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The extinction part is hyperbole though - with 7 billion humans out there it would need to hit fatality rates of 99.9...% for a decent chance of the human speci

The extinction part is hyperbole though - with 7 billion humans out there it would need to hit fatality rates of 99.9...% for a decent chance of the human species to be completely wiped out. And also assuming that it would persist and/or spread well enough to also wipe out the various uncontacted tribes on 2-3 continents.

SECProto 5y ago
Modern society functions by virtue of a century of businesses cutting margins as thin as possible, trading supply chain fragility for lower labour and capital costs. We're already seeing wild economic issues from a much lower fatality rate disease and the labour shortages/supply chain blockages/etc it has caused. It's very easy to imagine a 30% fatality rate pandemic causing total worldwide economic collapse, causing famine, causing nuclear war, causing photosynthesis to fail, causing a mass extinction exceeding the P-T event. Whether human populations survived is (to be honest), a kind of irrelevant nitpick. The species as a whole was much more robust when large fractions of the population were engaged in subsistence farming and we hadn't disbalanced the atmosphere and doomsday weapons didn't exist. Edit: minor grammar correction
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  I guess that I still consider global nuclear suicide-"war" to be very unlikely even (especially ?) under these conditions, but it certainly changes the calculus if you don't think the same way.
dehrmann 5y ago
A lot of this was hyperbolic: > But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows. Chickenpox is nowhere near that deadly. Remember the "Simpsons" episode where Maggie gets the chickenpox and Homer hosts a pox party?
trinovantes 5y ago
At that fatality rate, the virus would probably struggle to spread as its carriers would all die first. The sweet spot is probably around 40-50% like the bubonic plague
- ncmncm 5y ago
  It all depends on incubation period. A 100% fatal disease with a 3-week infectious incubation period could take out a whole populationvin only a little longer than that, save isolated pockets.

SECProto 5y ago

Modern society functions by virtue of a century of businesses cutting margins as thin as possible, trading supply chain fragility for lower labour and capital costs. We're already seeing wild economic issues from a much lower fatality rate disease and the labour shortages/supply chain blockages/etc it has caused. It's very easy to imagine a 30% fatality rate pandemic causing total worldwide economic collapse, causing famine, causing nuclear war, causing photosynthesis to fail, causing a mass extinction exceeding the P-T event. Whether human populations survived is (to be honest), a kind of irrelevant nitpick. The species as a whole was much more robust when large fractions of the population were engaged in subsistence farming and we hadn't disbalanced the atmosphere and doomsday weapons didn't exist. Edit: minor grammar correction

BlueTemplar 5y ago
I guess that I still consider global nuclear suicide-"war" to be very unlikely even (especially ?) under these conditions, but it certainly changes the calculus if you don't think the same way.

dehrmann 5y ago

A lot of this was hyperbolic: > But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows. Chickenpox is nowhere near that deadly. Remember the "Simpsons" episode where Maggie gets the chickenpox and Homer hosts a pox party?

trinovantes 5y ago

At that fatality rate, the virus would probably struggle to spread as its carriers would all die first. The sweet spot is probably around 40-50% like the bubonic plague

ncmncm 5y ago
It all depends on incubation period. A 100% fatal disease with a 3-week infectious incubation period could take out a whole populationvin only a little longer than that, save isolated pockets.