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As I mentioned forests in central europe: in parts of Germany we already have that situation. Some percentage of our area was declared nature reservation (or however you would translate it) and the forests are returning/going back to more natural forms. Wolves, Lynx and Moose are returning over the border to poland, eagles from Brandenburg cross in the other direction. We reintroduced european bisons (which live in forests) a while ago etc. Would be interesting to see a closed european forest canopy again.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I definitely think such books are the right starting point for this concept/setting, as even if we maintained an industrial level of technology, the sudden change in population density, and possibly mass migration of survivors to more stable regions, huge chunks of the world would be left to nature.

So start with “they’re dead Dave, they’re all dead” gives you something to work up from. A baseline of hazard and opportunity to drop perhaps half a dozen city states into. Kind of not entirely unlike Mega-Cities, just with nothing like the populations.

Pondering food supply? I guess one advantage is the relative ease of constructing poly tunnels. So in climates like Britain’s, we could probably still grow a decent variety of fruit and veg without being strictly tied to seasons. Not so much ignoring them via imports, but extending each season. This may also help protect crops from birds and bugs wanting to eat the fruit.

So whilst variety would absolutely suffer, I do wonder if it would noticeably affect abundance? Plus, depending on which season the hypothetical wipe out occurs, there may be plentiful crops to harvest when it’s time?

While the solutions seem simple they are all based in massive, truly gargantuan, logistics efforts.

Polytunnels require a massive petrochemical industry to support manufacture and distribution. At the moment, based on my limited experience of seeing them in the fields, they look a bit disposable so continued usage is dependent on changing to more robust materials for multi year use or scavenging stocks from abandoned properties.

Even if there are enough crops at the point of cataclysm, you need people and equipment to harvest them and more logistics to distribute them. At the moment that relies on refrigerated transport and people who know how to manage food transport. So there might be pockets of higher survival rates based in and around rural areas, but also a lower total population in those areas, so it depends on the cataclysm as to whether anyone who knows what they are doing survive.

In the short term, given stockpiles would exist? Finding said stockpiles would provide quite a lot for a diminished populace. And you’d only really need them for short to mid term.

Books would still survive, even where the Internet wouldn’t, so we’d still have some knowledge preserved, even if it’s not immediately accessible. Given DIY books tend to come with lots of pictures in each guide, even a hypothetical language barrier would be mitigated.

Add in that at least initially, tinned and other preserved foods would be fairly plentiful, and I think recovery would be possible. Especially as in my hypothetical there’s no ongoing threat, such as Zombies, Killer Mutant Plants etc to contend with or make supply runs particularly risky.

Poly Tunnels made out of plastic can last a good number of years before needing replacement. More if the plastic is treated well to resist sunlight.

Of course you can always replace them with regular glass greenhouse designs.

One big thing is that even if logistical operations are shut down, there would be an initial period of exceptional cheap building materials. Yes you might have to travel for them, but with massive construction likely halted there would be a period of abundant material access.

Plastic for poly tunnels might not be an issue in the short term because you'd have warehouses full of the stuff. Granted you'd have to find it so I figure one of the early jobs would simply be finding stuff that's out there and claiming it and soforth. Even if you don't have a full society collapse, loads of materials are held in warehouses and storage and such which aren't going to be known about unless you worked for the firm in the right department to know where stuff was.


For a few years there'd be easy resource access. Even food would be pretty easy because you'd have a huge food storage buffer (tinned and frozen). 2 weeks of food on the shelves changes a lot when the population drops by 9/10ths. There'd even be ample toilet paper!


One big consideration would be if populations would gravitate toward few major settlements and their surroundings and then slowly branch out again; or if populations would be dispersed.

Concentration simplifies your logistics, but cuts down on resource access and awareness. Spread out has the bonus that you can keep more things running but at a cost of more complex logistics.





And of course all of our chat so far has mostly overlooked those nations that might try and steal from others. With a period of excess of materials and resources you could well have some populations that end up relying heavily on raiding instead of restoring resource production and access.

On the raiding? With short term abundance, I don’t think it would be particular instant raiding.

Indeed, depending on whether the hit to the population is evenly spread, attracting others to where you are to increase your overall workforce and quite possibly skill base may become desirable if you already have a stable supply of food and water. Shelter itself, especially in the UK, would not in itself be much of a problem. Winter might suck though!

I think you paint a very rosy glow of post apocalyptic “we’re in this together”

Given the mental trauma of such an event, and the widespread dislike of “people not from around here”, I would expect many groups of total nobbers raiding just because they can.

We can also somewhat look to The Black Death and how it oddly improved the lot of Peasants.

Like other hard hitting plagues, those who owned the land had to offer better conditions to the workers, because workers were in short supply.

And outside of the most nutty humans, few of us really want a life of conflict and struggle, so it’s in our social species nature and indeed interest to work together to stabilise and re establish.

This would of course vary if the hypothetical loss of population isn’t evenly distributed.

For instance, and purely as an example, let’s say there’s just something about Cities which increased the survival rate dramatically. Then your starting point drastically changes, as you have a much denser population to argue over instantly available supplies, and in numbers where they could simply take what they want/need from survivors in areas worse hit.

Likewise, let’s reverse that example. And cities see a disproportionately higher death rate, with perhaps 0.1% of inhabitants surviving. You still end up with quite well populated smaller towns, and big old central sources of goodies, food and materials. That again is going to change the immediate perception of competition.

We’d also need to consider the impact of grief on a human being. I know when I found out Mum was terminal, I got uncharacteristically fighty that night. The shock of this event could easily send folk over the edge.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, cross posted!

The breakdown of our industrial and logistic capabilities mean that 90% of the remaining 10% promptly starves and/or freezes to death.

 Tyran wrote:
The breakdown of our industrial and logistic capabilities mean that 90% of the remaining 10% promptly starves and/or freezes to death.

Of the remaining 10%, you can subtract the people with treatable chronic illnesses like diabetes, people that need dialysis and other people similarily afflicted pretty much immediately, the medication they require has pretty short shelf-lives and the whole infrastructure around recurring treatments would vanish overnight.

 Tyran wrote:
The breakdown of our industrial and logistic capabilities mean that 90% of the remaining 10% promptly starves and/or freezes to death.

Not sure that necessarily tracks. Winters may not be as comfortable as we’re used to, but with buildings being intact, we’d hardly hurt for shelter. Basics like sleeping bags and blankets would also be plentiful.

Likewise starvation may simply not be the issue we think, because the existing stores are, at least in the Western World, designed and distributed for a populace ten times the number of survivors. Sure your diet wouldn’t see a great deal of variety at first, and rationing would still be a sensible idea. At least until the survivors have gotten some form of agriculture and animal husbandry on the go.

The energy industry will fall apart. Without gas or electricity our buildings become cold tombs unless they are old enough to have wood based heating systems (and are close enough to a forest).

And without electricity non-canned perishable food spoils within a week. And to be blunt stores don't tend to have that much food. They usually operate on a 3 day inventory, meaning they only have enough food for 3 days. At most food may last a month assuming people aren't dumbasses and ration all of it.

And we aren't getting the logistic chain up in a month (or in the next decade), so you likely will starve anyway after that month unless you managed to teach yourself sustenance agriculture (and live in a biome in which sustenance agriculture is easy).

Again depends where you are.

In the UK, we have well insulated homes because we have typically cold winters. I’ve added to this in my front room with thermal curtains. With those drawn, it never really gets so cold in my basement flat that I can stick on a hoodie, or my Oodie, and hide under a blanket for suitable warmth.

No it’s not ideal on its own, and I do have gas fired central heating, but when I want to scrimp on my energy bills, it’s plenty enough to keep my alive, if not as comfortable as possible.

Add in some draught excluders by any internal doors, and you’re pretty much OK unless already frail.

Portable gas fires aren’t exactly unheard of, and most towns will have somewhere you grab a Calor bottle from in a pinch. No that resource won’t last forever. But it should be enough to keep folks alive until we’ve better planned and adapted.

You can also pick up a wood burning stove, and pipe the flue out a window. No need to be terribly neat. Replace the glass with chipboard, seal round it with mastic and presto, provided the flue is properly fitted? Renewable heat source. You don’t even need dedicated firewood. With 90% of the populace gone, there’s lots and lots and lots of wood furniture available.

So, basically California.

There is virtually no threat of freezing to death in coastal Southern California. There are fruit trees everywhere and fish in the ocean. Water might be an issue, but the prevalence of bottled water and swimming pools would hopefully last long enough to get some cisterns set up, or some method of capturing water from one of the stanky river channels that run through the big cities. There are lots of edible desert plants that will do fine even if water becomes an agricultural issue. Waterfowl and deer are plentiful. Survival guides can explain how to make drinkable water from local resources over the long term. And there are enough guns one can scavenge to protect against coyotes and mountain lions.

I think there are quite a lot regions around that might manage fine. A lot of German houses are also insulated excellently. I live in a eastern german prefab house with modern insulation and I have my heating on maybe 20 days a year to not put on a pullover in my flat. If I could live with some weeks of 10 degrees celsius inside, I wouldn't even need that.
Also we have so many rivers, lakes and rain in more or less drinking water quality around here, that this too wouldn't be an issue. As implied: it depends a bit how much of the most important infrastructure can be kept up with that remaining 10%. If we can keep the regenerative powerplants up, electricity might not even be a problem. I mainly mention them because they need relatively few personal and supply chains to keep going for the next years or decades.
And if what is left of industry focusses on agriculture, medicine and infrastructure (pausing stuff like microelectronics, car manufacturing etc.) I assume those 10% could keep up enough food production to survive.

This quickly went from Life After People to Doomsday Preppers. Consider me in whatever role I can play.

I think we do need to get back to the core of the topic, as how the biome changes will affect challenges faced by survivors.

In the short term we may see a surge in insect population due to crops not being brought in, abundance of corpses both human and livestock etc. which in turn may lead to a surge in bird numbers, which in turn may prove problematic for any attempt to get crops planted.

There was also mention above at a lack of traffic leading to less roadkill. In the UK, that would help wild deer populations spread. Not an instant thing, but with fields and woods left unmanaged, wildlife might surge? Especially more rapid breeding species.

It's a hard question to answer because most of these collapse scenarios involve "a wizard did it" as the premise, and the answer to how the environment reacts depends on the details of how the magic works. For example, zombies can't exist in the real world and even if they did they'd be such helpless targets that the threat would be quickly contained and eliminated. Maybe there's some regional damage but the planet as a whole goes on as normal. About the only scenario where you could have an instantaneous collapse of human civilization would be nuclear war, at which point you're dealing with the catastrophic damage caused by the war and not just the absence of humans.

So, to use the zombie apocalypse example: does the magic only work on human corpses or do you have a bunch of zombie animals taking over the ecosystem? Can a tree become a zombie? If not, why not? How does the magic ignore thermodynamics without the new laws of physics having any other effects on the world? Who cares if the survivors no longer have access to the current power grid when it's now possible to build a perpetual motion machine and have infinite energy at will?

May need to narrow down the parameters to a specific scenario and location. If there are survivors Ham radio operators will be the beacons.

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:
It's a hard question to answer because most of these collapse scenarios involve "a wizard did it" as the premise, and the answer to how the environment reacts depends on the details of how the magic works. For example, zombies can't exist in the real world and even if they did they'd be such helpless targets that the threat would be quickly contained and eliminated. Maybe there's some regional damage but the planet as a whole goes on as normal. About the only scenario where you could have an instantaneous collapse of human civilization would be nuclear war, at which point you're dealing with the catastrophic damage caused by the war and not just the absence of humans.

So, to use the zombie apocalypse example: does the magic only work on human corpses or do you have a bunch of zombie animals taking over the ecosystem? Can a tree become a zombie? If not, why not? How does the magic ignore thermodynamics without the new laws of physics having any other effects on the world? Who cares if the survivors no longer have access to the current power grid when it's now possible to build a perpetual motion machine and have infinite energy at will?

To recap, the scenario I posited is a Failed Invasion.

Dying race sent a heavily automated colony ship to Earth. Its mission was to eliminate the dominant species (Us) because we could resist colonisation, then revive its cargo. First part mostly worked, but the revival completely failed.

The weapon used is in the same vein as a designer virus bomb. It’s deployed, does it damage then dies out, leaving the world and its biome otherwise untouched and ready to be moved into. But due to vagaries, it only kills a percentage. Here, 90% fatality rate.

The net result is a devastating blow to society as it is now, but with no follow up threat, as the cause of the apocalypse was a One And Done, non-lingering Silent Violent. With enough humans left over to have a viable breeding stock, and with no damage to other species of any kind.

I think one key aspect is its not just how many but who survives.

Do all the nuclear safety technicians die and we have several nuclear accidents that cause irradiation problems in localised or even massive regions of the world?

Does a warlord and their army survive and then rely heavily on raiding for resources causing localised risk and perhaps even causing major incidents

Does a warlord and their army survive and work toward ensuring stability in their local region. Protecting civilians and ensuring that skilled technical staff are found and information sought to maintain functional higher end technology.


Is there a balance globally between developed and under developed nations? Between different political bodies or even religious groups?

A major blow like that could cause a huge rise in religious belief which could spark religious wars, racism and a whole host of other things.



There are a lot of elements that could drastically change humanities chance for thriving. I think survival is almost guaranteed, but thriving and retaining as much of what we had is a huge questionmark.

At the most extreme you could end up with a nation like N. Korea surviving well and spreading their insane propaganda e tc..

Well, it’s my thread, so I’m gonna say a pretty evenhanded annihilation of mankind.

So, for stuff like Nuclear Reactors, you’d have a reasonable chance of someone with the knowledge of how to safely shut it down surviving, even if you don’t end up with enough to keep it properly maintained - unless things go well and you’re able to centralise all such survivors to a single National plant. Like Dungeness, just up the road from me.

Ok sorry if I missed it, but is this happening now or in the future?

Now. Present day.

Again, not sure it’s that easy. Fission reactors are fine when the infrastructure around them is operating correctly. Even if it’s not actively generating power, the things need to be actively cooled, hence Fukushima and the current worries around Zaporizhzhia.

And talking about nuclear proliferation, youd better hope that whatever dregs of humanity don’t get too carried away with looting military bases. A full civilization collapse would be hard to come back from just because of all the hugely dangerous remnants just lying about.

I'm just thinking of the current global stage and the players involved, and the possible power shift.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
To recap, the scenario I posited is a Failed Invasion.

How does physics work in your alternate setting? Colonization isn't even remotely plausible IRL so you have to modify things like thermodynamics, relativity, etc. And if, like I suggested, your modification to thermodynamics enables perpetual motion machines things like not having working power plants is not an issue.

Same thing with the concept of a tailored virus bomb. How do you make a virus that is 90% lethal, capable of transmission past the initial outbreak, and limited to a single species? And how do your modifications to biology impact the world? If your starting premise is something like "well, DNA doesn't actually exist and viruses are magic particles of energy from the fae realm" then you're going to get some pretty spectacular changes to the world even before the virus arrives.

I was happily ranting away about 90% reduction in population Leading to total collapse of civilisation, then I checked some numbers. The UK current population is about 70 million. Apparently the first census of England and wales in 1801 recorded a shade under 9m peeps, which is pretty close to 10% of current figures, and we did reasonably well in nicking other peoples’ land as our agrarian economy moved over to an industrial one. So perhaps success in the new world order will come from how fragmented existing countries become. Do totalitarian states stay cohesive because of the state infrastructure or are the losses sufficient to permit revolution to break free? Do western democracies hold with the idea of prosperity through working together and generally being nice to one another, or do they collapse into anarchy? I think it really would come down the the dice roll of which specific individuals kick the bucket.

There's a book called One Second After (author is William R. Forstchen) that details what happens to the US after a devastating EMP attack knocks out all electrical power (including vehicles, which would be disabled by an EMP due to having sensitive electronics in them). Things get very bad very quickly, but that is most likely because an EMP strike doesn't kill people, just infrastructure (so you've got a massive population scrambling to get a hold of dwindling stocks of food, medicine, etc.).

The UK current population is about 70 million. Apparently the first census of England and wales in 1801 recorded a shade under 9m peeps, which is pretty close to 10% of current figures, and we did reasonably well in nicking other peoples’ land as our agrarian economy moved over to an industrial one

Maority of people in 1801 were employed in farming, and gradually over the century moved to cities and took up new jobs.
Infrastructure in 1801 was orders of magnitude simpler than today.
If the 90% loss of human life is evenly distributed across the planet and is either instant or near-instant, there will be no centralized government on earth capable of maintaining industrial civilization. 1801 farmers used horses or oxen and simple iron tools to plow the fields, we use complex farming vehicles and fertilizers, and they all guzzle fuel. Fuel that is produced in specialized sites. And that fuel has to come from somewhere, and in many places in the world that somewhere is far away. Without massive fleet of oil tankers, that somewhere might as well be on the moon.
Our standard of living is maintained by millions of people who work hard every day to make sure the machines and pipes and wires keep working, and you can't really "scale down" our infrastructure,youd have to build brand new, smaller-scale systems.

Unless you magic it away and have the 10% survivors all find themselves in say, Texas specifically, or one province of China, not only do you not have enough people with specialist training to keep the infrastructure going, but you don't have enough population density to send people to learn how to do it in time.
Assuming someone with the skills needed survived to teach them, for all you know that 10% survivors might include every geology teacher in the world, and not a single engineer. There are a lot more hairdressers than blacksmiths in our service economy after all (with no offense to hairdressers intended).

Angronsrosycheeks wrote:
Unless you magic it away and have the 10% survivors all find themselves in say, Texas specifically, or one province of China

It's not necessarily magic, it's one of the more likely scenarios. The survivors of a species-wide catastrophe are most likely going to be people who are in a location that, for whatever reason, didn't suffer the worst of whatever killed everyone else: an isolated island that closed access before the plague could arrive, the chosen survivors in a doomsday bunker system, etc. And in that situation you're far more likely to have both enough of an intact infrastructure base to get a reasonable civilization restored and a wide range of skill sets among the survivors.

In the 10% scenario you're still talking about almost 800 million people, more than double the entire population of the US. That's a severe drop but still enough that between survivors with relevant education and university libraries/factory documentation/etc the knowledge base will all be intact as long as a 10% survival rate doesn't become a 0.1% survival rate before the situation stabilizes. And as long as the knowledge base exists the survivors can start sending out recovery teams to reestablish operations at vital infrastructure sites.