What would happen if everybody 17 and

older disappeared from the face of the Earth?

A lot of these answers are so very dismissive. It's like people think were determined to
annihilate ourselves because it's "in our human nature" (I.e. Lord of the Flies.) Really??? Does
that sound like the species that has managed to pull itself together for thousands of years? People
don't really seem to understand that humans are vastly adaptable creatures capable of cooperation
to pursue a positive end. Whenever an adverse situation is encountered, people have a tendency
to casually suggest that we're going to doom ourselves with self destructive stupidity. History
shows they are dead wrong. So despite what cynics (always the adults) would say about how we
are absolute toast, I have taken an attitude towards this concept that is defiantly optimistic in the
end in comparison to their own grim and cursory "analysis".
In total, my idea of what would ensue would be just l like others said:
Utter chaos.
But, only initially.
Let's think about what these kids have to work with:

pipelines (especially ones connected to water)

Houses

Hardware stores

Metal

A whole bunch of conveniently available tools and no one to shout at them if they take it
from their property.

Roads

Crop seeds taken from places across the globe that they can grow

Lots of newly available clothing

And probably the most valuable resources to their success: libraries full of information
regarding science and history and how to's, and an abundance of information connected
to the thousands of years of research and development of knowledge from the adults
before us.

Brains that tuned to high risk, high reward experimentation as part of their stage of
development. (And younger kids in stages where they are beginning to explore
consequences of actions, and even younger kids in stages of short term fantasizing. All
are great for trying to carve a new path, but I assume we are focusing more on the teen's
importance to this scenario.)

Things they do not have:

Experience

Skill

Knowledge

Oh look, those poor kids are toast aren't they? They wouldn't even know which way is up if it
wasn't pointed out to them! They don't have the knowledge and experience to accomplish
anything!
Wait, they have up to grade 12 education?
And everything left behind that had been created before them?
And the knowledge imparted to them from their parents and older peers?
And a broad understanding of how the world they lived in was created and maintained by the
people that used to inhabit the world with them?
And not everyone lives in big cities, tended to by the constant import of food from afar, and was
already capable of sustaining themselves without adults?
Oh, okay, for a second I thought you implied that it was going to be an absolute global
meltdown! Whew! You had me worried there for a second!
Really, they have everything they could need to rebuild a civilization at about the same level as it
was before, given a bit of time. But that's a long ways away.
But perhaps more realistically, that's not likely to happen. It would take a massive collective,
happy, socialist, "we're all in this together" sort of attitude from everyone on earth to participate
and a stunningly well organized global project to achieve it in a narrow frame of time it would
take to meet anyone's best hopes; a feat that is laughably impossible to muster, especially
considering the technical limitations. So, more realistically, you're likely to find small pockets of
prospering organizations that grow to take over the regions that failed to bloom.
But let's ignore what happens later on for right now. Let's look at what happens right at the start.
What will that mean for them?

The major hurdles they will have to face:

The power going out: indoor climate control, water, and food refrigeration all go out the
window.

No one left with the technical skills to grow crops (poorer places where kids participate
in growing crops will most certainly be better off in this way. Developed countries are
most vulnerable.)

The initial time frame after the adults disappear will be a pessimist's dream world. Everything
will go to hell. And it will take decades to get anything back to the way it was before. But I'm
sorry, you pessimists that answered before me, you seem to misunderstand just how stubbornly
adaptable humans are, especially teenagers and kids. With the nearly adult-like cognitive abilities
that can adapt to the change better than a full grown adult can, they will certainly find a way to
fight the elements and stay alive.
Hour 1 after the Disappearance
What happens at this point may differ depending on the time of day where the kids are. If it's
midday, the reaction will be immediate. Most kids will still be in close proximity to each other in
schools or in activities after school. So they will be able to unite and organize more quickly. The
slackers at school will certainly take this as an excuse to leave immediately (though it is most
definitely not in their best interests.)
If it is in the middle of the night, most aren't going to notice until morning because they are
likely sleeping. But being isolated and fragmented, each in their own homes, there will probably
be more chaos and confusion initially than there may be for those who are in daylight.
Cars will lose their steering and control and will crash and many will burn. The babies that may
have been in the backseat will die. Every road will be a huge pile up accident. In places where it
was rush hour traffic, roads will be completely impassible. This will by far be the biggest roadblock (pun very much intended) to any adventurous kids being able to travel and do anything.
Kids at home will likely wander outside into the desolation and panic when they can't find any
adults. Maybe they'll find a few other kids. Fights may break out, or they might immediately try
to cooperate because they recognize the adversity of their current situation. An infinite variety
of conflict problem solving methods may take place. Some older kids will watch over the
younger ones if they manage to find them.
Twitter will be ablaze with news from all over the world with kids panicking, exchanging rumors
and maybe some true information about what happened, if any solid facts can be deduced amidst
the chaos. Twitter servers will crash because of the load of Internet traffic, and the other
platforms of communication may crash as well when they turn to other platforms to
communicate. Many people will realize that it will some be time to say goodbye to the friends
they knew only through the Internet, possibly forever.

Nightfall after day 1 of the disappearance

The emotions of the day are starting to settle in. Whatever networks of organization that some
kids may have created has little sense of direction, but ideas, questions, and plans for how to
proceed begin to circulate. As kids settle in to the idea of this new world, they may start
whispering to each other wild rumors and mythologies about the cause of this occurrence. The
wild fantasies the younger kids generate and circulate may become the foundation of what may
develop into doomsday cults.
After week 1 of the disappearance.
Babies left behind by mothers alone without supervision will starve and die. Those without older
siblings are even more likely to die. Those that do have older siblings are likely to be rescued by
them as soon as possible, possibly including all the other abandoned babies they may find at the
daycare.
The older kids may have the sense to start looking for each other and organize as fast as possible.
There will be tens of thousandsnomillions of micro states, more like tribes, scattered
through every town and city in the world. In slums, or other troubled places, they will likely fight
for territorial dominance in some areas where the environment they were in before the
disappearance had some conflict. In more developed places, they may not conflict so much
simply because they have more access to goods. But that may change sooner or later as food runs
dry.
Whichever places where there are a few kids who haven't formed any coalitionin daycares not
found by older kids, sparsely populated areas, etc will remain in fear and darkness. Eventually,
if these kids don't find a way to live on their own or other kids to tag along with, they will starve
and perish.
Pets neglected and trapped in their humans' homes will die off slowly; their increasingly
desperate barks, howls, meows, chirps, and inaudible squeaks will fade away, and many
neighborhoods will be faintly permeated by the smell of death.
Depending on the source of power of some places, this will be the time that the power goes out,
and so does the Internet for those places. If they are powered by wind, the power would have
gone out almost the same day that the maintenance workers disappeared (wind generators require
a surprising amount of human work on them, despite how simple the machinery seems in
concept.) Coal fired power plants may be next, as the trains that supplied coal stop running, and
the people that did all the work to keep it going are gone. I'm not certain of how long it may take
hydro-electric power to go out, but it may take the next month to go out. Nuclear power plants
will run for a while without human maintenance, but not forever. Michael grant's books imagine
that the nuclear power plants will stay active potentially forever until they were forcibly shut
down, but I think this isnt possible, because some monitoring is always needed on hand. M not
sure how long it will last without human surveillance. Perhaps someone who works at a nuclear
power plant could comment, if you could find them to request their opinion. But without their
input, I would say that it would last around three weeks before something happened to

destabilize the reaction and cause it to shut itself down. Internet cable junctions will cease to
function when the local power source will go out, so even if one place still has power they may
not been able to access internet in the unpowered place. Slowly, the world will find itself
increasingly powerless (pun intended) and isolated from the globe.
Livestock, abandoned by their ranchers, starve and die. A lucky few may escape their enclosures,
but they live in environment that is nothing close to their native habitat from where they were
originally domesticated, and some are so completely domesticated, like cows, that they are
completely incapable of living without human assistance. They will certainly die. Horses will
live, but chickens, pigs, and other livestock aren't so certain.
Month 1
The food in refrigerators has run dry. There may have been a few cunning leaders wise enough to
anticipate this, and have the knowledge and resources to be able to get people to go out and grow
their own food. However, in places where they didn't have those brave leaders, this will be the
start of a major decline.
But besides the growing problem of food shortage, another problem will certainly be a big strain
on young people's lives: medical supply shortage. The kids that were kept alive by insulin shots
and other refrigerated medication are going to find themselves without it. Lots of kids are going
to die at this point if they hadn't before due to lack of ability to adapt or strategize. Later, the pills
that keep some alive, like hormones, psychotic drugs, and biological stimulants and suppressants
will run out, and there will be another, slower wave of tragic death as some are worn out by the
elements of nature and simply cannot compete, or will be driven mad without the drugs that kept
them sane and will commit suicide.
Up to year 1
This is going to be a deciding time for the success of many people. In less than a year after their
disappearance, a cold season or a hot season will have swept over the land. Places in the polar
latitudes or in the tropics are all likely to have kids die of heat stroke or hypothermia. They didn't
have the fur lines coats and other ways of life of the people in centuries before. They've lived in
heated and air conditioned houses their whole life, and the way of life that their parents lived has
adjusted to that comfortable way of life, so they do not have any knowledge of how to live
without hearing and cooling systems. They will die exposed to the elements if they weren't
resourceful enough to evade it. There will be a clever few who anticipated and planned ahead for
this catastrophe, but they'll find themselves living with very few people left around them,
especially in the Polar Regions, or any place that has cold weather.
By now, people are beginning to experience the last few things before they've seen about half of
what they need to experience to be able to successfully continue their existence. They've figured
out the general way of life that they need to live, and will most certainly hone their techniques
over the years, but overall this is about where the population stop declining so sharply. I estimate
about 1/2 of the population left on my most generous estimates, and around 1/8th of the original
population in my most pessimistic estimates.

General forward outlook

From here forward, they will begin the steady climb higher from the low place they were.
It's a long journey, but I expect that they'll figure out how to live.

After knowing and experiencing the environmental harm of their old ways of sustaining
themselves, they will certainly give up on fossil fuels for power, and will likely use other
methods instead, like wind energy, and abandon the cars that they had used before,
becoming a greener world than before. Also, they will give up on fertilizers. Partly
because they no longer have access to the sources of these commodities, and when they
do finally get connections to the sources they will have found more local ways of fueling
their economy.

Using the information learned in the libraries, they will begin pursuing jobs that will
improve their lives. They'll start handling factory machinery, make businesses that
operate in full capacity using the equipment left behind, and build new things using the
convenient standardized metric system that was invented before them.

Lots of land will be reclaimed by the wild. Fences will deteriorate and cease to be
functional, so wild animals will skyrocket in population, farmland is turned back into
forest and grassland, burrowing mammals and grazers will take over what used to be
people's yards, and the once carefully maintained lawns that you put so much care into
destroying "weeds" will succumb to the inevitable as native plants and animals take
residence once again. Many houses will lay vacant, inviting animals to make it their own
house to raise their tiny fluffy children without interference.

The small tribes of kid humans that had been able to live out the first year will grow in
size, annexing other tribes, and giving birth to more people and become small nations,
and develop their own identities.

The social demons of the pastpatriarchy, racism, and economic tyranny will
suddenly take a sudden surge in prominence. But such things are just signs of a society in
massive distress and change, which tend to minimize as societies begin to stabilize and
stop changing.

Over time, the new generation will stabilize and regenerate the world they once had. The
population will stop declining within the first decade and will begin growing again as
they start having children of their own. They will relearn the information left for them in
equipment guides, formulas, blueprints, research papers, graphs, and whatever.

The Internet will be back up and running, and the global connectedness and the era of
readily available and exchangeable facts that the world never had before now will prevent
us from going back in the middle Ages.

We'll be free from the environmental terrorism we had before. After learning from our
past mistakes that would continue to hang over our heads in the coming the centuries, we
as a collective society won't go back to such colossal destruction.

However, one thing that is certain to hinder their ability to adapt in the early stages before they
properly reestablish all the old securities they had before is something they might never see
coming: epidemics.
They have always lived in a time when hand sanitizer is always on the shelf, and food is
pasteurized, vacuum -sealed, and dehydrated, and when immunization shots and doctors were
always available to them. The security they had from sickness was so surrounding that it wasn't
ever a second thought to them. They'll not have any idea that they are dangerously exposed to
loads of pathogens. To say that they are at risk to new disease is a bit of an understatement. After
the initial threat of starvation, unpredictable continental scale outbreaks of disease are the next
biggest threat to their existence and may wipe out another huge portion of the population. And
this isn't anything they can readily prevent.
In my head, I like to imagine what may happen if the people that disappeared ever magically
come back. It can be a good indication of how much things begin to change over time, as they
might not be as obvious as things progress. They are definitely not going to have an easy time
adjusting to the new balance of the world. The longer they are away, the more things will change.
At first, maybe within the first two years, the change on the world won't be too big to handle.
The kids wouldn't have settled into their new way of life quite yet, and they would gladly go
back to having the new people to take care of them.
But as time goes on into the years and decades following, they will find it harder and harder to
reassert themselves into the new world. The places that they used to work would have been
raided, and be in various states of disrepair; the food that used to be growing out in fields and
stocked in their refrigerators is all gone, so the new comers would starve for quite a while; the
way of life that the kids found would be too rigid to allow several billion more people to join in
without lots of turmoil, so you could expect lots of fighting for dominance between the old world
leaders and the new world's leaders. Heck, there might be global civil war as people rip
themselves apart trying to hold either of their ways of life intact. Ultimately, having more
knowledge of the world they live in than their predecessors had, the children will win out in one
way or another, while the older generation is forced to live out the rest of their lives
begrudgingly under their control.