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We live in a tiny bubble of time that could change at any moment. Our recent ancestors struggled with smallpox outbreaks, measles, and of course the horror that

We live in a tiny bubble of time that could change at any moment. Our recent ancestors struggled with smallpox outbreaks, measles, and of course the horror that is polio. My mother knew a man who lived in an iron lung! We’re just part of one or two generations that has enjoyed both vaccines, and potent antibiotics, but were only ever a novel pathogen away from reliving the horrors of medieval plague towns. The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed millions of people, and given populations densities and air travel today, such an outbreak would kill far more. Society is no more resilient today if we’re being honest, but it’s more dependent on technology a relative few can understand or repair, and on food and water being delivered to our towns or homes. If the shit hits the fan, we’ll be in a truly unenviable position.

ams6110 8y ago
Yes and no. Our biology hasn't changed since the middle ages, but we're so much better with sanitation, medicine, and communication that it's much less likely that we'd suffer the sort of population-decimating plagues of the past. Not impossible, but much less likely. In the 1300s, nobody even understood what caused disease or how it spread. They had a vague understanding that sickness could be contageous, but that was about it.
- gotocake 8y ago
  A pandemic flu really wouldnt be something we could cope with. The combination of a long contagious latent period and high R0 would be devastating, and we need to bat perfectly every time to stop it. Sure, we can stop things like MERS and SARS and H1N1, but it just takes one slipping through and our knowledge won’t matter. Besides, we literally can stop things like measles, but people are too stupid and superstitious! It’s easy to look back on people who believed in the miasma theory of contagion, and laugh, but we haven’t come so far. We know our abuse of antibiotics is going to come home to roost, and we do very little to stop it. We know that cutting further into unspoiled habitats raises the risk of discovering something our immune systems have never encountered, but we do it. A black swan event like 1918 would play out just the same today as any other time.
  - lisper 8y ago
    The 1918 flu killed 20-50 million people out of a population at the time of 1.8 billion, i.e. somewhere between 1 and 2.7%. That is not even in the same ballpark as the black death, which killed a third of the people in Europe and more in other parts of the world. Even a worst case scenario today is extremely unlikely to be that devastating.
    - gotocake 8y ago
      And yet the 1918 flu had profound effects, and there is no guarantee that any future pandemic wouldn’t have a much higher CFR and total mortality. We also have to consider the impact of societal collapse in the near term, and the deaths that would cause. It’s true that the Black Death was spectacularly deveststing, but it’s also true that in a world where regular shipments of food and medicine are critical to daily survival, the diseases themselves would probably be secondary to starvation and societal collapse. Very very few people in the developed world could support themselves without the context of a functioning state for very long. It’s also true that we’re armed to the teeth and have lots of transportation. People would fight for food, fight for medicine they were used to a steady supply of, and you’d have mass casualties from thst alone. In the true (hopefully deeply unlikely) worst cast you’d see the use of nuclear weapons. The deaths in Asia from the plague had very little impact on Europeans, and visa versa. We can’t honestly say the same today. If something like MERS mutates in the right way, we could very easily look at a similar CFR to the Black Death, in a world with more than 7 billion people in it.
    - chewz 8y ago
      The comparable event to Black Death in Europe was religious wars with population loss up to 60% in Germany and Czech. We do not need plague. https://www.deviantart.com/arminius1871/art/Population-loss-in-the-30-years-war-729172832 https://www.deviantart.com/arminius1871/art/Population-loss-...
      - craftyguy 8y ago
        Deviantart is your source? Really?
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  In many respects modern society is far more fragile than it was in the past. We have better sanitation, healthcare and abundant food, certainly. Yet almost everything we have depends on longer and longer, vastly more complex, supply chains that might spread across multiple countries. During the black death, being pre-industrial, everyone in a town or village was close enough to the land that losing half a population did not leave them clueless. A horse or an ox, a ploughshare, and some people gets things going again. That scale today would have unimaginable secondary consequences and could get impossibly ugly while we figured it out. Most of our manufacturing comes from the other side of the globe. Just in time supply means there aren't barns and warehouses filled with food and spare parts any more. Global travel will spread any epidemic beautifully, long before nations start closing ports and borders. How long could most modern nations cope with closed ports? So if something virulent enough to decimate a population comes along, for which we have no immediate answer, I doubt modern society would cope at all well. Heck, look how badly we coped with BSE - a problem we mostly engineered ourselves through greed and arrogance. We're just remarkably lucky that nothing dangerous enough has come along during the antibiotic age. Hopefully it won't, but eventually it probably will.

ams6110 8y ago

Yes and no. Our biology hasn't changed since the middle ages, but we're so much better with sanitation, medicine, and communication that it's much less likely that we'd suffer the sort of population-decimating plagues of the past. Not impossible, but much less likely. In the 1300s, nobody even understood what caused disease or how it spread. They had a vague understanding that sickness could be contageous, but that was about it.

gotocake 8y ago
A pandemic flu really wouldnt be something we could cope with. The combination of a long contagious latent period and high R0 would be devastating, and we need to bat perfectly every time to stop it. Sure, we can stop things like MERS and SARS and H1N1, but it just takes one slipping through and our knowledge won’t matter. Besides, we literally can stop things like measles, but people are too stupid and superstitious! It’s easy to look back on people who believed in the miasma theory of contagion, and laugh, but we haven’t come so far. We know our abuse of antibiotics is going to come home to roost, and we do very little to stop it. We know that cutting further into unspoiled habitats raises the risk of discovering something our immune systems have never encountered, but we do it. A black swan event like 1918 would play out just the same today as any other time.
- lisper 8y ago
  The 1918 flu killed 20-50 million people out of a population at the time of 1.8 billion, i.e. somewhere between 1 and 2.7%. That is not even in the same ballpark as the black death, which killed a third of the people in Europe and more in other parts of the world. Even a worst case scenario today is extremely unlikely to be that devastating.
  - gotocake 8y ago
    And yet the 1918 flu had profound effects, and there is no guarantee that any future pandemic wouldn’t have a much higher CFR and total mortality. We also have to consider the impact of societal collapse in the near term, and the deaths that would cause. It’s true that the Black Death was spectacularly deveststing, but it’s also true that in a world where regular shipments of food and medicine are critical to daily survival, the diseases themselves would probably be secondary to starvation and societal collapse. Very very few people in the developed world could support themselves without the context of a functioning state for very long. It’s also true that we’re armed to the teeth and have lots of transportation. People would fight for food, fight for medicine they were used to a steady supply of, and you’d have mass casualties from thst alone. In the true (hopefully deeply unlikely) worst cast you’d see the use of nuclear weapons. The deaths in Asia from the plague had very little impact on Europeans, and visa versa. We can’t honestly say the same today. If something like MERS mutates in the right way, we could very easily look at a similar CFR to the Black Death, in a world with more than 7 billion people in it.
  - chewz 8y ago
    The comparable event to Black Death in Europe was religious wars with population loss up to 60% in Germany and Czech. We do not need plague. https://www.deviantart.com/arminius1871/art/Population-loss-in-the-30-years-war-729172832 https://www.deviantart.com/arminius1871/art/Population-loss-...
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      Deviantart is your source? Really?
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
In many respects modern society is far more fragile than it was in the past. We have better sanitation, healthcare and abundant food, certainly. Yet almost everything we have depends on longer and longer, vastly more complex, supply chains that might spread across multiple countries. During the black death, being pre-industrial, everyone in a town or village was close enough to the land that losing half a population did not leave them clueless. A horse or an ox, a ploughshare, and some people gets things going again. That scale today would have unimaginable secondary consequences and could get impossibly ugly while we figured it out. Most of our manufacturing comes from the other side of the globe. Just in time supply means there aren't barns and warehouses filled with food and spare parts any more. Global travel will spread any epidemic beautifully, long before nations start closing ports and borders. How long could most modern nations cope with closed ports? So if something virulent enough to decimate a population comes along, for which we have no immediate answer, I doubt modern society would cope at all well. Heck, look how badly we coped with BSE - a problem we mostly engineered ourselves through greed and arrogance. We're just remarkably lucky that nothing dangerous enough has come along during the antibiotic age. Hopefully it won't, but eventually it probably will.