What If New York City Were Suddenly Gone?

[massey]

It depends on how you define New York City.  While NYC itself has about 8 million people, the metro area has over 20 million.

 

If you just took out the city itself, but the surrounding area was mostly undamaged (like with a Thanos finger snap), then you've still got most of the people who make the city what it is.  The city still has a great natural harbor, and depending on how much physical destruction there is, it will either get rebuilt or just repopulated.  But if you take out the entire metro area (like with an asteroid impact), then you've lost most of the people who make up the "New York City identity".

 

If somebody works in the Empire State Building, but they live in Newark, do they get killed or not?  A lot of companies based in New York might be able to survive if you're just finger-snapping the NYC residents.  In that case, the city probably fills back up after a decade or so.  There'd be a major hit to the US (and World) economies, and we'd want to figure out what happened and keep it from happening again.  But I think it's something you recover from.  But if you take out everything within 20 miles of Central Park, then the city is dead.  While they might build new stuff there eventually, it's going to be an entirely different place.

 

As far as what other cities become more prominent?  I think Atlanta, Philly, Chicago, and LA.  They'll split a lot of the roles that New York used to have.  Houston and Dallas will benefit too.  Instead of having one major financial city, you probably have several regional cities that share that role.  Again, if it's clear the NYC is coming back, then I think this is more temporary.  Companies will plan to move back into Manhattan after whatever caused this disaster is fixed.  But if the area is a crater, then the transition will be permanent.

[Michael Hopcroft]

The arts would change forever. for one thing, American live theater would effectively cease to exist, as New York is one of only three or four places in the country where a stage actor can earn a living. Publishing, visual arts, music, film and television -- all would be devastated to a degree we cannot begin to imagine. This would just be because of the established artists, either, because NYC attracts the aspirants as well.

 

Then there would be the massive human tragedy involved in killing ten to twenty million people. NO nation on Earth has every experienced such massive loss of life in a single day. It would change the world forever.

[unclevlad]

One big problem exists here.  How does this happen?  There's only 2 plausible scenarios...one's a whole bunch of nukes, the other's a natural disaster.  Most obvious one there, is an asteroid impact.  HOWEVER, that's something that probably can be identified in advance, so some precautions could be taken.  There's a few sites that offer models of asteroid impacts of various sizes and velocities.  Kind of fun to look at them.  To take out something as relatively compact as NYC, it wouldn't necessarily take that large of an asteroid.  One thing to remember is there's going to be sweeping secondary damage from water effects.  It's actually possible the disruption *might* be mitigated by distributing things.

 

Option 2 is more complex.  2 events combine.  #1:  big honkin' nasty earthquake in the Atlantic, leading to a tidal wave.  #2:  at the same time, a big honkin' hurricane hits.  Yeah, the hurricane will offer some advance warning so the population loss could be mitigated....but throw 150 mph winds in with the tidal wave?  It doesn't erase NYC, I'll grant, but the damage is immense.  However, it's likely NYC would be rebuilt.

 

So let's go asteroid.  Let's also assume many of the companies *don't* decentralize.  Well....it's a mess.  Read this first:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks

 

And this is talking damage 1000 times greater.  Basically, within a week you've got a worldwide depression.  Insurance companies either go bankrupt...there's no possible way to pay off the claims, as they'll quite possibly exceed the entire US GDP...or they're stuck in total PR hell in denying claims because it was an act of God.  This also totally depresses markets;  the insurance companies own a LOT of stock.  Oh, and the stock market crash annihilates pension fund income, meaning many, many retirees are *flattened*.  This isn't speculative;  the banking crisis caused major problems for quite a few pension plans.  This is gonna make that look like a hiccup.

 

The politics are more complex than just saying there's a loss of a Democratic stronghold...because the market collapse is going to crush many, many fortunes...more of which lean Republican.

 

I'm also thinking most of the area does NOT actually get rebuilt.  It's honestly not even clear to me if it would be cleaned up.  First, we're talking a HUGE area that's been pulverized.  Second, as was pointed out, there's a honkin' big crater, which means water flooding everywhere, filling ALL the subway tunnels, which will further destabilize the entire region...sinkholes will appear at random.  Now also consider it's going to be a MASSIVE toxic site.  I think there would have to be massive efforts to just stabilize things so the damage doesn't spread.  And given that the economy is in the dumpster?  Rebuild ain't gonna happen.

 

The pollution aspect makes me think Boston and Philly are Right Out.  I suspect different sectors would move to different cities.  Markets to Chicago, as the mercantile exchanges are already there.  Banking, I'm gonna suggest Austin.  Culture...Miami?  Possibly Atlanta?  Media would be LA and probably Chicago.  But recognize this is gonna be in a vastly changed world;  recovery is going to take decades.

[Asperion]

If NYC were destroyed (all buildings and every thing else with it) then I see two eventual possible outcomes:

 

1:  Land basically abandoned or returned to the natives as a reservation depending upon the nature of how and why everything was destroyed.  

 

2:  Federal government starts rebuilding program similar to what we did in Europe after WW2.  Government will create a lottery system and the super wealthy will make certain that they receive their portion, even if that means there is nothing left over for the average citizen.

 

In either situation, I wonder why the U.S.A. needs a financial center.  The Federal Reserve is no in NYC, most financial operations (including stock, bond, and other Wall Street deals) are actually performed away from NYC, even while Wall Street is closed.  Most of the other things that NYC is famous for is better performed away from NYC.

[Cancer]

It's still plausible that a previously unknown city-killing impactor could pop up literally on the radar without a lot of notice, by which I mean a few days.  There are also questions about how quickly you could refine the orbit solution enough to say, "95% chance of hitting NYC in ____ days or hours." This is something I'm looking into for a course I'm thinking of developing.  And if the lead time is only 48 hours, how many people and how much stuff can you evacuate before it hits?  Hurricane evacuations have similar lead times to these but hurricanes by experience don't visit the absolute destruction that a nuclear strike, let alone a big asteroid impact, does; hurricanes make a broader swath of lower-intensity devastation.

 

There exist a handful of preparedness exercises positing detection of good-size impactors with lead times of a few years; orbit solutions take time to narrow down into 90% CEP even as large as a circle that circumscribes all of NYC.  (If there's interest I can post the link, but I don't have it here at home.)  I don't think any of the published ones explicitly hit NYC, but IIRC one of them *does* drop a ten-megaton class impact into the Rose Bowl.  I think all those focus on the pre-impact problems as opposed to post-catastrophe cleanup and restoration.

[Michael Hopcroft]

if it's a nuclear strike, then it isn't only NYC that will be totaled. An attack on that scale is certain to generate a massive nuclear response from the US. It's not called MAD for nothing. Even if it was the only bomb you initially sent, nuking NYC or an other American city amounts to global omnicide. It would take the maddest of madmen to even contemplate doing such a thing. Not even Kim Jong Un or DRT is that crazy.

[Cancer]

Perhaps not, but the Taliban are.