I want to destroy most of humanity

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Hypatia

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The year is 2050. A plague has just taken over 99% of humanity.

Out of those who remain, one in a thousand now has psionic powers.

My problem is visualizing what would realistically happen after such an epidemic. What kind of world would my psionic characters inhabit? Could anyone keep things together with so few people? Would it be a scavenger world, complete chaos?

I want to portray things somewhat realistically - both in practical and psychological terms. There is no threat left, everyone has had the disease and the survivors are immune. The infrastructure is intact. There are just very few people.
 

10trackers

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I'm writing a similar story, albeit without the powers and with less survivors. In my world, people flock together and form colonies. There's not much of scavenging going on, just focus on survival as a species, but that has another reason that is essential to my particular plot.

I don't think there would be complete chaos in your world, there are too few people alive for that (IMO). There could be looting, there would probably be some grouping going on... the fun thing is, you can make up what happens, because it's your world. As long as you have a reason for making it so, you can create a realistic world.
 

Chris P

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Completely understandable. Oh, you mean for a book...

I think we would have a tribal society of subsistence farming and foraging with such a large decline. People who were powerful before the plague would become the new chiefs, and likely form dynasties. The Stand is a little utopian in its view. I think Earth Abides is more realistic, and Lord of the Flies probably even more so.

ETA: 1% of the world's population would only be 70 million people, or about the population of California, Texas and Michigan. If they were concentrated in certain areas, then the infrastructure might well be intact. But if the plague hit randomly in all areas of the world, I doubt that infrastructure would survive.
 
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Baryonyx

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One percent of the worlds population would be at around 67,959,700 people.

Chaos wouldn't really be an issue since there's hardly anyone there. Whole cities, even whole countries would be pretty much deserted.

So I guess people trying to find other survivors would be the priority, setting up their own little communities etc to try and survive.

Depending on how long after the outbreak your story is set nature would start to rapidly reclaim the unpopulated towns and cities too and the buildings, roads etc would start to quickly fall into disrepair.
 

Hallen

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Society is how humans efficiently survive. It's the division of labor based on the capabilities of the individual. So, people will naturally start pooling back together and form societies. They'll probably do that in some place where they can grow food and have access to water.

There will be small clumps of people with huge amounts of territory unoccupied.

Cities would probably be abandoned for the most part because it would be too hard to get food and water there, but people would go there to get stuff like weapons and technology. Plus, cities need a high level of maintenance or they just fall apart quickly, so depending on the time line, they could be close to rubble.

Society would be a weird mix of some technology and good old fashioned stuff like axes and horses. Think the outer planets from Firefly.

Another book to look at other than the above, would be Lucifer's Hammer.

Is that along the lines you are thinking?
 

Ardent Kat

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Stephen King's The Stand could be a good place to start for reading some of the nitty-gritty consequences of a supervirus leaving a nearly-empty country. I agree with Chris P that it's a little optimistic, though. Also the survivors spend most of their time scavenging/foraging canned food and other stuff left over from the world before. They'd need a more long-term plan for farming and ranching if they were going to survive for the long haul.

...Which raises the question: Were animals affected by this plague? If not, there could be an abundance of meat as prey animals breed out of control. Which, in turn, would boost the number of predators, making wild animals like wolves a potential threat to humanity again.

The nature of your survivors' psionics would also make a big difference, I think. Pyrokinesis or telekinesis might make people better fighters, and more prone to solve their problems with violence (but with victors being the strongest psions rather than the brawniest bodies.)

Being able to read each other's minds would make it easier for those few survivors to find each other, and perhaps make them a little more likely to cooperate than kill each other. (Since even if you DID plan to kill someone else, presumably they could read your mind and be forewarned)
 

Darkness Rising

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One percent of the worlds population would be at around 67,959,700 people.

Chaos wouldn't really be an issue since there's hardly anyone there. Whole cities, even whole countries would be pretty much deserted.

So I guess people trying to find other survivors would be the priority, setting up their own little communities etc to try and survive.

Depending on how long after the outbreak your story is set nature would start to rapidly reclaim the unpopulated towns and cities too and the buildings, roads etc would start to quickly fall into disrepair.

Actually, if one takes into account that its 2050, one-percent of the population would actually be a lot more. With our population currently projected to add another billion every 12 or 13 years, one could reasonably expect the world population to be any where from 8-10 billion in 2050. One percent of that would be anywhere from 80 million to 100 million, which is quite a bit larger.

Sorry, just wanted to point that out. :)
 

Baryonyx

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Actually, if one takes into account that its 2050, one-percent of the population would actually be a lot more. With our population currently projected to add another billion every 12 or 13 years, one could reasonably expect the world population to be any where from 8-10 billion in 2050. One percent of that would be anywhere from 80 million to 100 million, which is quite a bit larger.

Sorry, just wanted to point that out. :)


....Good point!

Feel like such a fool now for not taking population growth into consideration :D:D:D
 

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There's a pretty cool book called The World Without Us that looks at what would happen to the physical world if all humans suddenly disappeared. It spends a lot of time detailing the influence we've had on our environment rather than just the impact our absence would have, but it's got a lot of information that might be relevant to you in terms of what abandoned parts of the world would look like.
 

Pthom

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I have a similar situation in a story that's sitting on the shelf at the moment. The requirement is for all humans on Earth to die, but almost nothing else. It happens a thousand years before the story takes place, so I thought I could get by with handwavium to explain it.

But beta readers wondered what mechanism could wipe out humans but not horses, dogs, cats, cows, whales, etc.

And I don't know.
 

Hypatia

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I'm going with a plague because I want to keep the infrastructure intact. also heavily implied that the plague was responsible for the powers, since only survivors have them - not people who avoided getting sick altogether.
 

shaldna

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Originally quoted by Hypatia

I want to destroy most of humanity

Me too. Wanna car pool?
 

small axe

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what mechanism could wipe out humans but not horses, dogs, cats, cows, whales, etc.

I recall that 12 MONKEYS had a situation where animals seemed healthy up on the surface, but surviving humans huddled in fear of some plague, underground.

I don't recall what they attributed it to in that movie (I do recall they sent Bruce Willis up to take samples of something ...)

SPOILER: It ends up being a man-made plague, but whether they got more specific, I forget. You might check it out tho.
 

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May I recommend the TV Tropes page for Apocalypse How? If you click on the Examples folder for Class 1 Human Die-Back you'll get a ton of discussion on how various books, series, etc handled this trope.
 

shaldna

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It's going to have to be something on a genetic level then.
 

Ambri

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Another book you might check out is SM Stirling's "Dies the Fire" series. He has a pretty realistist portrayal of what might happen if all our nifty tech stopped working, and shows people banding together into tribal and semi-feudal groups, and warfare with old style weapons, and postulates there would also be groups of raiders, and cannibalists and stuff.
 
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