What Happens If Half Of Humanity Dies? | Unveiled

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What Would Happen if Half of Humanity Died?</h4>

In November 2022, the global population passed eight billion people for the first time. There has never been this many human beings alive on Earth. As such, the world (and society) is constantly changing and evolving. The regular cities of the past are now dwarfed by the megacities of the future. The roads are full of cars, the skies are full of planes. With satellites, telescopes, and the occasional long-distance rover mission, we’re also spreading out into space. So much infrastructure has been built over a relatively short period of time - the last couple hundred years or so. But what would happen if the numbers driving the change suddenly… fell?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what would happen if half of humanity died?

The mass extinction of humankind is a story and concept for the ages. Tales of a Great Flood wiping out almost all of everything appear in most major religions; the global environment has made it supremely difficult for humans to survive at various times in the ancient past; contemporary science fiction has tried its hand, too, at re-imagining the world with the people removed. In HBO’s “The Leftovers”, two percent of the population suddenly disappears. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the supervillain Thanos snaps his fingers and fifty percent of life gets erased. But could anything even slightly comparable ever happen in real life? And, if it could, then what would happen next?

Certainly nothing quite like it has ever happened before now. Even with the very worst disasters and pandemics in human history, nothing has yet taken fifty percent of the entire global population. The Black Death comes closest, with up to 200 million people lost, at the highest estimates. But that dreadful number still didn’t equate to fifty percent of everyone on Earth at the time. In the history of life on this planet, the worst ever mass extinction event happened about 252 million years ago - the Permian-Triassic Extinction, otherwise known as the Great Dying. It did take comfortably more than fifty percent of species alive, although of course humans weren’t around to be affected.

Perhaps a ruthless enough pandemic could bring about such a disaster, then; some kind of air or waterborne disease, with a near one hundred percent fatality rate. For the purposes of this video, we’re imagining that the Earth is physically much the same as it is now. The planet itself hasn’t been destroyed, it’s just the human population that’s on it. Really, then, we probably are picturing some kind of supernatural, unexplained, sci-fi style happening. One day, there’s eight billion people alive… the next, there’s four billion people. How would we cope?

From minute one, there’s misery, worldwide mourning, and unparalleled confusion. Loved ones are no longer with us, but also there’d be massive fear and concern that the same thing could happen again - especially if the cause were some kind of unknown, seemingly supernatural mechanism. What remained of humankind will have just witnessed something terrible that it truly couldn’t explain, so neither could it predict if it might happen more than once. Unsurprisingly, then, even more people than usual might turn to religion, to try to make sense of things. For some, this would be the Rapture (or something similar) and there would be efforts to try to work out why some people had been taken while others had been left behind. For others, some kind of religious response might simply offer comfort in such inexplicable times. 

The massive global religions might still struggle, however. There would now be some incredible issues for them to contend with. Because, was half of humanity dead really what God intended? And, if it was, then how many would still trust that God? Instead, there might be a splintering of Faiths, leading to the emergence of more and more smaller, more specific religions, and cults. Faced with something so unprecedented, there would be countless new legends, stories and justifications put forward… and it would be more difficult than ever to persuade big majorities to accept any one model, in particular.

It’s not as though science will’ve lost its following, however. In fact, with such a massive and all-consuming problem to face, and with the remaining four billion people all looking for practical answers, science might even come out of this event stronger than ever before. With half of humanity still alive, it’s not as though we will have lost the collective knowledge of civilization. This particular scenario isn’t an all-out do-over of the human race. And so, as unimaginably devastating as the event would be, humankind would still have the foundations to continue as it had done before. After some interference in the beginning, communications links would still exist. After some initial turbulence, scientific research could still take up where it left off. It would be possible for the development of technology to carry on. Whereas with something like nuclear war it’s often predicted that we would be blasted back to the stone age… that isn’t what would happen here. Instead, those that remain would find themselves still in the twenty-first century, only with dramatically fewer people to share it with.

So, science and religion remain, albeit they will have had to evolve. But what about politics and diplomacy? There’d certainly be some major upheaval, with the survivors demanding answers and the politicians never able to provide them. Perhaps more so than with any other doomsday scenario, then, this is one where worldwide anarchy really could take hold. Eventually, though, something resembling law and order and normality would set back in… only, the world map might look very, very different. Again, not physically, but in terms of population, trade, in terms of the languages spoken and the dominant worldviews; the balance of all of that might be completely altered. 

Much would depend on how the loss of life is spread out. Would every country, every continent, every culture, lose the same proportion of its people? If yes, then would the status quo resume? If no, then how would any discrepancies impact the future? There’d also be a lot riding on how any one country, continent or region responds to the initial disaster. Not just in trying to make sense of it, but in reacting to it, especially in the early days. The economy that can weather the storm best would likely find itself in an incredibly strong position for the long-term future. The lawmakers who wrangle the greatest influence over international affairs from the outset, would likely be making the rules on Earth for a long time afterwards. History has seen some similar circumstances, in the aftermath of wars, for example. Whenever humankind has been hard hit, there’s always a race on afterwards to recover (and reshape) what remains; the same would be true here, only we’ll never have seen anything at quite this scale before.

One thing’s for sure, the day when half of humankind disappears would never get forgotten. Even thousands of years from when it happened, that moment in time would still be overshadowing human civilization in some way. A before-and-after moment like no other, it would serve as a constant reminder, a legend, proving that life is fleeting, and that it could be taken away at any moment. If the cause becomes known, then the rest of human history would be guided by ensuring that the same thing never happens again. If the cause for the lost fifty percent were never discovered, then humanity would know that there are some powers that it just doesn’t understand; that reality just isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Because where did those lost people go? To another realm, another universe? Were they taken by a God, or by some other kind of higher power? The debates over the physicality and metaphysicality of that day would run and run.

For now, we’re relatively safe in the probable certainty that nothing like this is about to happen. Certainly nothing so supernatural as an entirely unexplained halving of our species. We do know that it might be possible for something to happen to kill off large numbers of us - including a disease or another international war. But we can, at least, take measures to try to stop this from happening, or to limit the damage if it does.

How do you think you would cope if so many people were suddenly no longer here? How do you think Earth as a whole would respond to such an incredible and disturbing turn of events? Let us know in the comments. No doubt every survivor would have a different story to tell, different pre-event memories to cherish, and different ways to try to make sense of it… because it really would be like nothing we’ve seen before. And that’s what would happen if half of humanity died.