Exactly what it sounds like: on January 1, 2020, all of North America (from the Aleutian Islands...
WI: North America in 2020 is ISOTed to 30,000 BCE?
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Exactly what it sounds like: on January 1, 2020, all of North America (from the Aleutian Islands to Greenland, south to the Panama-Columbia border, including the Caribbean and parts of the continental shelves, with the ocean and troposphere above,) is exchanged with America 32,000 years ago.
How does society respond? How do people react to the drastically-changed climates and sea levels? What do we do with the rest of the world, and what sort of power balance will result? Does technological society survive at all?
How does society respond? How do people react to the drastically-changed climates and sea levels? What do we do with the rest of the world, and what sort of power balance will result? Does technological society survive at all?
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
Well without COVID and anyone even remotely comparable to the USA, Donald Trump gets to Make America Great Again and soon declares himself President-King Trump I of Earth. As his first Royal Presidential Decree; a wall is to be built on Mexico's dime. 
(The sweet taste of victory is rendered only slightly ashey at the knowledge that it required literally the entire rest of the planet vanishing into thin air before this became possible.)
(The sweet taste of victory is rendered only slightly ashey at the knowledge that it required literally the entire rest of the planet vanishing into thin air before this became possible.)
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Exactly what it sounds like: on January 1, 2020, all of North America (from the Aleutian Islands to Greenland, south to the Panama-Columbia border, including the Caribbean and parts of the continental shelves, with the ocean and troposphere above,) is exchanged with America 32,000 years ago.
How does society respond? How do people react to the drastically-changed climates and sea levels? What do we do with the rest of the world, and what sort of power balance will result? Does technological society survive at all?
Its is 30000 BC. The rest of the world is going Ooga Booga.
So there is no concievable external threat.
The North american continent has more than enough resources for modern tech civilization to survive. There will be major upheaval as the transported nations scramble to unfuck their agricultural sector and the disruption the rest of the world going away cause but the major countries should survive as entities.
Does Western democracy survive as well?
I doubt that.
There doesn't have to be. This post isn't about war.
That's an interesting and thoughtful question, one which deserves much thought and discussion.
- Location
- Argentina
Many many coronavirus deaths to poor people from that time that have no defences to it....
I think you should change it to 2019...
I think you should change it to 2019...
American politics are already very polarized.
Who knows what manner of message the various factions will get from being dropped in a virgin earth and all enviroment and resource depletion problems just... Go away.
The Manifest Destiny crowd will certainly get all sorts of ideas.
Was it in the Americas in Jan 1?
*Blinks*
Wait. 30k BC!? You did not drop us right in the middle of the last Ice Age did you!?
January 1st, (probably) no worries there, at least.
- Location
- Argentina
The virus had been a thing since December so...
Who knows?
But any modern virus could kill people from that era.
Not to mention the guns...
What did 30,000 BCE do to Alias?
- Location
- romania
Is the air still the same ? because I think people will have problems breathing after the swap, we have polution in the air, a lot of cut forests, different animals, different numbers of animals running around, I remember seeing an article about how people looked back then, it was not pretty, most of us would be super models compared to primitive mankind.
serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
Yep, during the early parts of the Last Glacial Maximum. Good luck with the massive ice sheets that will cover Canada and the upper states.
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
30K BCE: Canada is a lost cause. The entire country is unlivable and must be abandoned, as there are not adequate resources to environment-proof it, and even if there were it will be cold enough many things stop working with specialized preparation anyway. If the ice is still there tens, hundreds of million die encased in solid ice from glaciers taller than the tallest skyscraper. Even in the best scenario tens, perhaps hundreds of millions starve as the farmland we are used to is largely frozen over and largely unusable. There will be a panicked effort to switch to fishing from the now entire renewed fishing stocks. It will be insufficient.
North Africa would have only just dried out and begun to form the Sahara desert.
The worst part? The glacial maximum wasn't reached till 20,000 years ago.
I suspect none of the modern governments that get brought over survive the first decade. Canada is gone. The Northern US is gone as well. The surviving sections of the US splinter into multiple countries due to sheer weight of refugees and various crises. Mexico would likely have fallen completely as well.
It's difficult to find climate pattern information from that far back, but it is likely much of the world is going to have a very different environment from what we know - the Sahara would only just be drying out!
North Africa would have only just dried out and begun to form the Sahara desert.
The worst part? The glacial maximum wasn't reached till 20,000 years ago.
I suspect none of the modern governments that get brought over survive the first decade. Canada is gone. The Northern US is gone as well. The surviving sections of the US splinter into multiple countries due to sheer weight of refugees and various crises. Mexico would likely have fallen completely as well.
It's difficult to find climate pattern information from that far back, but it is likely much of the world is going to have a very different environment from what we know - the Sahara would only just be drying out!
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serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
From the wiki link I provided above
Article: According to Blue Marble 3000 (a video by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences), the average global temperature around 19,000 BC (about 21,000 years ago) was 9 °C (48 °F).[7] This is about 6°C (11°F) colder than the 2013-2017 average.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), permanent summer ice covered about 8% of Earth's surface and 25% of the land area during the last glacial maximum.[8] The USGS also states that sea level was about 125 meters (410 feet) lower than in present times (2012).[8]
When comparing to the present, the average global temperature was 15 °C (59 °F) for the 2013-2017 period.[9] Currently (as of 2012), about 3.1% of Earth's surface and 10.7% of the land area is covered in year-round ice.[8]
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
Right, but that wasn't what I was looking for: I wanted to know the frequency and strength of hurricanes, their typical paths, rainfall patterns, etc. Basically all the stuff you need to actually keep a civilization running that in modern society gets shuffled into the background because no one needs to consider it.
I'm questioning what modern farmland would still be viable 32,000 years ago and what would be opened up by the changes. Also what Ocean currents exist - those are massive and affect the environment greatly. Ocean currents are largely responsible for the environments of modern Europe, the west coast of the US, etc. If those are dramatically altered Washington state will probably go from cold and rainy to under a mile of ice.
Without this I can only try to estimate how bad the initial starvation period will be without being able to figure out what news areas are now viable for farming and what modern farmland that isn't obviously lost to the deep freeze will be nonviable for other reasons.
Oh, and another bad thing: modern crops are largely not bred for cold resistance in the US. Better hope we have some GMOs or heirlooms.
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Well, that thing where the government and corporations that manipulate it are failing to act/in denial of the need to properly react to several major crisis at the same time is a problem.
Add in the existing effects of the climate change disinformation campeigns, the vulnerability from outsourcing that fueled de-industrialization and the economic/logistical dependency on often exploitative relationships with nations that no longer exists...
Probably bad stuff.
I suppose how bad it gets depends on whether the US just self destructs immidately or after going full Nazi first.
Add in the existing effects of the climate change disinformation campeigns, the vulnerability from outsourcing that fueled de-industrialization and the economic/logistical dependency on often exploitative relationships with nations that no longer exists...
Probably bad stuff.
I suppose how bad it gets depends on whether the US just self destructs immidately or after going full Nazi first.
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Greenhouses might help offset the issue of frozen land and lack of cold resistant crop stock. Not a miracle fix, but something.
I figure settlements would become more isolated, depending on how much damage is caused by the new weather patterns. Large population centers would lose the import of food and humans would have to move out of the big cities unless they find a new way to supply themselves.
Another problem, besides the local plantlife, how would the ISOT'd wildlife and livestock fare in the extremely changed weather?
I figure settlements would become more isolated, depending on how much damage is caused by the new weather patterns. Large population centers would lose the import of food and humans would have to move out of the big cities unless they find a new way to supply themselves.
Another problem, besides the local plantlife, how would the ISOT'd wildlife and livestock fare in the extremely changed weather?
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
It's unlikely there will even be a chance for a cohesive US to go full nazi. This ISOT would kill a large portion of the crops and animals brought with it in short order. The US would fall to starvation and a wave of... basically the entire population of Canada and the northern states fleeing weather they are not able to withstand.
Most of the rest of what you said isn't really relevant. I expect coal and oil would immediately about face on climate change so fast it would give anyone watching whiplash - global warming is not nearly as bad a thing when you've just been slammed into the start of a global climate minimum. Not to mention how many companies would lose most of their leadership or vital personnel in this, and multinational conglomerates would not do so well with global supply lines cut.
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Anchises
Leader of the Coconut Tree Fremen
- Location
- Germany
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- He/Him
I feel like the ISOTed nations would fall hard but whatever remains of them still would be inredibly advanced super eariy. If they manage to retain early industrial revolution levels of tech we have skipped developments that literally took eons IOTL. Even sharing metal working and agriculture techniques, modern plants, animals and other stuff like that with the early humans in the rest of the world is a massive progress tech wise.
For the climate change thing, I mean that the nations have basically been trained to ignore it.
That would cause serious issues with getting any action in response to climate based threats.
- Location
- AO3 Usually.
I'll still be working a minimum wage job probably. :/
I'm not a geologist, or a sociologist, but I have a philosophy degree, so... same thing. Right? Right?
I'd predict immediate term, a general collapse of the Federal United States Government, mainly because of it's complete ineptitude in handling a major crisis it had complete foresight on.
The next century in our history will be dominated with us struggling to adapt to our way of life being... completely and utterly wiped out. Whatever state/local/regional governments/institutions continue on will be centered around simply responding to the massive humanitarian crises likely to happen as mentioned above, and reestablishing some level of creature comforts medium term. And though I can see myself thinking alongside cynical view that humans are evil, ending up in a scenario where we become so dedicated to the reestablishing our capitalist past, that we end up either in some sort of Oligarchic serfdom (elon stop), or some sort of regional free-for-all with endless warfare.
But when I'm not depressed, I have faith in humanity, so I'll put my beliefs in that this will be an opportunity for us all to build a kinder, gentler, more sustainable world.
In general, what institutions you believe will come out of the world largely depends on your own outlook on the world. Or maybe I'm just too naive for my own good.
On the other hand, with the rest of the world becoming 'free real estate,' we might just end up socially justifying a colonial system again for more resources. So there's that. Great.
Also Jan 1st is before I met my gf so thanks for making me single again :c
I'm not a geologist, or a sociologist, but I have a philosophy degree, so... same thing. Right? Right?
I'd predict immediate term, a general collapse of the Federal United States Government, mainly because of it's complete ineptitude in handling a major crisis it had complete foresight on.
The next century in our history will be dominated with us struggling to adapt to our way of life being... completely and utterly wiped out. Whatever state/local/regional governments/institutions continue on will be centered around simply responding to the massive humanitarian crises likely to happen as mentioned above, and reestablishing some level of creature comforts medium term. And though I can see myself thinking alongside cynical view that humans are evil, ending up in a scenario where we become so dedicated to the reestablishing our capitalist past, that we end up either in some sort of Oligarchic serfdom (elon stop), or some sort of regional free-for-all with endless warfare.
But when I'm not depressed, I have faith in humanity, so I'll put my beliefs in that this will be an opportunity for us all to build a kinder, gentler, more sustainable world.
In general, what institutions you believe will come out of the world largely depends on your own outlook on the world. Or maybe I'm just too naive for my own good.
On the other hand, with the rest of the world becoming 'free real estate,' we might just end up socially justifying a colonial system again for more resources. So there's that. Great.
Also Jan 1st is before I met my gf so thanks for making me single again :c
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Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
I forgot that 30k years ago was Ice Age, I take back what I said earlier; no way Trump keeps shit together in the face of that crisis.
As Byzantine mentioned; a lot of people die and none of the transported countries are likely to survive. What happens after that depends too much on local conditions, but I doubt it would have very much resemblance to modern western civilization.
As Byzantine mentioned; a lot of people die and none of the transported countries are likely to survive. What happens after that depends too much on local conditions, but I doubt it would have very much resemblance to modern western civilization.
Instant economic collapse, followed shortly by the effective dissolution of pre-ISOT governments when 30k BCE weather starts to make entire provinces effectively uninhabitable. The combination of political polarization, utter economic collapse, and the sheer shock of being ISOT into a mass death scenario is going to create a sectarian crisis. I don't see the current civilian government (or really any historical US administration post WW2) being able to handle this situation constitutionally. Things burn up to the point that martial law is declared and the military does its best to save some remnant of the USA
WyldCard4
Unregistered
I think people might be a bit pessimistic on the US staying basically united, but only a bit. The big question IMO is if modern farming technology and absolute panicked attempts at making food can avoid a mass die-off.
The scale of virtually uninhabited land to move into seems like an underestimated factor to me, as charging in and shooting megafauna isn't a sustainable strategy, but might be a decent placeholder while food production gets sorted out. Biggest obstacle to that is that it's damn hard to get outside of North America without using a ton of boats and planes.
I theorize that the concentrated capital (in this case mostly machines and electronics), ease of movement, and relatively low population density for most of North America is very promising for preventing worst case scenarios, but I just can't really tell if any of the normal food production will be sustained or if there are viable avenues for replacing it that can catch up, and the exact death rate seems super important for if we're looking at tens of millions of militarized refugees hunting everything that moves in South America or closer to a Soviet Union World War II battering ram that has continuity with the old United States.
Medium term, the ISOT'd population is absolutely sustainable, but the complete lack of preparation is a huge factor against pulling through without people dying of starvation in droves. I would expect every splinter government to insist they are still the United States even in worst case scenarios, and likely consolidate back into a single nation within a couple decades. (I expect history books to forget Canada was a thing in this timeline.) Even if none of North America proved viable with climate change I'd expect refugees to outnumber the natives of 30,000 BC Earth and for there to be a massive number of them as boats and planes retooled for evacuation and civil engineering necessary to survive.
Glaciers take forever to advance. I'm curious about the weather systems and how much of a problem they'd be. A relatively calm "worst winter ever in summer" type event might lead to fairly few fatalities in theory with massive energy devoted to solving the problem, but it seems like this would be a fragile equilibrium even with a plan in place, and without sticking to a good plan or competent leadership things likely get really bad.
Very tentatively I'd guess that the section of the northern population that is able bodied and healthy is going to mostly survive relocation, even if it's at the level of "dump a container ship with ten thousand people on the least dangerous looking coast" with a healthy local ecosystem that you're willing to ravage and plenty of people with guns shooting anything big it'd likely be able to hold together for a little while and eventually food production would hit the necessary minimum to supply camps. Death rates for everyone else (such as me, unhealthy physically, clinically depressed, mildly disabled) are likely to be much higher, with famine weakened immune systems, medical care breakdowns, and violence being major contributing factors even if the food supply is workable.
The scale of virtually uninhabited land to move into seems like an underestimated factor to me, as charging in and shooting megafauna isn't a sustainable strategy, but might be a decent placeholder while food production gets sorted out. Biggest obstacle to that is that it's damn hard to get outside of North America without using a ton of boats and planes.
I theorize that the concentrated capital (in this case mostly machines and electronics), ease of movement, and relatively low population density for most of North America is very promising for preventing worst case scenarios, but I just can't really tell if any of the normal food production will be sustained or if there are viable avenues for replacing it that can catch up, and the exact death rate seems super important for if we're looking at tens of millions of militarized refugees hunting everything that moves in South America or closer to a Soviet Union World War II battering ram that has continuity with the old United States.
Medium term, the ISOT'd population is absolutely sustainable, but the complete lack of preparation is a huge factor against pulling through without people dying of starvation in droves. I would expect every splinter government to insist they are still the United States even in worst case scenarios, and likely consolidate back into a single nation within a couple decades. (I expect history books to forget Canada was a thing in this timeline.) Even if none of North America proved viable with climate change I'd expect refugees to outnumber the natives of 30,000 BC Earth and for there to be a massive number of them as boats and planes retooled for evacuation and civil engineering necessary to survive.
Glaciers take forever to advance. I'm curious about the weather systems and how much of a problem they'd be. A relatively calm "worst winter ever in summer" type event might lead to fairly few fatalities in theory with massive energy devoted to solving the problem, but it seems like this would be a fragile equilibrium even with a plan in place, and without sticking to a good plan or competent leadership things likely get really bad.
Very tentatively I'd guess that the section of the northern population that is able bodied and healthy is going to mostly survive relocation, even if it's at the level of "dump a container ship with ten thousand people on the least dangerous looking coast" with a healthy local ecosystem that you're willing to ravage and plenty of people with guns shooting anything big it'd likely be able to hold together for a little while and eventually food production would hit the necessary minimum to supply camps. Death rates for everyone else (such as me, unhealthy physically, clinically depressed, mildly disabled) are likely to be much higher, with famine weakened immune systems, medical care breakdowns, and violence being major contributing factors even if the food supply is workable.
The climate 32,000 years ago would probably have been warmer than the last glacial maximum climate. It would probably have been colder than today though.
Climate during this part of the Ice Age was unstable. There were interstadial periods that were almost as warm as today, stadial periods of intense cold, and "mild" cold periods colder than today but warmer than glacial maximum conditions. I don't know what the climate was like 32,000 years ago, but there were Heinreich events (probably corresponding to intense cold periods) at 30,100 and 24,100 years ago, so at least 32,000 years ago probably doesn't take us into an intense cold period.
Also, Canada and Alaska get transported through time along with the rest of North America, so they're now covered by dark forest and tundra instead of bright glaciers. That'll warm the climate. That'll help. Oh, also presumably the air above North America also travels through time, so the Earth's atmosphere just got a big amount of carbon dioxide dumped into it; it won't be enough to end the ice age immediately (only about 5% of Earth's atmosphere would have been swapped), but it'll help.
The U.S. Southwest is one of the few parts of the planet that was actually nicer during the Ice Age than it is now, so that's helpful. I expect agricultural productivity of North America will generally have dramatically declined though. On the good side, there's most of a planet's worth of fresh agricultural land available - it should be more than enough for the population of North America, even with Ice Age conditions. I think the big question is whether mass starvation can be avoided in the year or so immediately after the time travel event.
This would be better if North America was transported to the middle of the interstadial period 43,000-41,000 years ago: "43,000-41,000 y.a. (approx.), a brief interstadial event, about as warm as the present-day. This phase seems to have followed on suddenly from a previous phase somewhat drier and colder than present. Fossil beetle evidence found in eastern England by Coope suggests that in north-west Europe at least, this phase was comparable in warmth to the present-day (Huijzer & Isarin 1997). Conditions remained treeless, however, probably due to the lack of time for tree populations to return from more southerly refuges." - From this web-page, part of a website which has a lot of information about ice age climate.
Some bad news: the sea level was lower during the Ice Age, so every port just became unusable. If the continental shelves were transported along with the rest of North America, there's now a giant wasteland of drying salty mud between the sea and the former coastline. If the continental shelves were not transported, there's now a Pleistocene wilderness area between the sea and the former coastline.
If the first year or so can be survived without famines, North America now has something like 99% of the human species and has an almost empty planet of almost totally untouched natural resources to expand into. One interesting consequence is a probable major shift of advantage to the tropical regions; Mexico, Central America, and the Carribean probably just became North America's main agricultural regions, and there will probably be a general shift toward reliance on crops that grow well in tropical and subtropical regions, because the temperate wheat belts are either greatly diminished or just don't exist. Whether this will actually be good for the people who live in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America is another question, being in close proximity to an extremely large, extremely well-armed country in desperate need of food imports is a dangerous position; the Mexican saying about being so far from God and so close to the United States seems applicable in this scenario.
A good end or non-horrible-end version of this scenario probably gives you an AMERICAN SUPER-HEGEMONY world. The United States contains something like half of the entire human species in this scenario, maybe the majority of it.
Also, even the most absolutely catastrophic Mad Max possible outcomes of the scenario are going to change human history immensely. Even if North American civilization collapses to a few tens of millions of impoverished subsistence farmers living at a basically Dark Age standard of living, that's an immense change to human history that would probably lead to humanity establishing colonies on Mars before 6000 B.C.E. or something like that (that's making the conservative assumption that the harshness and instability of the Ice Age climate would make an industrial revolution impossible and humanity would spend 20,000 years stuck at a Dark Age level of development until the Holocene warming makes a renaissance possible).
Actually a scenario like the Inca empire or Cahokia and its agricultural hinterland being transported back to a warm Pliestocene interstadial would be quite interesting. It'd be interesting to see how civilization would develop in that scenario. And they'd likely be better off than what happened to them OTL.
Climate during this part of the Ice Age was unstable. There were interstadial periods that were almost as warm as today, stadial periods of intense cold, and "mild" cold periods colder than today but warmer than glacial maximum conditions. I don't know what the climate was like 32,000 years ago, but there were Heinreich events (probably corresponding to intense cold periods) at 30,100 and 24,100 years ago, so at least 32,000 years ago probably doesn't take us into an intense cold period.
Also, Canada and Alaska get transported through time along with the rest of North America, so they're now covered by dark forest and tundra instead of bright glaciers. That'll warm the climate. That'll help. Oh, also presumably the air above North America also travels through time, so the Earth's atmosphere just got a big amount of carbon dioxide dumped into it; it won't be enough to end the ice age immediately (only about 5% of Earth's atmosphere would have been swapped), but it'll help.
The U.S. Southwest is one of the few parts of the planet that was actually nicer during the Ice Age than it is now, so that's helpful. I expect agricultural productivity of North America will generally have dramatically declined though. On the good side, there's most of a planet's worth of fresh agricultural land available - it should be more than enough for the population of North America, even with Ice Age conditions. I think the big question is whether mass starvation can be avoided in the year or so immediately after the time travel event.
This would be better if North America was transported to the middle of the interstadial period 43,000-41,000 years ago: "43,000-41,000 y.a. (approx.), a brief interstadial event, about as warm as the present-day. This phase seems to have followed on suddenly from a previous phase somewhat drier and colder than present. Fossil beetle evidence found in eastern England by Coope suggests that in north-west Europe at least, this phase was comparable in warmth to the present-day (Huijzer & Isarin 1997). Conditions remained treeless, however, probably due to the lack of time for tree populations to return from more southerly refuges." - From this web-page, part of a website which has a lot of information about ice age climate.
Some bad news: the sea level was lower during the Ice Age, so every port just became unusable. If the continental shelves were transported along with the rest of North America, there's now a giant wasteland of drying salty mud between the sea and the former coastline. If the continental shelves were not transported, there's now a Pleistocene wilderness area between the sea and the former coastline.
If the first year or so can be survived without famines, North America now has something like 99% of the human species and has an almost empty planet of almost totally untouched natural resources to expand into. One interesting consequence is a probable major shift of advantage to the tropical regions; Mexico, Central America, and the Carribean probably just became North America's main agricultural regions, and there will probably be a general shift toward reliance on crops that grow well in tropical and subtropical regions, because the temperate wheat belts are either greatly diminished or just don't exist. Whether this will actually be good for the people who live in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America is another question, being in close proximity to an extremely large, extremely well-armed country in desperate need of food imports is a dangerous position; the Mexican saying about being so far from God and so close to the United States seems applicable in this scenario.
A good end or non-horrible-end version of this scenario probably gives you an AMERICAN SUPER-HEGEMONY world. The United States contains something like half of the entire human species in this scenario, maybe the majority of it.
Also, even the most absolutely catastrophic Mad Max possible outcomes of the scenario are going to change human history immensely. Even if North American civilization collapses to a few tens of millions of impoverished subsistence farmers living at a basically Dark Age standard of living, that's an immense change to human history that would probably lead to humanity establishing colonies on Mars before 6000 B.C.E. or something like that (that's making the conservative assumption that the harshness and instability of the Ice Age climate would make an industrial revolution impossible and humanity would spend 20,000 years stuck at a Dark Age level of development until the Holocene warming makes a renaissance possible).
Actually a scenario like the Inca empire or Cahokia and its agricultural hinterland being transported back to a warm Pliestocene interstadial would be quite interesting. It'd be interesting to see how civilization would develop in that scenario. And they'd likely be better off than what happened to them OTL.
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I feel that people are being too pessimistic about the survival of the modern political system, the sheer panic that would cause the collapse of law and order would be overshadowed by the fact that people now live on an Earth with an untouched biosphere and resources, that your average man is now capable of seeing megafauna for himself and that manifest destiny is a viable idiology again.
Sure martial law would have to be declared, people would panic,there would be a mass exodus to the south and Canada would be abandoned but that would cause a recession, not total societal collapse, the complete wonder of living in a new world with barely any humans wouldn't cause panic, it would cause amazement, think of the adventurers, the missionnaries, the businessmen or even just average, everyday people confronted with a new, virgin world ripe for the picking.
tl;dr: people would be too busy being amazed by the fact that they live in a different world to panic about the societal hardships
Sure martial law would have to be declared, people would panic,there would be a mass exodus to the south and Canada would be abandoned but that would cause a recession, not total societal collapse, the complete wonder of living in a new world with barely any humans wouldn't cause panic, it would cause amazement, think of the adventurers, the missionnaries, the businessmen or even just average, everyday people confronted with a new, virgin world ripe for the picking.
tl;dr: people would be too busy being amazed by the fact that they live in a different world to panic about the societal hardships