So I heard there was this new flu... (in Off-topic)

Yeah so apparently its a thing, who's up for the doomsday countdown?!

(One non-pg word in the article, your sensitive eyes have been warned.)

http://gizmodo.com/5863078/engineered-avian-flu-could-kill-half-the-worlds-humans

In the fraking Netherlands of all places?

One can imagine some country kidnapping this scientist and telling him to reproduce his experiments in their country. Iran anyone?

And its just going to get easier and easier to do these sorts of things...

12 Monkeys anyone?

I was thinking Andromeda Strain or I am Legend

I'm so glad our most brilliant members of humanity are working so diligently to make sure we don't survive as a species :D

I've got a new flu? cool! (haven't read the article)

Nah, we could easily lose even more than 90% of the population and still survive just fine as a species (700+ mil left worldwide - about 1740 CE levels).
Half of current population is basically peanuts (3.5+ bil, we were that many in 1967 or thereabouts, not even half a century ago).

Heck, we could probably make due just fine with 99% of it gone (70+ mil left worldwide - about 1000 BCE levels).
In fact, we could probably still thrive even if 99.9% would vanish (7+ mil left worldwide - about 4000 BCE levels).

Just for reference's sake, we came back to the current level after being reduced to anything between 2k to 20k total not even THAT long ago (around 70,000 BCE).

Assuming the population loss was, you know, somewhat even (as in, mostly random, not selective by occupation or any other specific trait).

Or if the main trait(s) selected for 50% elimination was old age and/or general health level, that would work out quite nicely... gone would be most of the medicare/medicaid/social security financial problems or their equivalent in other countries (evil laughter).

We'd survive as a species, not as a society. I honestly believe that the world would be a very, very scary place in the aftermath of something like a mass death of the population, at least in many of the busier places of the world.

Considering that during my university years I was living in a city where the winter total city population was nearly but not quite double the summer city population, and even more of a drastic shift in the university-aged demographic (and I spent a few summers there), I can safely say that I would barely even NOTICE the disappearance of 50% of the population around.

Also, you do know that most of the jobs these days are in the service sectors, which are basically//mostly dependent on the total population, aren't you ? And with lowered population levels, the need for new construction, farming and such would drastically diminish, MORE than the proportion of the disappeared population (in farming since lower overall yields are much easier to obtain with far less work, and there would be far less of a need for new infrastructure, maintaining old infrastructure is trivial, etc).
Society would NOT collapse if half of the population vanished tomorrow.

You utterly and completely underestimate how badly people would handle that, especially if the cause was something like disease.

Think of society like a high rise building. If you remove half the building, you don't simply have a building that's half the size of the original. You have a very large building falling down very, very fast.

Then don't live in a high rise.

Not if you chop off the top half, then you do have half a building.

If chop the top half off a building all you have is a terrible sequel

Relax guys, I have it on good authority that this dude was just publishing the results of his best run through on Pandemic 2...

I mean, sure we've all fantasized about wiping out half the people we meet, but nobody ever follows through on it (besides, a virus is a terrible way to go, you might kill the wrong half).

There was this guy in Norway...

Well Thank you.

Oh, they'll panic and scream and run around for a while and refuse to go to work until it all (almost literally) dies down, but after that...