dmccarty
Super Star Member
If the power went out, from the Mystical Button or from a natural event like sun activity, comets, etc, the industrial world, or a large portion there of, would cease to exist. No power, no water. After a few days people will have to look for water. There will be enough food for a few weeks but water will be the immediate problem and will cause people to start moving. Then movement will be looking for food and avoiding the anarchy. Within a month, millions will have died from lack of health care, violence, and bad/lack of water. As weeks pass, and food is used up, people will start to die from hunger related illness and starvation. Violence will be a big cause of death as people fight over resources. In a year I would think a large percentage of the population of most countries would be dead. The US with a larger, emptier, land mass would do much better than Europe. What would happen in the UK, Ireland, China, Japan, Taiwan, and India would be really ugly.
If this was a world wide event billions of people would die in a year or two as the "system" equalized between the need of resources, the skill to get those resources and the number needing resources. Honestly, I would think the US population would decrease by hundreds of millions of people. There would be mass depopulation within that first year or two. Being prepared with a year supply of food might get you through if you can avoid the Reavers. (Reavers are the name of the whacked out cannibalistic, ultra violent, ubber rapist, "people" in the Fire Fly series. Excellent series, acting and story line, so of course, the series was canceled.)
This would not be the end of humanity but it would be a new Dark Age that would take a century or so to recover. Stephen King's "The Stand" and "Lucifier's Hammer" by Niven and Pournelle paint a reasonable picture of what that doomsday would look like. It ain't pretty. By a "century or so to recover" I don't mean that humanity would have been able to rebuild to the point before the event. I mean recover in the sense that there would be more law and order and less anarchy. Very likely, we would still have city/town states, warlords, chieftains, and maybe states in some sense of the word, with some level of technology that was reasonably advanced.
It would really stink, literally and figuratively, for a very long time.
Later,
Dan
If this was a world wide event billions of people would die in a year or two as the "system" equalized between the need of resources, the skill to get those resources and the number needing resources. Honestly, I would think the US population would decrease by hundreds of millions of people. There would be mass depopulation within that first year or two. Being prepared with a year supply of food might get you through if you can avoid the Reavers. (Reavers are the name of the whacked out cannibalistic, ultra violent, ubber rapist, "people" in the Fire Fly series. Excellent series, acting and story line, so of course, the series was canceled.)
This would not be the end of humanity but it would be a new Dark Age that would take a century or so to recover. Stephen King's "The Stand" and "Lucifier's Hammer" by Niven and Pournelle paint a reasonable picture of what that doomsday would look like. It ain't pretty. By a "century or so to recover" I don't mean that humanity would have been able to rebuild to the point before the event. I mean recover in the sense that there would be more law and order and less anarchy. Very likely, we would still have city/town states, warlords, chieftains, and maybe states in some sense of the word, with some level of technology that was reasonably advanced.
It would really stink, literally and figuratively, for a very long time.
Later,
Dan
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