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How old do surviving children need to be to keep human civilization from failing?

This question is inspired by several similar questions on this site.

The scenario: at one moment, all people above the age X disappear without a trace. How low this X can be that human civilization survives?

Obviously, 1 year old is too young, and 18 is arguably too old.

I set the following criteria of success:

Children don't have to maintain world in order after the event. Any level of chaos and regression is acceptable if the rules above are satisfied.

P.S. Extra bit of information - there are apparently more than a few children under the age of 18 (likely thousands, if not tens of thousands) who are familiar with Survivalism. A proper "failure" scenario should mention how all of those children will be eliminated, or isolated for the rest of their lives.

12 Answers
12

I'm not convinced that 18 is too old at all; in point of fact, if ALL the 'adults' left at once, society would be ruined in many different ways.

What we call civilisation is really a very delicate balance in this world. Let's start with something as simple as food distribution. Without people who know how to drive trucks, most of humanity will starve because it lives in cities and its food is produced on farms. Even if an 18YO knows how to drive a truck, they're not experts in logistics, planning, economics, etc. That's even assuming there's enough fuel to power the trucks, now that all the workers who actually know how to operate oil rigs and refineries are gone.

Let's assume that this mass extinction is really a mass disappearance, and there aren't a truckload (no pun intended) of bodies to dispose of before they generate disease, the real problem here is that civilisation, society, and all the other words we use to describe the framework of human social and cooperative interaction is NOT based on knowledge alone; it's also based on experience.

You've just lost all the experience that would under normal circumstances mentor the younger generation through the awkward transition of knowing something theoretically to actually understanding how to do it.

Any mechanic will tell you that knowing how to fix a car isn't as simple as reading a book on how engines work. The value an older mechanic brings to the table is all that experience of knowing what that knocking sound on the left side of VWs really means, and what to do to fix it. Similar scenario with doctors, and other critical professions.

Engineering is another example; knowing the math is one thing. Knowing how to design a building by knowing how people think, how they work, how they use the various elements of the building, what they care about - that's decades of experience.

We often make fun of the older / younger generation (cross out that which does not apply to you) and we talk about how the old world thinking is no longer relevant, and how these new whippersnappers come in with their fresh ideas and no understanding of how the world really works, and we're both right. At the same time, we're both terribly wrong.

The young in society are able to surpass the old precisely because the old are sharing the knowledge and experience they've accumulated with the young. That gives the young a 'leg up' on things, allows them to devote more of their time to refining and improving on what's already known rather than learning it all over again.

What you're doing is effectively disrupting that cycle. Assuming all the young folk don't die off in the short term from starvation or disease, the society that would remain would go back to a tribal nature, at least for a time. Cars and other tech may not last through extended periods without this young generation taking up the mantle across a very wide range of industrial fields, and if even one of those fails, it's possible society collapses, at least for a few generations.

Bottom line is that there are very few industrial and technical pursuits in our society that are extraneous, or even easy to learn without experience of others being passed on through the generations. Your society not only has to keep all that going without the experience, but then has to learn to pass that on in their own turn without the benefit of having received it themselves.

Your child society is in more trouble than I think you suspect.

Children in more traditional, agriculture based societies have much better chances of survival. Especially in areas where families still live almost self-sufficiently on farms and children are involved in the farm work.

For example, among the Amish: "Until the children turn 16, they have vocational training under the tutelage of their parents, community, and the school teacher."

And child labour is still common in Africa: "Agriculture alone employs more than 30% of all African children aged 10–14."

Based on this, I'd estimate that the limit would be somewhere between 10 and 16 years of age. Of course living on a self-sufficient farm is demanding, and children would have hard time surviving on their own. But there is enough of such families that even if some don't make it, some will. It helps that there are usually many siblings, so they don't get isolated when adults disappear.

if these are the criteria:

I set the following criteria of success:

Then I somewhat arbitrarily assert based off of cognitive development of children that the minimum age needed to achieve the above falls roughly between 12-13 years of age.

Society will collapse horrifically from the event with lots of children dying, however, 12 year olds generally have obtained enough skills in literacy and mathematics to re-learn lost knowledge from leftover books. Moreover, key cognitive changes occur at that age range allowing them to adapt to cognitively adapt to those changes. Children younger than that would probably adapt more primitively with a higher chance of loss of knowledge........

This isn't perfect because a lot of it is individual and situational driven. Theoretically, if a child as young as 2 managed to learn literacy and survive the apocalypse they could reboot society.

Not to mention overcoming the literal "Lord of the Flies" scenario incurred by the loss of authority, however that will happen even if the age cap is 18.

About 35

And even then it would be traumatic.

Civilisation is the accumulated knowledge of our need to work cooperatively to survive. It's a set of skills and knowledge accumulated over centuries, passed down from one generation to the next by a combination of education and in-work training.

To be able to maintain your technological level you need the infrastructure, that requires an active workforce who have the skills and knowledge to operate it. At around age 35 a graduate has 10-15 years of practical knowledge and some seniority. You've killed off the government, much of the bureaucracy and any senior management outside the tech industry.

You've also killed off much of the legal profession, large swathes of your food suppliers and a few other industries that you probably haven't thought of that define civilisation, like art historians for example.

What's more interesting is you've still killed off many of the people who have the skills needed to allow you to maintain any technological level without the major infrastructure of the power stations and power distribution networks. People like blacksmiths and farriers who know how to work metal by hand.

It jumps off the page that the death of (say) 99% of the population would not mean that any of your three criteria had failed.

I think criteria 1 and 3 would be met if 6-year-olds were to survive. Some of them, especially from subsistence cultures, would have some idea about farming. Even if they couldn't do it, at first, some of them would find enough food stocks to to survive until they were old enough to figure out how to farm. Most would not, but it only takes a few. Some 6-year-olds can also read and know about dictionaries. Libraries would survive and would still be there for people to use to re-learn.

Criterion 2 is tougher. I am assuming that a temporary loss of technology, followed by re-learning even within a few years, does not qualify as "maintained". I also think you need significant age to maintain knowledge of manufacturing. I'm guessing you'd need age 15 or so for above-stone-age tech to be maintained in "at least a few communities". The electric grid would fail, but there are a lot of above-stone-age technologies that don't depend on it, i.e. metalworking, paper, non-electricity-based printing, sailing, mechanical watchmaking, and college-level physics, chemistry, biology, and math, all of which would be would understood by a few bright children. With 15-year-olds, I'd assume that tech would initially drop to the level of 1600 or so -- more in some areas and less in others. That is still above-stone-age.

IMO the answer is "older than you might think".

The glue that holds civilization together is communication. A functioning wide-area network using modern electronic communications is soon going to break down, as key devices fail and don't get fixed.

So, who in your post-disaster world actually knows how to run a society where most of the comminucation network consists of telephones connected by physical wires, or the physical delivery of messages written with pen and ink on paper? Arguably, only people who were alive when that was the only thing available to them - and that probably means "people over 50", at the youngest.

I'd say around 8 to 10 years old.

First off, any city kids will die. However, in rural area's, especially in poor countries, there's plenty kids working on their parent's farm who know enough about crop rotation and the like to run it, if they keep working. Why the poor countries ? Because in rich countries the farmers are a lot more dependent on technologies, and in poor countries they're more self-sufficient. This'll be enough to get self-sufficient. You aren't quite back to stone age - they'll know basics of both agriculture and husbandry, which will be enough. Reboots will take ages as all many of the wealthy countries, where knowledge is concentrated, will be wiped out completely. The groups of boy scouts might take a bit longer to die.

Any reboot is probably dependent on low-population-density countries that are still rich and well-educated. For example, kids in certain parts of norway learn basic survival out in the wilds, while also being taught normally in schools. These could be a focus of a reboot, if enough knowledge is preserved in books they can access.

Note that every digital dependent storage will most likely be wiped out completely.

You'll probably also have traumatized every single one of them. But humanity is tough, and children can be better at adaptation than you'd think. After a year or five, it's just the way life is (and they'll start marrying again). They'll almost have forgotten the world used to be different. Most likely, older siblings will try and take care of their younger siblings, so those probably won't all die, but the lower you get in age the higher the mortality goes.

Right away, civilization will fall down close to stone age levels. Groups will either go agricultural, hunter-gatherer or animal-herding. Or some combination of those. They'll lose global communication as soon as automatic systems start failing. Electricity will fall out, and that's that. From that moment on, every group is on itself. Oh, yeah. They'll form groups, or tribes, before the week is over. Most of the ones fated to die as well.

In a year of five, the survivors will have a more or less stable life. This means they might start attempting to harvest technology. Expect the first new children to be born around this time - about 12 is a pretty normal age to be fertile, and they'll start it right away. Perhaps there are exceptions before, but as a rule humans are conditioned to start families by choice when they feel more or less stable and capable of feeding the offspring. This goes for most animals. 5 Years after the collapse sounds good to feel stable again. At this moment, basically everyone will have only distant memories of the previous world, or none at all.

Note that there will be all weird kinds of religion or random beliefs popping up left, right and center. Humans look for structure in the world. Also, there are a lot of books kids could read, but at this time, the current world might be a dream for all most know. They won't be able to tell the difference anymore between a lot of science or science fiction - someone who finds a star trek book might consider it historical, and therefore conclude that they are are plenty other worlds containing humans out there. Or people read harry potter and attempt magic. At this point, high school educational material should be easy to find, and this may help them.

After about 20 years, you're probably in medieval level society again, at least the more developed parts of the world. From there up, it depends on how smart the ones are that try and harvest knowledge left behind, and how accessible that is.

College level educational books will still be common around this period, and most science up to about 50 years before collapse will probably be preserved in one form or another inside those.

The age cutoff would need to vary depending on the child's experience, proximity to resources, and the nearby population of other survivors. Here is a plausible scenario that could work.

Everyone will need to be fed. Farm children are often given chores, starting at around age 8-10, with increasing responsibility as they get older. A large enough family should have an eldest child who knows enough about the operation of the farm to keep it reasonably self-sustaining for the near term. Although a few 12 year-olds might be able to take on this role, a more reasonable age would be 14 or 16.

This answer to a related question makes a great point about military campuses as a means of preserving civilization. The cut-off age for this group would be at least 20, although 22 or 25 would be better. Among their advantages:

These two populations could mutually assist each other in a concept I call "the citidel".

It should be noted that West Point is within marching distance of productive farmland.

Furthermore, the survival of these two particular groups could be related to the cause of the disappearance of adults. For example, if adults were being abducted by aliens, these two groups would have a better chance to resist (access and training with weapons) than your typical city dweller.

Responsibility

The other answers here concentrate on technical know-how so much that they completely miss another factor: Responsibility and self-control. Now that makes me sound old, hu? However, if you think about it, even grownups without responsibility and self-control can easily fail their jobs. I would say childhood is by definition not there yet, it's about achieving those traits. It comes from within, but it also comes from parents teaching their values.

Scavenging

I think we all agree that there will first be a period of scavenging. Mixxiphoid commented on your question

If you remove everybody older than 18 from Japan you removed about 80% of the population. In most of South-America it is the other way around.

That makes a huge difference for scavenging. With children being 1/5 of the population, in the supermarkets etc. there will be non-perishable food corresponding five persons available to one kid. If this is literally the other way around, that's only non-perishable food for a bit more than one person per kid. For long term survival, farming is important, but the non-perishables determine how much time the kids have before they need their first harvest.

Also note that there's quite the trade-off here: If your age X is high, you will have more know-how, skills and responsibility, but also less food per person, so you will need to start to farm earlier.

Farming

Farming is important for long term survival, but it's also a long-term process. The problem I see here is that if you're running out of food, it's too late to start agriculture and there's not much of a second chance. It probably averages around half a year of planning, from seeding somewhere in spring to harvesting somewhere in autumn. We all remember how back in the days, the next Christmas was just "very far away". You need to not only understand the concept of a calendar or at least the 4 seasons, but also a way to determine where you currently are on that timeline. You also need the (let's call it) discipline to not forget things that have to be done less than daily.

However, I think "the concept of seasons" is the easier one. What will be more difficult will be to get through a work day. If you get "Are we theeeeere yeeeetttt" after an hour long car ride, I doubt that we get a decent workday of boring, repetitive farm work out of that kid. Especially purely internal, without the impulse control that grownups are. Again, there's enough examples of such behaviour from adults, even with the emotional support of other adults.

Japan - the Mekka of saving society with children

Given these musings, Japan actually seems like a prime candidate here. They have big cities that will have a lot of non-perishables stored and they have a really good "age multiplicator" on that value. They have arable land - and with rice also an efficient locally growing food crop. Seeing how children clean their classrooms at the end of the day etc., it also seems like they have a leg up on what we called "discipline" before.

Some farmer's children are already helping out on their farms, so they have the know-how and will be able to go on farming. However, apart from know-how and discipline, they also need the idea of continuing to farm. While there's still a lot of non-perishables, they need to understand that the situation is dire and they need to farm. User anon provided this information about cognitive development in their answer, which lists "Begins to think long term" under the header "Middle Adolescence", which would be around age 15.

That being said, "dramatic events" could have dramatic effects. For example, if many kids die early on from something else than hunger, the leftover non-perishable food would be able to sustain the survivors longer, pushing the number down. However, they will need to be at least of reading age so that they can study the old texts. If nobody can read anymore, it will probably be too difficult to decipher a for all reasons foreign script, especially when daily life is about fighting for survival.

At any age ~40 collapse is certain, modern civilization just relies on too much specialized labor, you can't remove a large part of of population and not have collapse. The older the cut off is the less persistent technology will be lost, but no matter what you are looking a a reset to preindustrial/WW1 tech levels depending on what specific tech you are talking about. Oddly the less developed countries will be the ones that are the best off since said children will have actual work experience and will have apprentice like understanding of more advanced skills and will have a large number of farmers.

Below teenage a small percentage will survive but you are talking about a reset to stone age or close too it. Some children will possess some specialized skills but they will be few and too far separated to really take advantage of it, and there will be a huge die off afterwards caused by mass starvation. There will be no rebooting such a collapse they will have to progress normally as if modern civilization never existed.

The real questions is what technologies do you want to loose and which do you want to keep. For instance keeping some of modern medicine will require something in mid to late 30's. It's not enough that a few some people with skill X survive it is you need many many people with the skill to survive the initial die off becasue only some of them will survive all the subsequent die offs collapse will trigger. the more severe the collapse the more tech will be lost not becasue no one has the knowledge but because people are too busy trying to survive to preserve the knowledge.

13

13-year-olds have a basic understanding of science, politics, and art. Any younger and you'd have mostly elementary school children, which won't work.

It's way harder than you think. Maybe impossible.

I'm going to tackle this from a different direction. What is the minimum age to meet each of the three requirements?

Language is kept

This is an easy one. Language is extremely useful, and children acquire it early. Probably any group of children above five years or so of age will keep some sort of language.

Tech level above stone age is maintained

This is where things get a bit tricky. What exactly is tech level above stone age? Do they have to actually be able to make their own tools, or can they simply re-purpose existing scrap. It's way easier to fashion an extra shovel into a passable pitchfork, or an extra pitchfork into a passable shovel, than to make either one from scratch.

So if your goal is to have them be able to salvage portions of existing objects for their own purposes, I doubt you need to increase the minimum age very much. Certainly by the time children are 7 or 8, they'll be familiar with the basic premises and purposes of basic implements like the hammer, the plow, the saw, the anvil, etc. Human ingenuity is a pretty powerful thing, so they should be able to survive for generations without ever even needing to know that metal ultimately comes from the ground.

If you want them to be able to produce new goods "from scratch", that's a lot trickier. Knowledge of smelting, for instance is almost certainly lost. Not only do very few children (or adults, for that matter) know how to recognize the proper ores and build sufficiently hot fires, but the bigger issue is, none of them will actually care. If any significant portion of the population disappears, there will be so much scrap lying around that for probably at least a generation or two it will be far easier to scrounge what you need than to make it yourself.

Minimum age for scrounging: 7-8

Minimum age for producing: 30-40 (The issue isn't that you need to be 30 in order to know how to smelt, it's that if you lose more than about half your population, it's going to be way easier to scrounge than to produce. There's plenty of extra lying around.)

Sufficient artifacts and knowledge from our current civilization survives, so, eventually, younger civilization can utilize it for a "reboot"

This depends wildly on what you mean by "reboot". Given enough time (say 10,000 years or so), any group of people will "reboot" society. We did it once, we can do it again. But I assume you want something faster. So let's say 100 years. What can our society do after 100 years?

Not much, it turns out. At the most optimistic, we're back into the Industrial Revolution -- maybe 1770's tech. More realistically, though, we don't even get that far.

Again, this is much less a function of age than of the sheer number of people left -- the more people, the better. Existing knowledge is almost immaterial, in some ways.

First of all, what is this society not going to be able to do? You can kiss computers goodbye, for instance. Now maybe you're about to object we built computers in less than 100 years, so surely this society, with its current knowledge, should be able to do it faster. But this is wrong.

Yes, we were able to create computers in less than a century. But we had a bunch of existing knowledge to draw on. Early computers, for instance, utilized vacuum tubes. Probably no one alive today of any age knows how to make them; almost certainly no single person knows how to mass-produce them; and even if someone did know how to mass-produce them, they wouldn't have the resources to build, run, or maintain the factory necessary to do so.

So computers are out. So are cell phones. So are regular phones, probably. How many people know how to build an old rotary phone? Even if someone did, your new society doesn't have the manpower to maintain and staff the switchboard network. When people are worried about getting enough food and water to survive the year, calling New York just doesn't seem like much of a priority.

Automobiles are similar. We discussed the issue of actually producing new goods above, but even if we ignore those difficulties, by the time people could reproduce the Model T there wouldn't be much call for a Model T. To begin with, cars run on gasoline, and your society surely doesn't have the ability to produce it. Not to mention that without any maintenance for several decades, much of your road system isn't in great shape.

Basically, if you're kicking your society back to before the Industrial Revolution, don't expect them to get back to where we are now in less than two or three centuries minimum. My guess is it will actually take them longer, because so much of the knowledge and security that people had during the Industrial Revolution is now gone. No one is working on reinventing the cotton gin when they're worried where their next meal is coming from. No one's even planting cotton.

If we lost more than half the working-age people, the resulting impact to society would be devastating. Starvation would be widespread. Society as a whole wouldn't recover for centuries, even with adults still around. With only children? Good luck with that. Depending on how many millions they lose over the first year or two, it might take them centuries just to breed their way back up to Industrial Revolution population levels.

Minimum age required to fully rebuild within 100 years: 40-50 (approximately 2/3 of the working population)

tl; dr: If you're writing Young Adult fiction, I'd say that 17-18 is your minimum age. Not because I think it would actually work, but the genre does encourage age-related suspension of belief. There have certainly been other similarly absurd scenarios that have gone on to widespread acceptance (cough Hunger Games cough).

On the other hand, if you're trying to make a serious, well-considered construction of what society would be like if all the adults suddenly disappeared...understand that probably involves massive casualty rates, especially during the first few years (but also increases in other types of mortality thereafter; expect infant mortality rates to skyrocket, for instance); a return to subsistence farming; and abandoning any technology much more complicated than the plow for anywhere from a few to several centuries.

Keeping language and basic societal structure is easy. Keeping advanced technology is nearly impossible.

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