Historical Plagues Impacts

Screw the man-made disasters, just think of how fast diseases would spread. IIRC, dense population centers were one of the contributing factors to the bubonic plague.

Yes, to think of all the broken bones we could have mended in pre-Egyptian times; all the people who died needlessly from the Black Death in Europe; the sailors we lost to scurvy at sea. The numerous indigenous peoples that did not survive initial contact with European pathogens. So many lives lost needlessly.

Well, all of it was due to the lack of medical knowledge. The bubonic plague hardly kills anyone anymore. The point the parent is making is that we shouldn't compare the societal effects of COVID19 today with that of the bubonic plague when it was at its worst.

Another contributing factor was the lack of modern medicine. Plenty of communicable diseases exist today, and residents of dense neighborhoods are doing fine. If a disease kills too fast for a treatment to be discovered in time to prevent many deaths, it will probably be killing too fast to spread effectively. Swine flu killed ~14,000 people worldwide, so I'd put dying from an outbreak of a deadly disease at the same level of probability as a man-made disaster like terrorism. In other wor

The Inca didn't even have the concept of infectious disease, or quarantine. If you want a 99.9th percentile bad outcome look at Black Death Norway. Civilization didn't collapse in the face of 60% of the population dying. These are people without the germ theory of disease, never mind antibiotics, antivirals and the state capacity to seal borders completely and modern hospitals. COVID can be really, really bad without it ever having been likely to be a civilizational or species level th

It's a well established fact that 80-90% of the pre-Columbian population died from European infectious diseases, often before seeing a single European, since the diseases travelled faster than the people.This was centuries before the germ theory of disease became mainstream in the late 1800s, and no one on either side had a clear understanding of what was going on.Divine intervention was probably the most common theory.

Because the Americas were isolated while Europe had engaged in extensive trade with the middle east, asia, and africa for centuries. European resistance to disease did not come free, it came at the cost of having lived through several catastrophic pandemics. The black plague (among other endemic diseases such as smallpox, measles, cholera, and malaria) killed hundreds of millions of Europeans, the Europeans of the 15th century were the descendants of the survivors of past outbreaks.

Disease maybe? The Spanish flu wiped out more people than WW1.

"we'd have to explain why it couldn't happen, before speculating on less-likely scenarios"The colonization of Americas is the perfect counter-example for disease wipe-out explanation. Pre-Columbian American population had no immunity whatsoever to a bunch of serious diseases (some of which managed to become pandemics back in colonizer's homelands), diseases that have accumulated over millennia (since the last Bering overland/over-ice human crossing)! You'd e

Actually diseases from Europe swept through the population, decimating it; except right at the coast the natives met the devastating germs before they met the Europeans themselves. There was brute force, but little of it was needed. Europe got Syphilis in return, which also caused widespread death for a generation or two, before mutating into a less fatal form.