If All The People In The World Died...

[Billy_Ray]

This is a question that myself and my friends have debated for a while now.

If all the people in the world were to die now and you were the last person on earth how long would electricity last?

Personally I think that you could live the rest of your life with full electricity from the reserves that have been built up. There must be some kind of reserve for system failure that is designed to support a whole area not just one person?

However, my friends think it would run out quite quickly as it would need people to maintain the supply?

What are your opinions?

[Hippy]

Whilst electricity as a phenomenon would continue to exist, I think you mean the mains supply to houses etc. I expect that this would fail quite quickly as the power stations would need fuel and with no-one to top this up and maintain the distribution system the whole caboodle would grind to a halt.

 

If you could find petrol (don't forget you will need electricity to make petrol station pumps work) and a generator (like the portable traffic lights trailer thinggies) then you could make your own. However, there would be no radio, TV, Internet, etc so you would have to find your own entertainment. As you would be the ONLY one left that sounds rather sad and lonely. What a bleak future you have dreampt up!

 

[Mattk]

.......but remember there is just one person in the world !

would it really drain the grid that quick ?

[CT]

Electricity flows a little like water. Turn off the pump ( the power station ) and the electricity stops flowing straight away.

 

[SteveD]

You wouldn't need to worry about petrol: there would be plenty of vehicles around to "borrow".

 

[mr. piper]

as unlikely as it may seem this has actually happened to me! and to be honest i was too dead to notice if the leccy had gone, saying that my leccy went this morning at 9.00am and that was without global anilati,anialhat,anailit.... dead people everywhere, so there!

[LeMarchand]

If everyone suddenly died, as Hippy says, the electricity supply would not take long to fail, as there would be no-one to run the power stations. You could generate your own using a generator and fuel (if you could access it) of course.

 

However, you would have much bigger problems: all those dead bodies everywhere would rot; cars would be crashed everywhere (even if it happened when the roads were relatively empty); fires would run unchecked; I'm not sure about the unmanned safety of nuclear power stations, but I suspect that a few of them might blow - and if enough of them go, you'd have radiation problems; if it was just humans who died, animals would soon turn feral, and if it was every living animal that died, the ecosystem would collapse. (I'm sure there are many more problems I haven't thought of).

 

Assuming that only humans died, and that there weren't any radiation problems (and that you wanted to live as long as possible), I suspect that the best course of action would be to find a relatively secluded place in the country with it's own water supply, and to grow your own food/livestock. You could use a generator for power and would probably need to arm yourself against wild animals, but you could probably survive a long time assuming nothing happened that would require medical attention, like serious disease or injury.

[hopalong]

You would need someone to put a shilling in the meter

[rja211077]

it would stop within an hour i reckon due to failsafe devices at the power stations and the fuel supplies

[Mattk]

surely as with most things nowadays,the power stations themselves are fully automated with people taking only a minor role ie safety checks etc etc

 

[Gandy]

surely everyone in the world except you would not be considerate enough to turn off all of their electrical stuff before they died?  All this stuff left on would soon drain the power.

[AllYourBase]

I seem to recall an episode of the twilight zone that had a similar main theme. A nuclear accident killed everyone in the world except a lonely book reading bloke, who happened to be an a bank vault at the time. He lived quite happily for some time as he was happy in his own company reading all the books he had, but then sat on his glasses and became completely helpless! It was quite freaky.

[romko]

Don't know for sure, but I think you may be making a false parallel between electricity and water kept in a reservoir, that can be "drained".

I dont think that electricity is "stored " on a huge , ie. national, scale (excluding some smaller scale capacitance and battery type storage devices such as that used in solar energy) . There is no national "reserve tank" type thing for power as far as I know.

As such, as others have pointed out the supply would cut out when the power stations and generators failed . 

[Dom Tuk]

The electricity would not last long as all the dead people have left all their appliances on so it will drain the electricity sharpish. The major problem will be food, shelter and heat. I would then set up home in a large Tesco store and start eating the freezer foods first. the matchboxes will come in handy. when i have emptied one store (should take about 3 months) i will walk to the next store and set up home there. It should be fun really.

[peanut]

these are some interesting things to consider but i think you would be so lonely and sick of all the smell and disease from all the rotten bodies you would probably just kill yourself. not only that but you would need an awful lot of generators to keep everything running. fuel pumps, heat, refrigeration, light. you may also want to take up reading as your favorite hobby as you would have a lot of learning to do with nobody to tell you how to run a power station, milk a cow, and do everything else that was not previously your responsibility. but hey look at the bright side, until you get sick of all that crap and finally kill yourself, you will have no rules, no bills, nobody to tell you what to do. you could do anything you want. you could also live in a new house every day.

[tomd]

Surely all the people who died at computers, using power tools, watching TV, heating their houses etc would be (owing to the automatic age) using the same amount of electricity once they had died as they were beforehand.. Their heating and tvs won't turn themselves off because the occupants have died.

[Uriah Heep]

The answer is simple.  If everone in the world died over a short period of time there would be very little electricity after the next work shift.  Tecnology soon breaks down without the human touch.  In the case of neuclear power stations with spectacular effect.  In reality none of the electricity produced is stored.  What you make is what you get and when it has gone its gone.