re: #273 klys (maker of Silmarils)

Nah, Black Death did way more.

Or there is believed to have been a near-extinction event back in the very early emergence of humanity, the effects of which are supposedly visible in the human genome (see the genetic bottleneck section on the Toba catastrophe theory).

Things have changed, I agree, and I don’t think they’ll ever go back to exactly as they were. But the same could be said of any other number of events that have happened in my lifetime.

I think a near-repeat of the 1918 flu is a likely outcome.