This
is a fairly good place to start, though I imagine you would have difficulty tracking episodes down.
Essentially within a week almost all infrastructre (water, etc.) would be gone. Within ten years the roads would disappear. I can't really remember much, but it's surprising how quickly nature takes over. The world would be very different a just a year down the line.
It's not over. Not yet.Chaos would reign, a lot of infrastructure would fall over and the population of the world would fall considerably (yes, I know technically it would already have done, but it would do so even further with no support infrastructure). I don't think it would be as bad as 'life after people though', after all, there's got to be some people out there who know how to siphon fuel and replace car-parts, so I expect at least some vehicles would still be moving, at least for a few years.
edited 25th Dec '10 6:53:34 PM by MattII
Nope. Just over a quarter of the global population is below 18. The main problem with social demographics in developed countries today is that there are too many "dependents", people over about 65 and under 18, and too few people who can work and have children to balance it out. Hence the saying, "the world is getting older", or something to that effect.
Most of the youth are located in the less developed countries, like Africa and the Middle/Near East. Due to their lifestyles, such people would be much more independent, and would suffer much less of a decline in population due to overdependence problems such as those found in developed countries.
edited 25th Dec '10 7:53:11 PM by Five_X
I write pretty good fanfiction, sometimes.I was actually talking about the dieoff after everyone over eighteen gets killed.
In developing countries they'd stand a much better chance of surviving, though it would be even harder than what they're used to.
In developed countries... yeah, 99% dieoff. Your typical survivors are the country bumpkin, the boy scout, and the unusually intelligent and/or hot girl that somehow knows how to maintain firearms/cars/power tools/whatever.
edited 25th Dec '10 7:52:55 PM by Medicus
It's not over. Not yet.I wouldn't be so sure. 99% seems ridiculously high, even for such developed countries. Young people are more skilled and resourceful than one would think.
I write pretty good fanfiction, sometimes."Problem" being a relative term, though: Increases in efficiency due to automation far more than compensate for decreases in workforce availability. Thus, ever-growing quality of life (in purely material terms) among most strata of society, in spite of significant unemployment.
I wonder what would happen to the infants, though. Even in third-world countries, I'd imagine there wouldn't be nearly enough teenage mothers to be able to breast-feed more than a tiny fraction. Are synthetic alternatives available at all, in such places? If yes, would the stores last long enough for the infants to be ready for other foods? If no, just how bad is cow's milk for babies?
Of course, all of this is only relevant if the teenagers don't simply decide to abandon the infants in the first place. In the rural areas of "healthy" third-world societies that can be taken as a given, though, I think, due to close-knit social bonds at the level of family and tribe and the taking on of adult responsibilities at younger ages.
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.Cow's milk is unhealthy for young babies (1 or so years or less), but there are government supplied "alternatives" in developing countries, which aren't healthy at all. However after 1 year, babies could drink cow's or other animals' milk without any significant consequences.
I write pretty good fanfiction, sometimes.![]()
Yes, I consulted wikipedia before posting and gathered that much. But "unhealthy" can mean a lot of things; the long-term effects might be slightly stunted growth for 10% of infants, or death for 90%. Quite possibly nobody knows for sure, because it's the sort of experimental data hard to come by for any scientist who qualifies as a civilized human being at the same time - and the Mengele-types tend to be notoriously unreliable, even if their results are available somehow.
Ew! Good thinking, though.
edited 25th Dec '10 10:34:17 PM by kassyopeia
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.Well, cow's milk can lead to anemia due to nutrient imbalance, and the alternatives supplied by third world governments are "unhealthy" in that they're contaminated. That could lead to any number of things, but mostly death, because medical care would be impossible to find in this situation.
I write pretty good fanfiction, sometimes.Oh, another though, say good-bye to democracy as government, police and lawyers are now gone. In fact I think things would turn out not too different from Lord of the Flies Except with cars, and no rescue.
Oh, and what about clothes and other things, are lots of keys and key-cards and things suddenly going to go missing?
edited 25th Dec '10 10:52:18 PM by MattII
Y The Last Man is another series worth looking to for inspiration.
In that case there was a Gender Cide, but since most of the professions that run infrastructure are male dominated, the effect in that department wouldn't be too different from all the over 18's suddenly disappearing.
I started babysitting at 13 by 16 I think I could have kept my little cousins alive. I’d at least have died trying.
Cow or goat’s milk is ok if you cook it and the kid isn’t allergic. Yeah you end up w/ anemia but it’s better than starvation. Also you can start diluted rice cereal pretty young. My mom used to stock up, and keep a ton of baby formula in the house so some kids would be ok for a while.
I’d be concerned about running out of food in general. Reserves would last a while do to low population, but eventually not much would be left. Do your characters have the means to grow anything? Are any of them hunters?
Random thoughts:
You’d probably have packs feral dogs. You’d probably have a lot of shell shocked little orphans some mute or selectively mute. A few little kids who don’t have an older sibling or a gang may beat the odds and survive for a while; maybe you should research feral children.
What would scare me would be older teens getting pregnant. Being a pregnant teen w/ no mom, no aunts, and no hope of medical care would be absolutely terrifying.
Lots of knowledge would be lost. Illiteracy would become pretty common though some older kids would make the effort to teach the little ones. Higher math would be lost. New mythologies would arise.
Oh and diarrhea, lots of diarrhea.
The kid better not be allergic to the goat's milk.
Seriously, though, thanks for addressing that. Cooking anything might be a non-trivial task in itself once utilities have broken down, of course - but figuring out alternatives would be one of the survival essentials in any case. And the rural third-worlders I had in mind, or anyone else with access to live cows to obtain the milk in the first place, should be in a good position in that regard, too.
Soon the Cold One took flight, yielded Goddess and field to the victor: The Lord of the Light.How long is it going to take everyone to disappear, is it going to happen all at once, or are people going to disappear one at a time?
And, oh crud, how are zoo animals going to react, because if some of the predators, lions, tigers, leopards etc. get out then they're going to contribute to the death toll a fair bit I'd say.

I've got a novel in the works, a big one, based on the premise that one day, everyone on the planet ages 18 and up disappears. More or less vanishes into thin air. No reason given, many speculated upon by those left behind (religious/paranormal/scientific/just unexplainable) but nothing is ever confirmed. The disappearance is a one-time thing, people who turn 18 afterwards are unaffected (although at first many are afraid they will be, once they figure out no one older than 17 has been left).
So, storywise, I've worked out everything in great detail. Its centered around a town in Illinois (guess where the author lives...), fictional. Many characters, many subplots about how they go about trying to live, but main features is formation of two large factions that end up in a sort of war.
What I would like help on is figuring out the exact effects on infrastructure and stuff of the whole adult population being gone. I'm going to have the town's power die about a day and a half after the vanishing. But I'd like to get some advice on other aspects of how things function afterwards.
And if there's any other questions or points to bring up about how the world would be affected, please bring them up (for example, I'm realizing there will be a lot of babies, small children, and the retarded left behind who will end up dying if no one saves them.)