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Originally Posted by malloyd
Not particularly. Everybody dies in seconds (which may well be the intent here) will produce plenty of ruins in fairly short order as still running machinery and processes do destructively uncontrolled things. Unfought fires alone will damage most cities rather noticeably in fairly short order.
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Ah... Probably not much direct damage from unsupervised machinery, but good call on fire. That might be reason to suspect a quick-kill event, but see below.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thrash
I haven't found a plausible mechanism for directly killing off the humans while still leaving the atmosphere intact, which is why I've been taking "sterilized" to specifically mean "subjected to lethal doses of solar UV." GRBs are too short to affect more than one hemisphere at a time, although the possibility exists for "aftershocks." A supernova event might last a full 24 hours and cover the entire globe, but in most scenarios the damage would either be limited to the upper atmosphere or strip the atmosphere entire.
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I wouldn't expect sterilized to be used that way, given Kromm's usual precision in word choice, but you could be right. It might simply mean 'rendered infertile'.
It would be kind of a strange event that killed everyone so quickly.