Harry Potter New millenium challenge

[kingdark]

This is a strict non crossover challenge that starts post Hogwarts.

It is the year two thousand. The prophecy made by an extinct / conquered civilization that in the year two thousand all advanced technology will cease to exist becomes reality.

Any and all technology that is based on electricity / electronics or advanced engineering fails to work.

Planes crash.
Trains stop.
Trams stop.
Cars no longer respond when their engines stop working causing them to crash and cause accidents. Chaos erupts all around the world. Hundreds of thousands of people die in accidents, crashes and afterwards from injuries and wounds. Many thousands more die from disease, the lack of food and water.

In a mere year millions of people are dead and the major cities have become virtual ghost towns. guns and advanced firearms become incredible rare, forcing people to return to sword and bow.

That is the basic scenario I have in mind. It is with this back story that the story takes place. Witches and wizards also notice what is happening but because they don't rely on technology but on magic they are mostly unaffected.

Several darker witches and wizards take advantage of this to 'put the muggles in their place' since they lost most of their weapons and are forced once more to rely on horses for transportation, sails ships to travel on the sea and so on.

Personally, I hate the canon epilogue. In fact, as far as I am concerned the seventh book (and sixth if I'm feeling particularly nasty) don't exist.

The author can twist it as he or she wishes as long as the background story fits the criteria.

No technology that relies on electronics period.
Millions of people died from wounds, accidents, crashes and diseases.
Doctors and the like have become very rare.
The amount of births have gone down as well because people can no longer go to hospitals for various reasons.

Thoughts about this scenario?

Kingdark

"I'm baaaaaaaaack!"

 

[zeebee1]

They thought the muggles were helpless. They aren't going to attack and face prison time just because the muggles are now more helpless than before. After all, zero is still zero.

Besides, it's not like guns will suddenly stop working.

 

[Archanon]

See... I can't get behind this sort of challenge, because you'd really need to explain why it no longer works... because you can't just have technology stop working for no reason and have everything else about the world remain the same. If it's because the rules of reality change, well, sure, that could do it... but then we wouldn't have thunderstorms, probably, because electricity would work differently, and hell humans would probably simply die because, y'know, your brain runs on electrical signals.

And that's ignoring combustion; does that still work? If not, why have those chemical properties suddenly changed, and what else would that effect? Because I guarantee that those same chemicals exist outside technology.

So yeah. This kind of challenge can't work, because science.

 

[The Eromancer]

oh that's pretty easy of an explanation, we actually just recently noticed that the sun set off a solar flare with enough emp in it to wipe out all electronics on the planet in one good blast, shielded or not.

Why do we still have electricity right now?

Because the solar flare shot out in a different direction from earth, so be happy with what you have folks, you never know when it could just up and stop working one day.

The only thing about this explanation though is that once you started making new electronic devices you'd have electricity again and there's no reason for the earth to stay with no electricity.

Oh sure something like that would cause a huge loss of life, might even cause some nuclear energy plants to go up, but its not completely unrecoverable from.

 

[Ina_meishou]

This idea....is drastically underestimating the devastation a permanent loss of all electrical technology would cause.

Millions is, at a low ball estimate, the losses for the first week. Inside a year the major cities would not be 'virtual ghost towns' but very real death zones due to lack of food transportation and the epidemic diseases caused by lack of medical storage, lack of sanitation protocols, and the vast number of corpses that would pile up rapidly.

That's not getting started on the cannibals that would emerge, and the diseases and miscellaneous shit that would lead to.

It's a nightmare scenario, anyone alive to return to swords and horses and scavenging for gunpowder and all is going to have to be lucky as fuck. And there probably won't be a whole lot of them for the wizards to lord over.

Birthrate, though, would actually skyrocket. That's the usual response to crisis conditions and vast death. A bunch of those kids would die young, but they'd be born.

 

[MonCappy]

This idea....is drastically underestimating the devastation a permanent loss of all electrical technology would cause.

Millions is, at a low ball estimate, the losses for the first week. Inside a year the major cities would not be 'virtual ghost towns' but very real death zones due to lack of food transportation and the epidemic diseases caused by lack of medical storage, lack of sanitation protocols, and the vast number of corpses that would pile up rapidly.

That's not getting started on the cannibals that would emerge, and the diseases and miscellaneous shit that would lead to.

It's a nightmare scenario, anyone alive to return to swords and horses and scavenging for gunpowder and all is going to have to be lucky as fuck. And there probably won't be a whole lot of them for the wizards to lord over.

Birthrate, though, would actually skyrocket. That's the usual response to crisis conditions and vast death. A bunch of those kids would die young, but they'd be born.

In such a scenario the lucky people would be the ones who died. I know if such a think were to happen in real life, I would not want to be among the survivors.

 

[kingdark]

We humans are stubborn bastards. I have no doubts we would and could survive should it happen. A few generations down the road and we would be straight back where we are now or further!

 

[daniel_gudman]

What if <a href='http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=351' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>the world stopped spinning and everybody flew into a wall?</a> Like with a focus on Harry Potter characters.

 

[Ina_meishou]

We humans are stubborn bastards. I have no doubts we would and could survive should it happen. A few generations down the road and we would be straight back where we are now or further!

With no electronic technology?

Bullshit.

I like drive and ingenuity and working to better things as themes as much as anyone else...

But bullshit.

If our tech goes, human civilization as we know it is fucking done. Humans will probably survive as a species, there will probably be successor states and tribes and cultures. Those societies would quite possibly achieve some impressive shit, in time.

But the world we live in is over, if electronics suddenly stop working. Our systems are too heavily tied up in electronic storage, transfer, power, and tools to keep on. And refugees fleeing from the core regions will disrupt the periphery zones that are less bound to electronics, over-straining those systems.

 

[Hawk]

Without electricity ever functioning again yeah our society probably would take hundreds of years to redevelop. I mean it's hard to even conceive of much of our technology having analogs without electricity but that's our own education and knowledge working against us, eventually humans would find a new means of powering technology. Also combustion engines can run entirely without electricity. Modern cars wouldn't due to computer control systems and spark plugs, but older designs would. Trains would run still. Guns would still fire. I expect that a lot of small combustion engines would be used in place of electric in short term. Very primitive computer systems can be made to run on clockwork. It would take a LONG time to recover, but I fully expect it's possible.

If it's just a massive EMP from the sun then only half the planet (the daylight side) goes dark, but even in the event of a planet wide EMP, society would break down, probably deaths would be well over a billion. It would probably take decades for economies to recover to their pre-EMP states, but they would recover. We rely on electronics yes, but we have people that know how to make them, and we have books on how they're made still. I expect that we'd start to see limited electrical systems re-established within a year at most. Keep in mind that a lot of military electronics are shielded against EMP, and some civilian electronics would survive by being in Faraday cages (intentionally built or pure chance).

Edit: I was curious enough on this topic to do a quick search. According to National Geographic our current technology gives us at least 20 hours warning of an emp from the sun because the emp is based on the coronal mass ejection component of a solar flare, which being composed of matter travels much slower than the light of the solar flare so we can see the solar flare event well before the CME hits the planet. In these 20 hours if electrical companies acted quickly they could disconnect their transformers from power lines, and leave them disconnected while the CME passed and reconnect them afterwards (it only takes a few hours in passing the planet). The electrical grid would then survive intact, as would much of the electronics if people properly removed power supplies and grounded them. The planet being without power for around a day as electric companies disconnected and reconnected the grid would likely cause no small degree of mass panic, but as people in quite a few areas can tell you, being blacked out for a day doesn't generally kill.

While I admit to generally ascribing to the theory that humans are inclined to hysteria and attacking each other when things turn bad, I am pretty willing to believe that law and order wont completely collapse in a day or two.

 

[pfeil]

No technology that relies on electronics period.

Like, say, the human brain?

 

[Vanigo]

No technology that relies on electronics period.

Like, say, the human brain?

Human brain's pretty good at rebooting itself. A big EMP will knock you for a loop, but you'll recover.

Actually, there's something in HP canon that can shut down electronic technology pretty effectively: the huge concentration of magic at Hogwarts. So the question is, why is there suddenly so much magic everywhere? And the muggles... are they still muggles?