cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48832670
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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Other Comic Communities of Interest
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I mean even if the genie wasn't being that literal, just destroying all toilets would probably have the same result without the milk and lactose intolerance situations. Cholera and dysentery would take out a large chunk of the population. Societies are only advanced as their sanitation systems allow.
If all toilets on the planet are destroyed, how long would it take to replace them? The plumbing should still be fine; the toilet is just a fixture. You might need to rush to turn off the water, but there will still be a functional pipe to take any waste away. Toilets are pretty much just funnels into that hole, plus some extra plumbing to help wash away whatever goes into them.
In the short term, it would suck, but I think the problem would be solved pretty quickly, maybe even as humanity's top priority. Probably with funnels, buckets, and chairs with holes cut in them at first, then the market will be flooded with new toilets.
I think you may be underestimating how much human kind shits. We collectively create about 2.2 billion pounds of fecal waste a day. We could create a bunch of toilets if we all worked together, and some of us know about plumbing enough to make it work, but that's not the vast majority. And we all recently saw how dysfunctional world governments and the global manufacturing supply is during a crisis.
With systemic issues a hiccup that would be fine on a smaller scale could end up leading to cascading systemic failure. Hygiene suffers, the amount of people who get ill raises a few percent and the next thing you know the hospital system is overwhelmed. During COVID only 1-7% of the population ever became sick enough to be hospitalized. I imagine every single person having to handle their own waste is probably going to cause more significant illnesses than 1-7%.
Yeah but the difficulty won't be "we have nowhere to put our shit", it will be "how do we put our shit into this hole in our bathroom?" Which will probably turn into getting a bucket or two to anyone that doesn't already have one and getting creative with fashioning funnels while the supply lines ramp up and deal with toilet scalpers and the other grifts that are sure to pop up. That 2.2 billion pounds of fecal matter can still be handled in the same way it currently is, we'd just be improvising the interface to it.
Though that is from a purely rational point of view. I do agree that there will be many infections that happen because of the average intelligence level and some thinking "all toilets broke means I gotta shit in the river" or "all toilets broke means I get to shit in the river" (ie some people fucking shit up because they don't know any better and others fucking shit up because they like fucking shit up).
Yes, 8 billion people handling human waste is a very large problem. Especially considering there's a large population of very young, very old, and disabled people that won't be able to handle their own waste. Handling human waste is extremely dangerous, especially when a lot of people are doing it. Dysentery was the largest killer of people up until very recent modern times, and that just because of advances is sanitation systems.
Just teaching people how to disassemble broken toilets, how to run water afterwards, and then how to block the hole so sewer gas doesn't flood every living space on earth seems like a nightmare. We couldn't get people to wear masks correctly.
It doesn't take a very large portion of the population becoming ill to have a societal threatening level of infrastructure collapse.
This is a genie, they're always literal.