Would the babies between 0-1 who survive learn languages from videos, learn to read and write, find books, copies of wikipedia etc. and reboot society?
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20No, they would all die. Have you ever dealt with a 3 year old (let alone a 1 year old) kid? – SJuan76 Aug 30 '18 at 21:56
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4Some will be adopted by animals. But there will be only a few, and it all likelihood these surviving humans won't find a mate and die out. – Alexander Aug 30 '18 at 22:11
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18Despite what Livy and Kipling might say, I think wolves would eat a baby before they adopted it. – kingledion Aug 30 '18 at 22:18
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1Forget about wolves! Far more likely, once the kibbles and bits run our, little Fifi Flufferpoodle will be noshing away on Junior's corpse! – elemtilas Aug 30 '18 at 22:24
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2Related: Everybody over the age of 15 suddenly dies, what happens? – Alexander Aug 30 '18 at 22:27
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@kingledion this goes well beyond Livy and Kipling: Documented cases of feral children – Alexander Aug 30 '18 at 22:29
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@elemtilas My 1 year old could totally take a poodle. – kingledion Aug 30 '18 at 22:30
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@Alexander The well documented cases are all between age 3 and 7. Under 1 year old, and even the animals can't help a child out. – kingledion Aug 30 '18 at 22:34
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4Babies still suckle at their mother's teat, get their diapers changed and are still learning to walk. It's absurd to think they'd survive. – RonJohn Aug 30 '18 at 22:38
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@kingledion how do you define a "well documented case"? Just in this Wikipedia article - "Andrei Tolstyk (2004) was raised by dogs in a remote part of Siberia from the age of three months to 7 years." and "Madina a three-year-old girl lived with dogs from birth till she was three years old." – Alexander Aug 30 '18 at 22:42
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1@Alexander Both of those had parents around. They weren't in the wild, they were just neglected. – kingledion Aug 30 '18 at 22:44
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@kingledion I'd argue that in these cases the children were completely neglected and their parent's didn't play significant role in their survival. – Alexander Aug 30 '18 at 22:50
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@Alexander's link, though interesting, shows that almost all the reputable (and using that term is a stretch) feral child cases involve a child being abandoned and finding a way to survive (almost all with a social group animal host) well after a year in age. – GerardFalla Aug 30 '18 at 22:57
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@RonJohn IMHO it's quite common to stop breast feeding between 6-12 months. And crawling is good enough if food and water is not too far away. – darsie Aug 30 '18 at 23:02
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Here's a 1-year old who was fed and kept warm by cats for several days: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/argentina/3866797/Real-life-Mowgli-kept-alive-by-cats.html – snips-n-snails Aug 30 '18 at 23:08
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@traal, nothing in the article claims the boy was a 1-year old. The word "baby" was mentioned a single time, but the description of the father "losing him" while he hunted for cardboard suggests a child old enough to walk. – JBH Aug 30 '18 at 23:25
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Darsie, so it does! My apologies to @traal. I didn't notice the subtitle, I just started reading the article. I'll clear the comment (and this one) in a bit so as not to add to the lengthening discussion. – JBH Aug 30 '18 at 23:48
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Babies might survive in warm climates, maybe southeast Asia, in fruit and vegetable gardens with their dogs, or picked up by monkeys. – darsie Aug 30 '18 at 23:57
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This question has sparked a [meta] discussion at What to do with troll questions? – user Aug 31 '18 at 07:47
4 Answers
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No
The assumption made in the question is "Some babies between 0 and 1 will survive."
Humans are born extremely dependent on their parents. Children at age 1 do not have fine or gross motor control skills. If all humans older than 1 disappeared, the rest would die very quickly soon afterwards.
jdunlop
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Baby at 12 months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX6u5TtCdvE looks pretty capable of grabbing and eating food and drinking from a puddle or bucket that's continuously refilled with water. Food might be in supermarkets torn open by dogs. Or maybe in jars smashed by the baby. There are lots of babies and endless possibilities. – darsie Aug 30 '18 at 22:33
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9They're also more than capable of grabbing and eating poison. Or drinking contaminated water. Which one do they only get one try with? Infants would die, plain and simple. It's not a case of animal-level intelligence, it's the fact that humans are born, developmentally, much earlier than other animals, to accommodate our oversized brains. This means that we need a ton of support as infants, but that's the way we evolved. It also means that, absent that support, we die. – jdunlop Aug 30 '18 at 22:45
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4@darsie I think it'd be fascinating to look for places where you might have a source of water that's continuously refilled without human intervention where there are not also natural predators which would relish an opportunity for a quick meal. – Cort Ammon Aug 30 '18 at 22:52
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@jdunlop There's no doubt that most will die from all fathomable reasons. But there will be a few lucky ones with food and water, protected by dogs or other animals. Rats might be a problem when there's lots of food around. – darsie Aug 30 '18 at 23:17
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@darsie - I think the odds are one in a million that you'd have an environment that was protected from the elements, had sources of food and water that did not require human replenishment for several years, and had protection, animal or otherwise, from hostile animal life. In which case, given the annual global birth rate of 130M, you'd have 130 survivors globally. The human race would die. (It does however, change things if humanity had forewarning, as suggested by Cort Ammon in his answer.) – jdunlop Aug 30 '18 at 23:24
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1Addendum to my last comment - and that the infant did not suffer an injury or infection that, absent caregivers, would prove fatal. eg. early development ear infection, bladder infection, infected cut when crawling over rough terrain, head injury from a fall (again, motor skills not spectacular), etc. – jdunlop Aug 30 '18 at 23:27
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Backing up Jdunlop and hoping to put the discussion in comments to rest...
And given the OP's conditions at the time I write this...
No
The adult human body can live without water for about 100 hours. That's 3ish days. Children under the age of 1 are still suckling and would likely die within 48 hours. On the miraculous chance that one is very hardy, it's dead in a week.
Keep in mind that just any old animal can't save the baby. It must be a lactating female.
The article found by Traal suggests some animals may bring scraps home the child could eat. Remember, we're talking about 0-1 year olds. How many are on solid food? Even if they are... the odds... the odds... The goal isn't for one to survive, but to reboot humanity....
And if one happens to be nearby, the odds of any animal nursing a human baby (Disney's Tarzan not withstanding) are so low that one saved baby on the entire planet would shock me.
And the problem is that you'd need 10-20 (minimum) within a local area (i.e., they become a peer group or grow to adulthood within mere miles of one another).
Worse...
Babies in 1st-world countries are all dead because, with rare exception, they're inside and in cities. Domesticated dogs and cats are more likely to sit there and watch the baby die in its crib.
It's the babies in 3rd-world countries that have the greatest chance of survival, which I still consider to be zero, because they're not as separated from the wild as 1st-world babies are. But, to build on what Kingledion said in the comments, a wild predator (one that is trained to eat the easily-caught young of its prey) is far more likely to eat the child than nurse it.
But let's assume 20 kids did survive such that as adults they could meet
Would they reboot society?
The short answer is yes, but it would take just as long as it took the first time: tens of thousands of years. The children are learning from their animal parents, not human parents and trained siblings. They wouldn't know a video player or a book from any other piece of meaningless trash laying about.
There isn't any electricity, anyway. That all stopped working weeks-to-months after the adults all died.
That means books, but weather gets into unmaintained buildings, and paper rots. They're not being trained to read, they're being trained to hunt. Which means everything other than picture books is just pages with weird scratching on them.
But, what if they found that picture book and started making the "A is for Apple" connection?
That's such an unbelievable long shot, but let's say it did happen. No spoken language, but they start figuring out what characters are and a few words. How long to reboot civilization (aka, to bring it back to 2018 standards)?
Tens of thousands of years.
Knowing that "A is for Apple" doesn't give you any clue toward building an operating fabrication facility to build computer chips which are then assembled into a working computer with written software that plays World of Warcraft.
I sincerely apologize, but without some external influence acting as the adult to train the child, (a) all the children are dead, but if they aren't (b) they would need just as long as we originally did to come back up to speed.
JBH
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2You probably wouldn't have the thousands of years you'd want anyway. A postulated minimum viable population for space colonists is 160. 20 is well below minimum viable for humans, so genetic drift and the consequences of inbreeding would finish off any such community. – jdunlop Aug 30 '18 at 23:35
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@jdunlop, you're probably right, but I'll willing to offer it as a gimme. With 20, there's an above-zero chance. – JBH Aug 30 '18 at 23:47
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After the introduction of foods at six months of age, recommendations include continued breastfeeding until one to two years of age or more. Globally about 38% of infants are only breastfed during their first six months of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breastfeeding – darsie Aug 31 '18 at 00:11
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There are off grid houses with solar electricity. Solar panels should last 20-40 years. Inverters don't usually last that long. – darsie Aug 31 '18 at 00:14
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6Darsie, you want to reboot humanity. The Internet doesn't operate on solar panels. Solar panels may reduce the cost burden of public buildings, but they don't operate on solar panels. Unmaintained buildings experience water and wind leaks, destroying the interior. You can't offer point solutions for a systemic problem. Your goal cannot be achieved. – JBH Aug 31 '18 at 00:17
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3And that first six months of life is 50% of your "surviving" population. After that you have children who might be able to crawl who are hoping to live near a food source that will be provided (those lovely cats) or somehow survives for 5-7 *years* as a nearby pile. You set the goal: rebooting humanity. All the "but one lived" stories in the world don't add up to a solution. The answer to the question you asked is "no." – JBH Aug 31 '18 at 00:20
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@JBH Thanks for your answer. I accepted it because it was most detailed and faceted and while not always correct it included the option of survival, which I think is reasonable. I don't know if the odds are as bad as you put it and it feels a bit weird to be the judge to select an answer. – darsie Aug 31 '18 at 10:06
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No thanks, I do not want to automatically move this discussion to chat. – darsie Aug 31 '18 at 14:58
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Darsie, that "request" (Please avoid extended... ) is automatically created by the system after a conversation between two people has gone on for a while to avoid two people dominating the comment chain such that no one else has an opportunity to participate (or can't be seen in their participation). It's part of the StackExchange engine and needn't be responded to. – JBH Aug 31 '18 at 17:17
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Maybe
I agree with jdunlop that the assumption that any babies under the age of 1 survive without assistance does not hold water. Those babies will most likely dehydrate to death. Some may starve instead. The lucky ones will die of SIDS. This is not a happy world you are creating.
If we assume that more than 0 babies survive, then we must assume that there is a tremendously advanced automated nursing system designed to raise these children after the humans are gone. This would be as advanced as the zookeepers who raise birds with bird puppets so that they bond to something that looks like the correct species.
If you have such a system in place, whether or not these children grow up to read and write is really dependent on whether they system causes that or not. It's going to be complicated enough that you might as well treat it as another human being.
Cort Ammon
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3Interesting. If society has time to prepare for this event, the situation becomes a whole lot different. – Alexander Aug 30 '18 at 22:32
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1note these children will grow up as sociopaths due to lack of social contact, automated childcare is unlikely for humans since they need social contact almost from birth. – John Aug 31 '18 at 00:03
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No, but maybe not for the reason you were expecting.
There's been some research on development of Math Faculties and other such things. Basically what it boils down to is we construct "Phrases" and "Metaphors" in our thought processes. All of these abstract concepts, etc. have been closely related to words that already existed with very few exceptions. (Babies can detect small numbers and differences between them as one of the exception.... most animals can also do this, it's called Subitizing). Words took a long time to develop. Especially the abstract ones like Zero. My personal belief is that abstract ideas just take more "Supporting Evidence"; that there's a gap in your knowledge, or shortcut of describing that you feel you're missing, which leads you to posit an abstract idea. At any rate we know that language is harder to learn when you're older and that a certain level is needed to hit the next level. So if someone is raised without communication then they'll have no "Human Intelligence" and the idea of them picking up such intelligence from what's lying around is probably pretty fanciful. Further amassing the required level of knowledge to utilize any of it before it was lost is further removed from plausible...
Imagine you were raised somehow by Monkeys (taught tool usage) in Asia (so you can relate to no communication). Most useful information these days is in electronic form. What do you think your odds are as a teen of finding a computer. Being interested in it versus destroying it or finding daily food. Figuring out it needs power. Finding power. Getting lucky with the hard drive contents (internet is a dream). Making/finding the tools required to utilize contents. Utilizing the contents.
For some things this is already a monumental task. Even with an average human's normal intelligence level. A reduced one is just absurd.
So if we take the premise that a decent amount survived to teen years. The likelihood of a huddle of humans deciding to research would be low. Even lower that they succeed at anything... And here's the real kicker: "With our current technology... how well does advanced correlate with danger?". I'd say a decent amount. That is, your humans that are smart are gonna kill themselves because there's too many guns and nonsense around and you don't have enough trial population to fuck up too many times. Even electricity is dangerous and you need it for tons of things we use today.
TL;DR No->Maybe->Highly Unlikely->No->Absurd->Maybe, they survived anyway?->Dead anyway
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