Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
The first casualties would be the billions of animals that are dependent on humans. Pets, zoo animals, farm animals in stables or enclosed meadows, animals in laboratories and research centers.
Some would go extinct, those who are dependent on breeding programs, like rhinos and some primates. Of course the extinction rate will immediately start to level off to almost normal rates. Once the forests and other nature grow back it will be back to normal and new species can evolve to fill the niches left behind by now extinct species.
It would depend on what the cause of human disappearance was and how quick it was.
The truth is pretty much anything capable of actually rendering humans extinct would probably render most animals extinct humans are far better surviving than most animals are. You talking asteroid impact, solar flare, nuclear war, massive climate change.
Humans can go into shelters, or build mitigation technology. The animals would just die if we didn't help them.
The only possible way I can imagine that humans would go extinct quickly and not any other life form would be some kind of viral disease outbreak either natural or artificial, but I realistically can't see something like that wiping out the whole species. You could have a death toll of 10 million people and it wouldn't even equal 1% of the global population. Especially considering it wouldn't be 10 million people all from the same area.
Think about all of the things humans have survived and with far inferior technology then anything we have now, ice ages, super volcanoes, global pandemics that keep coming back, hell in the 19th century one of the largest asteroids to hit the world since the extinction of the dinosaurs hit earth and literally no one died or even noticed.
You're forgetting the most obvious cause.
Instantaneous, world wide alien abduction