Everything man-made vanishes

[rewster]

I'm a little tired of single countries or regions being picked on or moved or turned upside down... so...
ASB's come and take everything... houses, cars, streets, mines, factories, airplanes, bridges, you name it they took it. The only thing they leave behind is nature and humanity.
Oh, they don't take things we've "steered" in a desired direction like domesticated animals and crops. Just the stuff we built from scratch, from stone tools on.
So... does anyone survive this, and if so, what happens to society?

[mattep74]

so all humans are left naked or with just the clothes they are wearing?

[Mike Stearns]

So... does anyone survive this, and if so, what happens to society?

Yes, people survie. Society-technology=stone age.

[Hermanubis]

so all humans are left naked or with just the clothes they are wearing?
Yeah, that’s what I’d like to know… (Also, what happens to people in skyscrapers?)

[rewster]

Your clothes all fall off... yes, you are naked. Deal with it. :p
People in skyscrapers either fall to their deaths or are placed nicely on the ground by the ASB's. Whatever, either way that's not really the issue.

[Hermanubis]

Your clothes all fall off... yes, you are naked. Deal with it. :p

Eww…. To tell you the truth, I’m not really into that…

[rewster]

Yes, people survie. Society-technology=stone age.

Sure, but what about the effects of imposing the stone age on modern people?
Are we capable of surviving? Nobody I know has any clue how to flint-knap, or even what flint is and where to find it. Some boyscouts may know how to start fires...
And if we do survive, what do we manage to salvage of our technological heritage? Are we able to rebuild anything, or are we so preoccupied with survival that our generation dies without passing on any significant technological knowledge on to our descendants?

[Mojo]

Survival is going to be really harsh but restarting civillization is going to harder, all the surface minerals iron in buildings and steel and coal has been mined out near the surface so getting rescorces is going to be hard.

[rewster]

That's true...
suppose instead everything manmade is simply disintegrated. Now where buildings stood are big dirtpiles filled with iron, sand, and everything else. Then we'd have plenty of surface materials to work with.

[JLCook]

Then 5,999,000,000 of them are going to starve to death. Horribly! Possibly many of the remaining 1,000,000 people will also die as well! Peta and the Green movement, however will get their way, although I fail to see how they profit by it, since they are just as likely to starve as anyone else! Perhaps they'll all happily starve to death, I don't know! This is not a happy scenario! The few places on earth where extremely primative people still live will likely be the only survivors!

[Forum Lurker]

Actually, I'd expect North America to do swimmingly (relatively speaking). Without man-made containment, massive herds of livestock are unleashed on the fields which are going fallow without any machinery to tend them, and our population is much lower compared to our food-production ability than that of most other continents.

[Nik]

Do you have perfect teeth ??

They'll soon be embellishing my improvised crutch, which I need to walk now that chunk of titanium's vanished from my leg...

;-)

Or, does the effect persist, so my freshly broken tree-branch gets ASB'd too ??

;-((

[Dave Howery]

Then 5,999,000,000 of them are going to starve to death. Horribly!
Nonsense! Balderdash! Only 4,999,000,000 will starve to death. The rest will die in the cold (I had a coat just a minute ago...), drown in the ocean (hey! where'd my boat go?! *Blub Blub Blub*) or be eaten by various predators (suddenly, we're helpless against them).

[rewster]

Hehehe, yeah... it is a sad scenario... and yet some of these posts make me laugh. I'd have a big old toothache myself, until that tooth rotted out.

No, the effect does not persist (you get to keep your makeshift crutch to whack people's teeth out with)

Whether you assume people are instantly transported to non-lethal environments (land, above freezing, ground floor) is not that important.

I doubt predators would be a serious threat... humans would instinctively group up and throw rocks at any sort of threatening beast, and besides, most predators are afraid of us, and still would be.

North America's prospects aren't too bad comparitively... but in order to benefit from all the wandering livestock you need to reinvent the knife. A lot of subsistence farmers would survive... they'd just say "where'd my house and shed go?" and rebuild them.

Steering away from thoughts of how many of us will die, what do y'all estimate would be our "recovery time" in terms of getting back to where we are now? Another six or eight thousand years, just like last time? Or will we be able to translate enough of our modern knowledge into a significant enough advantage that we turn things around in a few hundred years or so?

[Forum Lurker]

We've lost all of our books, so we'll fall back into oral tradition. Fortunately, I've got a good singing voice, a wide knowledge of many basic sciences, and enough persuasiveness to convince people that it's important for someone to gather information, so I'd be set as a historian/scientist/shaman while everyone else was busy trying to put my lessons on ironworking, bowmaking, and tanning into practice.

[Hermanubis]

Steering away from thoughts of how many of us will die, what do y'all estimate would be our "recovery time" in terms of getting back to where we are now? Another six or eight thousand years, just like last time? Or will we be able to translate enough of our modern knowledge into a significant enough advantage that we turn things around in a few hundred years or so?
Well, once people know it can be done…


Honestly, I think that at least industrial Civilization would be up and running in thirty years or so…

[Ward]

Sure, but what about the effects of imposing the stone age on modern people?
Are we capable of surviving? Nobody I know has any clue how to flint-knap, or even what flint is and where to find it. Some boyscouts may know how to start fires...
And if we do survive, what do we manage to salvage of our technological heritage? Are we able to rebuild anything, or are we so preoccupied with survival that our generation dies without passing on any significant technological knowledge on to our descendants?


Well I know what flint is and were to find it . I also know were there is a salt lick . With in an hr or so my wilf and I would have a Fire going as well as a chicken rostoing over it .
As for flint- knaping I can do some of it . We would have fire harden spear points in the first day .
You city folk would starve in a mater of days .

How may of you know how to throw a pot out of clay or make a basket .
And do you know were clay can be found .

[eschaton]

Honestly, I think that at least industrial Civilization would be up and running in thirty years or so…

Dude, are you serious?

The carrying capacity of the world, in hunting and gathering times, was 5 million. 99.9% of people will die within, probably, the next 6 months. They'll hunt down, poorly, whatever domestic animals they can find, and decimate anything they see as an edible vegetable.

There are no weapons, so there is nothing that could help former farmers/ranchers keep the starving masses off their land.

Most people north of, say, Washington DC in North America will die in the winter. In fact, almost everyone will, except those extremely few people who know how to skin deer and make clothing out of it. Everyone in the arctic is dead...not that many people lived there to begin with.

The people most likely to survive will be people in tropics who live lo-tech lives who can easilly replace their materials. I would say that pastoralists in Africa will probably do the best and now have the highest population densities. Farming is dicier, because in most areas it involves some metal tools now, and it will take time to construct whole new wooden/stone plows and the like.

Stirling fantasises aside, the amount of engineers who would survive know *anything* about how to make industrial technology would be vanishingly few. The chances of them running into a large enough population base to actually develop technology anew is pretty low, as they're going to be in different parts of the world, by and large.

Finally, there's the population density question, as to technology. I think in some of the areas where farming could still be an option (the U.S., Europe) people would abandon it for hunting soon enough. The human population shifted to farming because population pressures required a more effecient means of providing food per square acre. It was not, however, good for human bodies. Hunting is going to be easier within a generation or two, with open fields and plentiful wildlife, and no one will want to slave all day on the farm when they can spend much less labor hours gathering wild plants and chasing down a deer.

To sum up, except for pockets, I think almost everyone in the U.S. would die very quickly, with the exception of the south, who would repopulate the U.S. over the centuries. the survival of the 'western world' predicates upon people somehow figuring out how to make stone tools again within less than a year (something I'm certain will not happen in all communities). The best off people will be current stone-age hunters, migratory farmers, and herders in Africa, South America, and Indonesia. I do not think that any knowlege whatsoever will survive from before, save some legends from barbarian groups, and when the tropical people migrate to better, empty lands, over thousands of years (I would guess 10,000 or so), new civiliizations would arise, with no knowlege of (since no physical evidence exists) of anything that came before them)

[Forum Lurker]

How may of you know how to throw a pot out of clay or make a basket .
And do you know were clay can be found .

I wouldn't be needing either of those for a while. Plenty of meat in the neighborhood, and all you need for that is wood (as there are convenient lumps of unworked iron where the buildings used to be, sufficient to build a fire).

[eschaton]

I wouldn't be needing either of those for a while. Plenty of meat in the neighborhood, and all you need for that is wood (as there are convenient lumps of unworked iron where the buildings used to be, sufficient to build a fire).

Where did you get the iron from? I didn't see it in the scenerio. Anyway, making a forge is likely beyond anyone starting from scratch. Maybe, if you're lucky, you can make a copper forge, as those fires don't need to be as hot.

Depending upon how dense the population is where you live, the domestic animal population will crash pretty quickly. If you can follow around a herd of cattle, you might be able to survive (though it's going to be difficult avoiding the bull with no weapons). But how are you going to stop the stronger guy two towns over from taking your cattle then?

[fortyseven]

the title is man-made right? Mwahahahaha.

[Ward]

I wouldn't be needing either of those for a while. Plenty of meat in the neighborhood, and all you need for that is wood (as there are convenient lumps of unworked iron where the buildings used to be, sufficient to build a fire).



Ok do you know how to work iron ?
Also what are you going to use as a hamer and anval ?

And what meat are you going to eat ?
And How are you going to kill it and skin it ?

plus what are you going to use to get water with ?

As for dieing in the winter I will have Furs to wear and a house to live in .

American Natives lived where I'm from for many years before the white man came here .

[Forum Lurker]

I don't need to work iron in order to hit a rock with it and make sparks. Getting meat is a simple matter of pitching rocks, and skinning is a nicety for those with tools; I'll probably end up sharpening a goose femur once I have time, given the region's absence of flint. For water, I rely on the beautifully clear Mississippi, at least until I can turn one of the many undifferentiated lumps of soft metal into a shallow dished bowl (not that hard, really; untanned hide works for mitts, wood gets it hot, and a lump of rock can hammer it. It'll be ugly as sin, but copper is a forgiving medium). I'll be heading west before winter sets in, so a hole dug in the ground and lined with fur and pine needles will keep hypothermia away; the Pacific coast doesn't see weather which threatens frostbite.

[rewster]

Hehe, is this board full of survivalists or do you all just look up "how to survive in case of technology disappearing" online?

I personally live in the middle of Seattle... but I did grow up on a dairy farm in NY so... maybe I'd live, maybe not. I'd probably resort to cannibalism (of already dead people of course) if I can survive the first few weeks improvising with clubs and rocks as weapons of self defense. It'd take me a while to get out of town with my girlfriend, and I'm not about to leave her behind. Human bones should make decent tools once I find a jagged rock to scrape them with. Perhaps I'll make some fishing hooks... try to get away from the city for a while and maybe aim towards Mt. Rainier state park (should be easy, just climb hills and look for Mt Rainier) then find a little lake to build a leanto on and fish out of while I figure out what the hell happened to the world. If I could find a farm somewhere with a few sheep to steal, I'd do that, otherwise I'm stuck learning how to make a bow and arrow... using stones and sticks. Yay.

Anyway the point wasn't whether I'd survive (improbable) but whether civilization would return and how long it would take.

[Hendryk]

I'd be in trouble, but at least my parents would be fine, as they raise chickens in their backyard, and the village they live in has all it needs to survive (at least for a while) without technology: wheat fields, vegetable patches, vineyards (so we have something to trade), some cows for the milk, and sheep that can be fleeced to make wool clothing. There are also local potters who use traditional methods, and assorted craftsmen whose skills would definitely come in handy. Wolves, after being hunted to extinction in the early 20th century, have returned to the area in recent years, but I don't think they'll be a problem if basic precautions are taken.

A novel was written pretty much along those lines by French SF author Barjavel in the 1940s: Ravage. In a technology-dependent future of flying cars and hypersonic planes, all of a sudden everything more complex than mechanical clockwork stops working, even firearms. Most of mankind starves to death, and the few survivors gather in rural communities. It's actually not a very good novel, but it bears mentioning.

[Dave Howery]

I doubt predators would be a serious threat... humans would instinctively group up and throw rocks at any sort of threatening beast, and besides, most predators are afraid of us, and still would be.
?
are you kidding? Do you know how predators turn into maneaters? Most of them do it when they scavenge human corpses after a plague or flood, and they get a taste for it. They did it frequently in India even in the face of guns. In addition, many predators are only afraid of humans if they are hunted regularly. To take the US as an example, in the states where hunting cougars was banned, they came back with a vengance and have become a nuisance in several places.
Now, in this scenario, we have billions of people dying of starvation all over the world, combined with a total lack of guns and even bows. In as little as a year, maneating is going to be a worldwide problem. People group together scare predators off? For a while, but the predators will figure out pretty damn quick that people are no threat to them. And how are people going to fight them off? Most of us would be lucky to come up with a straight sharp stick.... we'd be reduced to throwing rocks, and that doesn't help much when you're facing a pack of maneating wolves...

[Mojo]

I think that plenty of food would be avable in the first few days maybe longer up north if only man made things disappear then all that food from the store is suddenly lying on the ground with no protection. Also what would happen to pet stores? Granted that most of the animals would die but if they were out where its warm we could easily see colonies of wild ferrets,dogs*, and cats.
*would dogs/cats/cows ect. dissapear considering humans bread them?

[Forum Lurker]

The only animal that's likely to be completely wiped out, with no feral population, is the turkey. Damned stupid animal, the domestic turkey. Unfortunately, living in Minnesota, I'll probably have to deal with wild boar migrating north from Iowa, and those are a much greater threat than the handful of predators released from zoos. Unless I've got an honest boar spear by then, which requires getting the charcoal to work right, the only way to survive a boar attack is to get up a tree and be patient.

[Dave Howery]

uh, there are populations of wild turkeys all over the country that would survive just fine. Domestic turkeys would be eaten in a month, but wild ones are about uncatchable without tools.
You realize how hard it would be to make a boar spear? You don't have a straight shaft, you don't have a knife to carve a straight shaft, you don't have an axe to cut off a tree limb to make a straight shaft.. .and you certainly have no way to make a steel spearhead with crossbars. You don't even have shoes to walk over to the tree to cut off a tree limb. Most of us in the industrialized nations couldn't even walk around to get where we need to go without tearing our feet up to the point of collapse, as we have soft soles.

[Forum Lurker]

There are no paved or even dirt roads. While it's painful to walk on twig- and pine-needle-covered ground barefoot, when you're as soft as us Americans are, we're not going to cripple ourselves that way.

And yes, I'm aware of how much work it takes to get metallurgy and woodcarving running. It's much easier, however, when the ASBs have thoughtfully piled all of the metal in our cities in ingots, so that all I need to do is have enough time and energy to spare to A) make charcoal, B) pile rocks together into a forge, C) find rocks to use as a hammer and anvil, instead of hunting down hematite and trying to figure out how to smelt it. Iron is still a few months, if not years, away, given the required working temperatures; copper will come much sooner.

[Othniel]

We did before Lurker. Westward expansion involved tons of trailblazing. I love trailblazing myself...so....

[rewster]

Er... but... why would these maneating beasts all pick on us humans, instead of seeking out stupid, unassuming domestic animals that don't throw rocks? I think those of us that survive will have progressed well beyond sharpened sticks (otherwise we'd be just as dead as the corpses the animals are feeding on). We should have stone pointed spears at the very least... probably stone axes and pretty quickly the dreaded bow, once we remember what sinew is.
By the time a pack of wolves actually gets together (years away from now unless you happen to live in their current range) they'll probably have given up on eating humans in favor of their natural prey.

[sbegin]

Well I know what flint is and were to find it . I also know were there is a salt lick . With in an hr or so my wilf and I would have a Fire going as well as a chicken rostoing over it .
As for flint- knaping I can do some of it . We would have fire harden spear points in the first day .
You city folk would starve in a mater of days .

How may of you know how to throw a pot out of clay or make a basket .
And do you know were clay can be found .
That's great Ward, but what about medicines? Those would be gone too. How many people today take pills for cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, etc....

[Dave Howery]

because humans are even stupider and weaker than domestic animals; cows and horses have hooves, boars have tusks.. hell, even rams have horns. Humans have.... nothing. And there are still going to be all those human corpses providing free meals everywhere. I'm not saying that humanity will be wiped out everywhere (the Bushmen in Africa can make everything they lost fairly quicky), but there is going to be a maneater epidemic across the world like nothing ever seen before. As you say, eventually some of us will get it together enough to make stone tools again (but this is pretty much a lost art... how many flintknappers are around anymore? It's not an easy thing to do), but during the learning process, we're pretty much easy meat for everything from wolverines to tigers...

[Ward]

That's great Ward, but what about medicines? Those would be gone too. How many people today take pills for cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, etc....


well I would have to teach the Grand kids were these are . I might have two to three mo. left to live . I take 10 pills twice a day . I think I could last that long .

[Forum Lurker]

because humans are even stupider and weaker than domestic animals; cows and horses have hooves, boars have tusks.. hell, even rams have horns. Humans have.... nothing. And there are still going to be all those human corpses providing free meals everywhere. I'm not saying that humanity will be wiped out everywhere (the Bushmen in Africa can make everything they lost fairly quicky), but there is going to be a maneater epidemic across the world like nothing ever seen before. As you say, eventually some of us will get it together enough to make stone tools again (but this is pretty much a lost art... how many flintknappers are around anymore? It's not an easy thing to do), but during the learning process, we're pretty much easy meat for everything from wolverines to tigers...

Bah. There aren't nearly enough predators left to make a serious dent in our population, aside from feral dogs, and only a few breeds of dogs actually have it in them to make effective predators. The worst source of violent death is going to be people killing other people, whether for food, fertilizer, or just to reduce the competition.

[Othniel]

Dave, you know wolvirines don't attack humans unless they are cornered.


Besides most humans struggle far too much for an animal without much hair. Sure the fatter ones will be nipped away at and ultimately the slick, the slippery, the strong, and the fast will last longer than any of those that rely on their tools. We are likely to group together and provide a serious deterant in such a large herd. Yes I am calling humans herd animals although we designate into smaller packs and hermatouges...

[Dave Howery]

Bah. There aren't nearly enough predators left to make a serious dent in our population.
There aren't many predators around now BECAUSE HUMANS SHOOT THEM AND TAKE AWAY THEIR HABITAT!! Suddenly, that ain't happening anymore. With humanity going through a mass dieoff, all wildlife will be coming back strong. Before firearms came around, wolves regularly killed people across Europe; one pack even invaded Paris and preyed on people. Even after firearms, tigers and leopards in India preyed on people on a regular basis, until their numbers were reduced to the point of near extinction. And herding does NOT deter predators... it draws them, in fact. Haven't you ever seen a nature documentary on lions attacking zebras? Herding doesn't stop predation... it makes it so that with the large numbers, a pretty good number will survive; plus, when the animals run in all directions, it can often confuse a predator, who won't know which one to go for first, although they'll eventually pick one out.
To be sure, starvation, cold, and human on human violence will be the big killers. But predation will happen in the opening days when we are trying to re-learn how to make stone tools, and it will not be negligable. Make no mistake about it, without our tools, we are going to be utterly helpless in the face of big predators for some time....

[mattep74]

ok, here are some dieoff numbers i can think of

within 5 minutes everyone flying an airplane has just died from impact on the ground, all living and working in high buildings(including me), those in hospitals has died when the roof gave away. Lets say 5-10% of the human population dies within those minutes.

Those driving cars can be lucky if they are at a traffic light. If you are driving over a large bridge like the Oresundbridge your dead.

ANyone driving in a tunnel is dead as soon as the event happens. Maybe 1 million people dies that way

Everyone else is confused since they are in a world that is absolutly silent and they dont have any clothes

Within a day anyone that needs a medical drug to survive starts do die, the weakers older people dies within a few days without help.

My guess is that 75% atleast of the human population dies within a week and that within a year there are less than a million humans alive around the world

Those least affected would be the tribes that already lives like in the stoneage

[Forum Lurker]

There aren't many predators around now BECAUSE HUMANS SHOOT THEM AND TAKE AWAY THEIR HABITAT!! Suddenly, that ain't happening anymore. With humanity going through a mass dieoff, all wildlife will be coming back strong. Before firearms came around, wolves regularly killed people across Europe; one pack even invaded Paris and preyed on people. Even after firearms, tigers and leopards in India preyed on people on a regular basis, until their numbers were reduced to the point of near extinction. And herding does NOT deter predators... it draws them, in fact. Haven't you ever seen a nature documentary on lions attacking zebras? Herding doesn't stop predation... it makes it so that with the large numbers, a pretty good number will survive; plus, when the animals run in all directions, it can often confuse a predator, who won't know which one to go for first, although they'll eventually pick one out.
To be sure, starvation, cold, and human on human violence will be the big killers. But predation will happen in the opening days when we are trying to re-learn how to make stone tools, and it will not be negligable. Make no mistake about it, without our tools, we are going to be utterly helpless in the face of big predators for some time....

What you're forgetting is that no matter why the predators are gone, they're pretty much gone. The wolf population of the continental 48 states is negligible. Its hunting cat population, outside the Rocky mountains, is a few hundred, maybe a few thousand animals in zoos, most of which have never learned hunting behaviours. The total numbers of predators are presently miniscule compared to the human population, and by the time they've bred up, we'll have made tools out of the conveniently pure metal ingots lying around.

[Dave Howery]

where does the idea come from that pure metal ingots are lying around? Aren't those man made as well? The original post doesn't say anything about them. It does say that everything manmade from stone tools on up is gone... that includes all forged and processed metal.
There are more than a few hundred large predators in the US... there are thousands of cougars, thousands of black bears, and hundreds of grizzlies. Wolves are only a handful in the lower 48... but there are lots more up in Canada. When people massively die off in a short time (as will happen) and predators aren't being shot anymore, they will come back fast, along with all forms of wildlife in general. The few thousands of people left will learn to cope with them, but they are going to be tied to small farms with the crudest of implements for a long time. Predators are going to fill in the areas around them. They have the edge in that they aren't adversely affected at all by the Change (quite the opposite). Wolves and cougars breed a whole lot faster than humans will be able to in this scenario; the only ones that will take a long time to recover their numbers are the bears. While humans are dying off in massive lots and struggling to learn to make tools again, predators will move into the vaccuum left by the huge loss of humanity. Their prey (especially deer) will be exploding in numbers for a while, so they won't lack for food... not to mention the initial windfall of all those human corpses lieing around...

[Forum Lurker]

The idea of the ingots lying around comes from
That's true...
suppose instead everything manmade is simply disintegrated. Now where buildings stood are big dirtpiles filled with iron, sand, and everything else. Then we'd have plenty of surface materials to work with.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on the significance of predation; I feel that a population of predators outnumbered by at least two orders of magnitude compared to the ratios at any point in the Paleolithic, and with an evolved fear of humans much greater, will be much less significant than the effects of predation on Paleolithic populations, but I can't convince you of it short of a highly unethical experimental setup.

[Dave Howery]

actually, there has sort of been an experiment on it. A couple of US states banned or restricted the hunting of cougars. Guess what happened? They became nuisances and there were attacks on people. This is in a situation where we have guns and large numbers. Cougars and bears are only cautious around humans when they are hunted regularly... with guns. And grizzlies aren't even cautious then. I think you underestimate just how fast wolves can breed too... the ones in Yellowstone built up their numbers pretty quick, being limited mainly by some being shot or hit by cars... that isn't happening anymore. With most of humanity dying off in a short time, there is nothing to stop predators from coming back strong. It will be quite some time before humans will be able to start pruning their numbers back.
Concerning the metal.. nothing in that post says anything about ingots of metal. Sounds to me more like there is going to be a mass of loose metal instead of ingots. Steel is manmade and will disintigrate into iron and carbon... all other alloys will dissolve as well. And a lot of that iron is going to rust away before we can do anything with it...