[slashdev]

This. It would take something truly catastrophic to make humans extinct now that there are so many of us on every part of the globe.

Climate change won't cut it, neither would total nuclear war.

Even if you had something like an impact big enough to superheat the entire atmosphere, enough humans might survive inside buildings, basements, subways, etc to carry on.

Modern civilization though is a lot more fragile. It's possible to blast us back to pre-industrial times and the easy to access resources are mostly gone. It's not clear that we could bootstrap a second industrial revolution easily.

[nicklecompte]

To be clear I don't think anthropogenic climate change will cause human extinction. But a terrible series of volcanos could absolutely turn Earth into a colder Venus for, say, a couple hundred years - pelagic vertebrates and certain microbes would be ok, but I am not sure humanity would survive more than a few generations, even in underground sci-fi bunkers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_ev...

[slashdev]

It would have to be worse than the previous volcanic extinction events, which were massive. It's not clear the Earth can even do that anymore.

[nicklecompte]

> It's not clear the Earth can even do that anymore.

This is a good point, but the event wouldn't need to be more volcanic so much as that volcanism would need to ignite more carbon-containing materials - naively I would expect there to me more "fuel" in the Earth than there was 300m years ago.

[slashdev]

That's also a good point

[jakderrida]

> But a terrible series of volcanos could absolutely turn Earth into a colder Venus for, say, a couple hundred years

Minoans went from the thriving trading center of the Mediterranean with written language as old as Egyptian Hieroglyphics to seemingly irrelevant for a while during the Bronze Age because volcanic eruptions seemed to have turned the air they breathed to poison. Not to mention places allegedly hit by the fall of volcanic ash whose remains are so far deep we only speculate they lived there.

[bryanlarsen]

OTOH our garbage and wreckage will provide a lot of resources. For example there may not be any easily accessible copper deposits, but there are a lot of wires to scavenge. No easily accessible fossil fuels, but the amount of plastic in garbage dumps makes them a fossil fuel source.

[tiahura]

With the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.

[acdha]

This is like a rejected version of one of Heinlein’s omni-competent hero fantasies. Humans aren’t fruit flies, with anll individuals interchangeable and ready for life shortly after birth. Even ignoring the dubious math getting to those numbers, think about the skills and equipment. In your scenario, everyone’s so busy taking care of food and childcare that they’re not going to have time to realize that they don’t have teachers for all of the subjects or specialists who can maintain intricate manufacturing lines. The people who work on semiconductors can’t just switch to make pharmaceuticals or engines!

[slashdev]

Why would more women survive than men? Leaving asside how difficult it is for for a single woman to raise children in a post-apocalyptic society

[rhelz]

// ratio of ten females //

I’m really hoping this is a ironic literary reference to “How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”

[adolph]

Can you do a USSR accent? We need an Ambassador de Sadesky in the sibling thread.

[rhelz]

Da, Komrade!

[adolph]

Do you need the line?

[adolph]

Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

[angiosperm]

Because the men have almost all killed one another off, leaving mostly those who managed to stay out of the fight? Who is supposed to teach the kids skills to rebuild civilization if who's left are wholly occupied with reproducing? Will you kill the infant boys too?

[tiahura]

Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

[Cacti]

eh. you underestimate global thermonuclear war.

[philipkglass]

Global thermonuclear war would destroy technological civilization, but even now there are small groups of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers in remote regions who use only muscle power and do not need factory manufactured goods. Uncontacted tribes [1] would go on living much as usual if a nuclear war depopulated industrialized regions.

There would be some increase in mortality among remote tribes as radioactive fallout from a large scale nuclear war drifted down globally, but that wouldn't be enough to cause human extinction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

[jakderrida]

> but even now there are small groups of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers in remote regions who use only muscle power and do not need factory manufactured goods.

Good luck getting them to adopt your useless ass in the post-apocalypse.

[slashdev]

Large parts of the world would be untouched (Africa, South America, Middle East). You might get a nuclear winter, but many people would still survive that.