Timeline for If everyone in the world disappeared except 35 random people, how long would it take for one of them to realize they're not alone?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 22, 2018 at 22:17 | comment | added | Anthony | I think that there is going to a huge ceiling on anyone's survival if they don't find other people within a certain period of time. Determining what that amount of time is is an interesting question in and of itself. I suppose I see your point that someone in an urban area has to migrate farther to reach an area of sustainable resources (regardless of any presumed skill sets), but I think this would be offset by the vast availability of non sustainable resources within their urban area, eg canned foods that will take a lifetime to go through. | |
| Aug 22, 2018 at 22:13 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | @Anthony The point of that caveat was that we can reasonably expect a bushman to live out their life in this case, at their full life expectancy. I think that we have to limit our assumptions of life expectancy for the urbanite, because their environment is radically changed by this shift. This affects how far they can walk. | |
| Aug 22, 2018 at 19:54 | comment | added | Anthony | Yawn at your survival skills caveat. Some Bushmen with mad survival skills might be able to field dress a deer and make fire from their ass or whatever, but that doesn't make them any more skilled at finding one person that's likely 1000km or more away. Humans are clever and social. We are designed to survive novel situations. A "spoiled urbanite" may not be able to track a wildebeest by scent, but no one is so helpless they would starve as soon as the lights went out or would walk off a cliff without GPS. | |
| Aug 22, 2018 at 6:09 | comment | added | user | Of course, also, if there are more than 19 urban areas of sufficient size, it seems somewhat unlikely that more than one person would be left in each, thus potentially nullifying your argument in your "best hope" paragraph. Taking the 37M inhabitants figure for Tokyo ("largest city on the planet") from the article you linked, if you scale down the world's population from 7,000,000,000 to 35, that's a factor 200M reduction. That would leave approximately 1/5th of a person in Tokyo. The odds that there would be more than one person left even in the biggest city on the planet seem rather slim. | |
| Aug 22, 2018 at 5:56 | comment | added | user | I added some SI units, but I think there is a bigger problem with your answer: it seems to me that you used the wrong surface area figure. Wikipedia puts the total surface area of the Earth at 196 940 000 sq mi, but the land area as 29.2% of that or 57 510 000 sq mi (148 940 000 km²). You probably want to double-check your calculations. 35 people spread over 57.5M mi² would be about 1.64M mi² per person, which is quite far from your figure of 4.8M mi². | |
| Aug 22, 2018 at 5:54 | history | edited | user | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Add some SI units
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| Aug 22, 2018 at 5:50 | comment | added | user | At a moderate walking pace of 4 km/h and by walking 8 hours/day, 429 km is easily traversable in 2 weeks. Even a completely unfit person should be able to manage half of that, which means that you'll cover that distance within a month. Of course, that doesn't help if you don't know where to go and the other person either goes to where you're going, or stays put! If everyone is wandering around looking, that alone would be a serious obstacle for anyone to find anyone else. I would guesstimate that most people can spot another person 1 km away in open terrain, but probably not 10-100 km away. | |
| Aug 22, 2018 at 5:06 | comment | added | Shadowzee | Using square kilometers is extremely misleading. A straight line distance would be far more accurate. 400Km is going to cost you either 3-8 hours of driving. Easily achievable in a single day. | |
| Aug 22, 2018 at 4:46 | history | answered | Cort Ammon | CC BY-SA 4.0 |