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Comment by Aerbil313 | Hacker News Reader

A global disaster is very different from a local one. I suggest you review your faith in The Almighty We. Civilization has never been more fragile in history than it is now.

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But there's nothing in the article to suggest that these events actually affected the entire world. Most of the analysis seems to have been carried out in the northern hemisphere. If one of these events happened, perhaps it'd affect only one hemisphere or we'd have portions of the world unaffected or partially unaffected and able to provide assistance.

Half the world is still very different to one country.

In fact, if the "once country" was _China_ (or Taiwan) it could be a civilisation ending event. We've built a house of cards, and while it does have some redundancy it's not all that resilient.

Keep in mind the modern world as it is now hasn't even existed 50 years, it has never really been tested with a truly international disaster.

We’re just coming out of an international disaster.

The “international disaster” was voluntarily shutting down production for a relatively short period.

Let’s see how we handle something real like another world war or global natural disaster.

You're ignoring (among other things) global food logistics. You delete the ability to produce, deliver, and distribute fuel to a hemisphere for a couple of months and the resulting disruption to agriculture guarantees a global famine.

Would it be global or would it only be the side of the Earth that was facing the Sun at the time of impact?

It hardly matters. Pick a hemisphere, you will probably hit 2 of China, the US, and Europe. No matter what a large chunk of the worlds manufacturing is going down.

Not the side, it's about the hemisphere. And in general the northern hemisphere is weaker to intrusions by powerful electromagnetic events (would have to lookup why again). It also turns out that most of the worlds population is in the northern hemisphere above the tropic of cancer.

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