99% of the population, anyone still alive after about a week wouldn't need to worry about it anymore.
>911103 is right about comparing this to a natural disaster; the main threat for the survivors is now not protecting yourself against but finding as many others as you can to share survival skills, develop social groups, and use each other's skills. In the current year, there are very, very few people who would be fine on their own once the food supplies run out, and I'm sure that people would realize it. Even for Mr. military macho survivalist, going on his own or killing everyone else wouldn't really be beneficial to him.
>>911108
That's along the right lines. Note, that if there's enough of society left for there to be a government, the situation we're discussing won't occur. Another case study is the Black Death, where local villages definitely turned against each in fear.
There's a death threshold that has to be crossed for the non-violence instinct to kick in. In the Black Death, it was about 30-70% death rate, and that wasn't enough. Governments remained, nations remained, villages remained, and thus loyalties and conflicts remained. Part of it was the death toll wasn't high enough; most of it was that it wasn't FAST enough. The Plague didn't take out 70% of Europe in a single week, it sputtered on and off for many decades. People adapted and institutions, borders, and governments survived.
Once everything you know and rely on is gone, once "Village Name" or "Country Name" has no meaning anymore, once you've got nothing left but getting to tomorrow- that's when people band together against all odds. The OP's situation certainly fits this requirement.
>>911091
>implying archeotech isnt the single most dope scifi/fantasy trope of all time.
>>911091
Its not that they band together, its that demand for laborers skyrockets. Nobody gives a shit about anybody else when they need to fight tooth and nail for resources. Funnily enough, workers tend to wander off to greener pastures.
>>911114
>>911108
Also, you're overlooking the resources angle. If more than 80% of the population is killed, really, the only things that will be fought over are food stocks and drugs.
Drugs/medicine will only be fought over if someone knows you have them, and food will generally be either shared or gone. Any smart gang of bandits/ex gang members will realize that you don't kill the farmer and take there food, there are NO MORE FARMERS. It would be more of a mafia protection scheme kind of system.
On the other hand, if it was something like half the population killed off, there would be a breakdown of social order, BUT there would still be fights over housing, good food, and enough population that assholes felt like killing you and taking your stuff was sustainable because there were lots of people to do that to, they wouldn't run out. Although, again, a mafia protection scheme/fealty system is much more likely.
I would expect smart survivors to stockpile a year or two of food/medicine/ some tools/weapons in the city, and move to a farming town in the area to take over farms.
Oh, and there will be the same stupid shit fights, drunk guy stabs other drunk guy over spilled drink, just no organized violence.
Basically, organized violence needs money to exist, and money doesn't happen until you have stockpiles of resources. usually cattle for small raids, but mines for armies.
>>911016
>0.5% of the population to live
>current world population is 7,290,412,900
>0.5% of 7,290,412,900 is 36,452,064.5
>population of California is 38.8 million
Based on that, I'd assume California would be the only place on the planet where there's a population of people. The entire world save California would die off, oh and those couple million in California that'd die too. Would California even notice? I'm using California to show just what 0.5% of the population would be like.
>So, sure, let's say .05%
That leaves 3,645,206.45 people. 3.6 million people is like fucking nothing. That's like the population of Connecticut spread out over the entire globe. To understand what that means,
Right now there's an average population density of 35 people per sq. mile. 0.05% of that would be 0.0175 people per square mile. Which is 1.75 people per 100 square miles.
What does that mean? 3,645,206.45 people on Earth. 1.75 people per 100 square miles on average. It means there are no rape gangs. No, cities, no towns, no fucking nothing. Just tiny tiny groups of people. It'd take a long time to get survivors together. Let's say you are in California and there's only 0.05% people left. That's 19,401.25 people in the entire state. That's 0.11 people per square mile (down from the original 246.1 people per square mile.) which is 1.1 people per 10 square miles.
Yeah, not much civilization coming out of that for a long long long time, if ever.
>>911230
>carrying supplies to farm land
>two years of supplies
>>911274
Really?
>>911230
I agree that anyone who stayed in the city would group up into violent gangs. Resources are condensed and often not easily transportable. This would be tempered by the MASSIVE amount of space available, meaning the need for gang/tribal conflict is minimal.
That's really not important though, because almost no one will stay. Short term, they will be full of dead bodies and disease, and most importantly, there will be no fresh water. Anyone that stays there after the infrastructure falls will die. Non perishable resources can support a few small groups or loners, but water issues alone make them deathtraps if everyone stays. There are of course exceptions for cities that are built on rivers, etc, but even those people will move out where there's more space eventually.
Long term, the cities won't be safe. Look at Pripyat today for an example. Just 30 years of abandonment, and it's falling apart. Stairs are collapsing, walls are falling open. The most radioactive city in the world, and it's the buildings themselves that are the biggest danger. (there are many tourist videos on youtube. check em out. it's cool) It takes a lot of work and a lot of engineering infrastructure to maintain a city. The survivors of a 99%+ mortal plague will not be able to do that. Within one generation cities will be uninhabitable as actual cities.
What this means is that ALL of the interesting things in post-apoc fiction happen in the first generation of survivors, if we translate it to reality. Fallout taking place 200 years after the War is bupkiss; based on the world depicted, it's more like 50. Once you get good at it, the stone-age hunter gatherer lifestyle is actually pretty laid back. On average, hunter gatherers work 10-15 hours per week to obtain food, everything else is community. Even the most stable of medicines will rot or crumble to dust in a decade. So aside from scavenging for metals etc, there's going to be no reason for anyone to go there.
>>911016
>>911076
>>911085
>>911257
New York City has 8 million people. If only 4000 survive, that's a 0.0005 survival rate. Which is 14 people per square mile of land. Roughly one person every 20 blocks!
Forget rape-gangs, it'd be a really long time before you even find evidence of a single other survivor. Just giving up and commiting suicide might be the real worry.
I'd worry the power plants would breakdown really quickly without anyone watching them. Some maybe even within hours, hopefully not catastropically. But you'd be ok on food and water for a long time in the city. Just one supermarket might have food and drinks for...years? Or forever raid people's houses for dry/canned food and their hot water heaters for water. But I'd probably leave for the suburbs because there'd be just way too many dead bodies.
Oh, if this didn't kill people's pets, you'd have to deal with whatever results from that. Feral cats everywhere? Dogs are usually locked up better so they'd probably just add to the bodies.
As for /diy/, I'm not sure you'd ever really need to build anything again. Some dead guy already built it, just take theirs.
