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by pixl97 1016 days ago
Honestly this is one of those events where billions could possibly die.

Green revolution. The level of food we need requires nitrogen. This is broken down by natural gas into fertilizer and requires immense amount of energy and transportation. When the grid gets knocked out, you're on a countdown till you run out of gas/petrol. If you don't get enough power back up before this happens you're running into a game over situation. Once fuel runs low and food runs out, people will start killing each other in massive amounts to deal with the resource constrained world they live in. Once enough electrical engineers die then the system doesn't come back up.

1 comments

Yup, it could really go down that way.

When animal populations overbreed and/or their feed under-grows, a 10% overpopulation often results in not a 10% shaving of population, but a 90% population crash, because almost every animal goes under the survival budget.

It would very much the same here.

Excellent point about the EEs (and other high-capability engineers, mechanics, technicians required to keep it all running) being in the dying population. Absolutely right - if the critical mass of available experts fails, the system never recovers. Only after society stabilizes, regrows, and re-creates the knowledge; by then, it would be about rebuilding from scratch.