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Just Xenos? Or a scenario where his rickety corpse falls off the Throne and another Eye of Terror erupts from Terra creating a free-flowing demon gate that covers a chunk of the galaxy?
Realistically there’s two answers here – if the God Emperor of Mankind just packed it in one day, the Imperium dies the same day. He is the only thing that enables human ships to travel the warp so without him powering the Astronomicon, the Imperium as a functional spacefaring society dies pretty much immediately. Now if you’re talking about humanity as a species – that answer is much harder to figure out.
We’ve seen evidence of worlds that have remained untouched for millennia by….pretty much everything…for reasons that don’t always have a clear cause. Worlds that haven’t felt the foul touch of the warp, or had any Orc spores fall, or been a big enough blip on the psychic radar to catch the attention of Chaos or anything else inside the warp. Plus, humanity has spread in every direction with truly enormous reach – the IOM alone is said to stretch across a million worlds and there are human worlds beyond the Imperium (for reasons) that still exist and bang along just fine.
I suspect that if the Emperor was to die ‘today’ there would still be humans kicking around for tens of thousands of years, if not longer, as the Tyranids and the Orc and Chaos and Necrons and whoever else is left that just can’t die shred their way across the galaxy. But the Imperium? That dies with the Emperor.
The Imperium of Man settled over a million worlds. That sounds like a lot, but there’s around 100 to 400 billion stars in the galaxy. If there’s an average of one inhabitable world per galaxy, they’re barely scratching the surface. And, given that they’re a major power, the others presumably aren’t either. So it would take a very long time for anyone to find the last holdout of humanity.
That said, it’s just one interpretation. Maybe “a million worlds” isn’t meant to be taken literally and it’s orders of magnitude more. Maybe only a fraction of a percent of worlds are habitable, and xenos would quickly find the last humans as they take over the habitable worlds.
Obviously this is highly speculative, and tied to our individual ideas about the narrative purpose of the setting. But in my personal conception, the Emperor dies, and the Imperium dies, and humanity… just keeps trucking. Only local warp travel means loads of worlds collapse completely, but without the overwhelming need to pour practical resources into the Imperial core and military resources to the Imperial periphery, many worlds are much better off. Factions like Chaos and the Orks are actually depowered by the lack of opposition. Genestealers have a harder time spreading through the galaxy. Individual worlds become more resilient and have fewer threats to deal with.
The galaxy is so large and there are so many inhabited worlds that I am pretty sure people would starve to death from the slow breakup of interplanetary food trade faster than Xenos could actually kill humans with weapons and orbital bombardments.
Just xenos? A few hundred years at best. Orks can roll very quickly. If you leave them alone to grow for a few hundred years, they can quickly re-discover teleport technologies, become smarter than even humans, growing dozens of Beast-level Orks. And that is not even their limit. The last time it happened, they nearly destroyed Terra and a large chunk of the Imperium in a span of a few years.
Wouldn’t this kill off the tech priesthood and other barriers against rediscovering scientific and engineering knowledge? You might end up with small groups of worlds, close enough for local warp travel, reverse engineering their old Imperium tech, the tech priests overthrown, and gradually learning how to build reliable technology for real.
The “Imperium” as an entity would fade very quickly.
The planets and denizens? Probably never. Space is big. Some planets already survived 30k->40k without any issues. The death of the people would not be on a chronological scale any of the individuals living it would care about.
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We are not here to discuss or complain about the real world.
Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction.
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Just Xenos? Or a scenario where his rickety corpse falls off the Throne and another Eye of Terror erupts from Terra creating a free-flowing demon gate that covers a chunk of the galaxy?
Realistically there’s two answers here – if the God Emperor of Mankind just packed it in one day, the Imperium dies the same day. He is the only thing that enables human ships to travel the warp so without him powering the Astronomicon, the Imperium as a functional spacefaring society dies pretty much immediately. Now if you’re talking about humanity as a species – that answer is much harder to figure out.
We’ve seen evidence of worlds that have remained untouched for millennia by….pretty much everything…for reasons that don’t always have a clear cause. Worlds that haven’t felt the foul touch of the warp, or had any Orc spores fall, or been a big enough blip on the psychic radar to catch the attention of Chaos or anything else inside the warp. Plus, humanity has spread in every direction with truly enormous reach – the IOM alone is said to stretch across a million worlds and there are human worlds beyond the Imperium (for reasons) that still exist and bang along just fine.
I suspect that if the Emperor was to die ‘today’ there would still be humans kicking around for tens of thousands of years, if not longer, as the Tyranids and the Orc and Chaos and Necrons and whoever else is left that just can’t die shred their way across the galaxy. But the Imperium? That dies with the Emperor.
The Imperium of Man settled over a million worlds. That sounds like a lot, but there’s around 100 to 400 billion stars in the galaxy. If there’s an average of one inhabitable world per galaxy, they’re barely scratching the surface. And, given that they’re a major power, the others presumably aren’t either. So it would take a very long time for anyone to find the last holdout of humanity.
That said, it’s just one interpretation. Maybe “a million worlds” isn’t meant to be taken literally and it’s orders of magnitude more. Maybe only a fraction of a percent of worlds are habitable, and xenos would quickly find the last humans as they take over the habitable worlds.
Obviously this is highly speculative, and tied to our individual ideas about the narrative purpose of the setting. But in my personal conception, the Emperor dies, and the Imperium dies, and humanity… just keeps trucking. Only local warp travel means loads of worlds collapse completely, but without the overwhelming need to pour practical resources into the Imperial core and military resources to the Imperial periphery, many worlds are much better off. Factions like Chaos and the Orks are actually depowered by the lack of opposition. Genestealers have a harder time spreading through the galaxy. Individual worlds become more resilient and have fewer threats to deal with.
The galaxy is so large and there are so many inhabited worlds that I am pretty sure people would starve to death from the slow breakup of interplanetary food trade faster than Xenos could actually kill humans with weapons and orbital bombardments.
Just xenos? A few hundred years at best. Orks can roll very quickly. If you leave them alone to grow for a few hundred years, they can quickly re-discover teleport technologies, become smarter than even humans, growing dozens of Beast-level Orks. And that is not even their limit. The last time it happened, they nearly destroyed Terra and a large chunk of the Imperium in a span of a few years.
Wouldn’t this kill off the tech priesthood and other barriers against rediscovering scientific and engineering knowledge? You might end up with small groups of worlds, close enough for local warp travel, reverse engineering their old Imperium tech, the tech priests overthrown, and gradually learning how to build reliable technology for real.
Welcome aboard, Gue’vesa.
The “Imperium” as an entity would fade very quickly.
The planets and denizens? Probably never. Space is big. Some planets already survived 30k->40k without any issues. The death of the people would not be on a chronological scale any of the individuals living it would care about.