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Comment by patall | Hacker News Reader

That really depends on what people 'think' is a lot. About 7 million Germans died in WWII (civilian + military), clearly a lot, but still 'only' 10% of the population.

The Ukraine military has reporter their own casualties as 3'000 men so far, which is huge, yet 10+ times that many people go into sport arenas every week.

If nuclear war now would kill 50% of the global population, it would certainly define our history for centuries, yet half of us (i.e more than 4 billion humans) would still be there afterwards.

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The problem we have today is that of specialization. I dont believe there is a viable scenario where only 40% of the population dies. We either lose something like less than 10% of the population or we loose over 80%.

Food is the reason. In 1900 before the green revolution there were less than 2 billion people on the planet and huge portions of them grew their own food. After that point industrialisation and mass fossil fuel production of fertiliser allowed our population to explode. Now were completely dependant on those factories that have massive supply lines fed by specialists.

2 billion people today rely on subsistence farming, it's silly to think 90% of people on earth would die on account of that alone.

They survive on subsistence farming because their near large urban cities don't. The moment those cities are not fed the terrible order they already exist in gets worse. A supersaturation even can only exist as long as energy is being applied. When that is lost (fossils fuels) then a corrective event occurs.

No, they survive on subsistence farming regardless of what any cities do. That's the definition of subsistence farming.

I agree that the situation in cities would be dire, but over 40% of people live in rural areas and half of them are already growing their own food.

Well, the point is if the cities can’t feed themselves the people would go out into the countryside to search for food, and food wars would break out. So even if you have your own farms, property rights are basically over under a catastrophe of that scale

> So even if you have your own farms, property rights are basically over under a catastrophe of that scale

1. And for the same reason, just any kind of government will be forced to seize land from vapid hipsters, and grow something edible on it, along with enforcing at least minimal rationing.

2. 1/3 of food in the world is wasted

> consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food, 222 million tonnes, as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa

A healthy young adult can live a heck a lot of time on one bag of staple foods.

There were under 2 billion people in the world at the beginning of the 20th century. There are now about 8. This is a large increase in biomass, largely driven by the use of petroleum fertilizers. This means, on average, roughly, a human being is 3/4ths made of crude oil. You are what you eat.

If you take targeting of oil production infrastructure as a given, that means 3/4ths of all human beings starve to death. What's left might not have the know how to farm without oil, and that doesn't take into account contaminated farmland.

Now, that oil that has been pumped and turned into food is now biomass in the biosphere, so the earth can now support that increased level of population after a period of regrowth. It isn't the end of this scale of civilization, but it is a reset back to agrarian civilization for a time.

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