6 ms·

> we all have reason to be very, very concerned What are you going to do about it? Armed revolution? Hoard enough food to ensure that you survive a few mon

> we all have reason to be very, very concerned What are you going to do about it? Armed revolution? Hoard enough food to ensure that you survive a few months longer than the rest of humanity?

hoodoof 9y ago
I'm going to try to locate the billionaire bunkers that I am sure they have all built deep into mountains and take refuge with them before battling my way across a post apocalyptic landscape fighting zombies, accompanied by a ragtag bunch of survivors. I figure the Bezos bunker must be part of his 10,000 year clock mountain http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html Of course I have no idea what to do because why the heck would you think about that unless you were an actual doomsday prepper? Likely outcomes at that stage is gigantic food crisis and the catastrophe that would follow so you'd need to store quite alot of bags of rice to get through that.
- prewett 9y ago
  A real doomsday prepper would have bought some land in the middle of nowhere (so hordes don't want/think to come there) and learned how to farm it. Storing six months of food or whatever is preparatory-theater and doesn't address sustainable survivel.
  - jonhendry18 9y ago
    Assuming it's still farmable.
  - Arbalest 9y ago
    I have thought about this (but done nothing, partially because I don't have the resources). This is my thinking too. Not just for you though, you need to be able to feed a self sustaining community (probably 100 or more people). Considered also taking some technological stores too. Water tech, refined metal stocks, manual and lower tech power tools. Maybe even some spare solar panels, inverters, battery electrolytes. Though I haven't thought deeply enough to actually work out any timescales for the size of stocks required. Picking the right climate is probably the most important part though. Even if there is great change, some places are still going to be more arable than others, and surely that is at least partially predictable.
    - javajosh 9y ago
      Yeah surviving an apocalypse is like settling a new, mostly terraformed planet. Sounds almost fun if you put it that way!
    - Yetanfou 9y ago
      Putting all this effort into something which most likely will not come to pass in your or your children's lifetime is not constructive and will eventually sap the energy and resource needed to stay 'prepared'. May I suggest taking up a lifestyle at this time and more or less in the place you are - assuming you're not in some jam-packed city where all hope is lost the moment society does break down for some time (New Orleans during Katarina is a good example of what will happen)? If you do live in such a place and will not consider to move out of it this won't work but if you have some space around you which you can call your own it makes sense to start using it in a productive way by growing something useful. Dig a well if you can, a dug well is more reliable than a deep-drilled one as you can get water when the power fails (which it does quite often where I live out in the Swedish countryside thanks to storms or careless snow plough drivers and such). If you don't live in a forested area you can start planting trees on less productive or hard to till soil, you'll need between 2 and 4 hectares to keep a house with around 200m2 of living area warmed to today's standards, less if you make the wise decision to lower them a bit. This does assume you have a wood-burning stove and cooking stove, of course - get those and use them regularly. Plant some fruit trees, berry bushes, a plot of potatoes (which you'll have to move around year after year as you should not grow potatoes in soil which carried them the year before or the one before that), root vegetables, easy stuff. For fun and profit you can add hops which will allow you to brew beer if you can get hold of barley - you could grow it yourself but it takes a lot of land and is a lot of work if you do everything by hand. Just make sure to think in practical terms, you're not trying to relive some Swiss Family Robinson fantasy but trying to live in a way which makes you and yours less dependent on the intricate workings of society, irrespective of whether any doomsday-scenario ever comes to pass or not. The less dependent you are of the trappings of 'modern' live, the less you'll suffer for the loss of such. I saved the best bit for the end: you'll most likely be happier in the here and now by becoming more self-reliant and less dependent on 'modern' society and its... lures. That does not mean you have to become a Luddite or back-to-the-land hippy, it just means you won't feel lost by not being part of the herd which follows the latest craze, sports the latest gizmos and relishes in the latest fad. It also means you won't need to think about 'prepping' anymore, just like people who cycle to work won't need to think about going to the gym to get some exercise as they made it part of their normal life.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    If you're in a sparsely populated area (e.g. New Zealand), you could likely hunt for food for years before food security became an issue.
    - lancewiggs 9y ago
      Well I guess there are the sheep and cattle to eat, and they would go wild. But we have no native mammals, and the imported tahr and pigs are notoriously hard to hunt.
      - toomanybeersies 9y ago
        Tahr aren't hard to hunt if you know what you're doing. It sounds cliche, but in order to hunt a tahr, you have to think like a tahr. Once you learn their habits they're fairly easy to find and easy enough to shoot. There's really big numbers up some of the valleys too. I've seen mobs of up to 30 before, and they just tend to stand there like idiots while you're shooting at them.
  - wiredfool 9y ago
    A real doomsday prepper _is_ a subsistence farmer. And hopefully one that doesn't rely on external inputs, and has a water supply that's not affected by climate change. Learning how to farm it is essentially equivalent to currently farming it, or if not, then you need a few years of supplies to make it over the startup transient. With no reliable external input.
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    What good would the concept of "ownership" be in the face of societal collapse? Push comes to shove, the only law will be "might makes right", so the only way to prepare for the worst is to be able to defend your assets. Being someone or friends with someone who has access to advanced weapons seems like a minimum requirement, but most important is to have a very wide social network with valuable skills to fall back on and start trading with.
  - drjesusphd 9y ago
    I imagine it would be difficult to predict what would be arable land after a climate catastrophe. If climate change is bad enough to affect the global food supply, chances are that means what used to be arable land isn't anymore.
- red75prime 9y ago
  > quite alot of bags of rice Optimal average temperature for rice growing is 23-26C [0]. Current annual average temperature in, say, Japan is 16C. A remote place with access to water and fertile soil, a lot of weapons and you're all set. [0] https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/48657 https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/48657
  - richjdsmith 9y ago
    Yea, but knowing how to plat rice seems critical to this plan... I know I'd be in trouble.
    - jhauris 9y ago
      You got me curious, and I found this article about people growing rice in Maryland without flooded paddies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/rice-grown-in-maryland-farmer-sees-a-future-that-doesnt-involve-flooding/2013/12/16/e4b6ccee-523a-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b572c9eab0eb https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/rice-grown-in-...
toomanybeersies 9y ago
At least when I lived back in New Zealand I had an emergency plan. I wouldn't call it a doomsday plan. With the likelihood of earthquakes and other natural disasters leaving you without help for days or weeks, it's only sensible. No need for global unrest to cause problems. You don't need to be a doomsday prepper to be prepared. And you don't need a complete collapse of society for things to get uncomfortable for you. You should have at least 3 days of food and water, as well as other essential supplies (blankets, first aid kit, radio) in a bag or convenient location, ready to go in an emergency.
- czechdeveloper 9y ago
  You said it great. It's not only "i can still buy anything anytime and all my energies and water work" and "Mad Max". Being prepared does not mean I expect Mad Max world.
- CapitalistCartr 9y ago
  I live in Florida. Only having three days of food during the Summer is irresponsible. A week of non-refrigerated is realistic. People who laugh about "prepping" haven't heard about hurricanes.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Having less than a week worth of rations (as in canned / dry food) is irresponsible regardless of where you live. During the “great storm” we had in London where we had like maybe 5” of snow fall and everything stopped working I had people seriously complaining and telling war stories about going hungry because they couldn’t get food delivered... Like seriously any small scale natural disaster or even a local utilities outage can cause issues to so many unprepared people it’s not even funny. I keep some basic canned / dry food enough for about a week for 2 people, 20 liters of bottled water and several high capacity charged chargers and I live in W2 London.
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  Even having a basic first aid kit at hand can mean the difference between life and death in a lot of cases. I keep a tourniquet and quick-clot gauze in my first aid kits because ambulance response times are commonly 30 minutes around here. If you have an arterial bleed you're going to be in pretty bad condition by the time the paramedics arrive unless you can control it. I've never seen an off the shelf first aid kit stock those items. Most of the off-the-shelf kits can barely treat a scraped knee.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 9y ago
That’s a extreme position. Use the experience of folks living in NYC after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. Things to consider: - Disruptions to communications. - Disruptions in emergency police/fire/ems response - Gasoline and diesel gone in 24 hours (or worse... I was on a coastal island where a hurricane suddenly turned -- all gas was sold within 6 hours of the hurricane warning!) - Electricity disruption - Mass transit shutdown - Shutdown this of highways and other roads. Basically, there’s a 72 hour “oh shit” phase (priority: your safety), 4-10 days of the new normal formulating (priority: protect your property), and then the new normal (deal with consequences, if any). How to prepare depends on risk. If you live in a floodplain or on the coast, you should have a clue about how you’re going to need to think about a couple of weeks post flood or hurricane. In other places, it’s probably good to think about what to do when a snowstorm knocks out power for a week.
sulam 9y ago
Personally I am hoping for large scale carbon capture. Environmentalists hate it because it’s too deus ex machina — if you believe it will happen then nothing we emit now matters. I take the tack that we _must_ figure it out because the alternatives aren’t tenable. As a species we do well when it’s clear what we have to do, and I’m bullish that we will figure out how to remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere before climate change effects hit the insane point (insane = 100M sea level rise and mass migration that puts what’s happening now into the “small effect” bucket).
- seiferteric 9y ago
  I wanted to believe this, but I think it could be too late. Doing so would require gargantuan amounts of energy that I think could only come from fusion but that is at best 30+ years away from first net energy. Even then it would take some time to build enough capacity, and lag effects in the environment mean we will almost certainly see some pretty effects in the next 100 years.
  - sulam 9y ago
    With today’s technology, yes. There’s good science being done right now that is much more efficient. And all our current approaches are chemical engineering, but I personally think organisms modified with CRISPR could be a better path. You’re just trying to get them to do what they already do, more quickly, and I think that’s in the realm of near-term science fiction instead of magic.
- mark-r 9y ago
  The problem with carbon capture is one of scale. Even though we're adding immense amounts to the atmosphere, it dissipates quickly. It's a minuscule percentage of air, only .04%. To remove significant amounts of carbon requires sucking in stupendous amounts of air.
kiliantics 9y ago
Armed revolution is starting to look more and more like the only reasonable thing that could stop this runaway train. Politics is not working. There are many eco-terrorists out there and they have put a lot of thought into this: https://deepgreenresistance.org/images/decisive-ecological-warfare-infographic-highres.jpg https://deepgreenresistance.org/images/decisive-ecological-w...

> we all have reason to be very, very concerned What are you going to do about it? Armed revolution? Hoard enough food to ensure that you survive a few months longer than the rest of humanity?

hoodoof 9y ago

I'm going to try to locate the billionaire bunkers that I am sure they have all built deep into mountains and take refuge with them before battling my way across a post apocalyptic landscape fighting zombies, accompanied by a ragtag bunch of survivors. I figure the Bezos bunker must be part of his 10,000 year clock mountain http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html Of course I have no idea what to do because why the heck would you think about that unless you were an actual doomsday prepper? Likely outcomes at that stage is gigantic food crisis and the catastrophe that would follow so you'd need to store quite alot of bags of rice to get through that.

prewett 9y ago
A real doomsday prepper would have bought some land in the middle of nowhere (so hordes don't want/think to come there) and learned how to farm it. Storing six months of food or whatever is preparatory-theater and doesn't address sustainable survivel.
- jonhendry18 9y ago
  Assuming it's still farmable.
- Arbalest 9y ago
  I have thought about this (but done nothing, partially because I don't have the resources). This is my thinking too. Not just for you though, you need to be able to feed a self sustaining community (probably 100 or more people). Considered also taking some technological stores too. Water tech, refined metal stocks, manual and lower tech power tools. Maybe even some spare solar panels, inverters, battery electrolytes. Though I haven't thought deeply enough to actually work out any timescales for the size of stocks required. Picking the right climate is probably the most important part though. Even if there is great change, some places are still going to be more arable than others, and surely that is at least partially predictable.
  - javajosh 9y ago
    Yeah surviving an apocalypse is like settling a new, mostly terraformed planet. Sounds almost fun if you put it that way!
  - Yetanfou 9y ago
    Putting all this effort into something which most likely will not come to pass in your or your children's lifetime is not constructive and will eventually sap the energy and resource needed to stay 'prepared'. May I suggest taking up a lifestyle at this time and more or less in the place you are - assuming you're not in some jam-packed city where all hope is lost the moment society does break down for some time (New Orleans during Katarina is a good example of what will happen)? If you do live in such a place and will not consider to move out of it this won't work but if you have some space around you which you can call your own it makes sense to start using it in a productive way by growing something useful. Dig a well if you can, a dug well is more reliable than a deep-drilled one as you can get water when the power fails (which it does quite often where I live out in the Swedish countryside thanks to storms or careless snow plough drivers and such). If you don't live in a forested area you can start planting trees on less productive or hard to till soil, you'll need between 2 and 4 hectares to keep a house with around 200m2 of living area warmed to today's standards, less if you make the wise decision to lower them a bit. This does assume you have a wood-burning stove and cooking stove, of course - get those and use them regularly. Plant some fruit trees, berry bushes, a plot of potatoes (which you'll have to move around year after year as you should not grow potatoes in soil which carried them the year before or the one before that), root vegetables, easy stuff. For fun and profit you can add hops which will allow you to brew beer if you can get hold of barley - you could grow it yourself but it takes a lot of land and is a lot of work if you do everything by hand. Just make sure to think in practical terms, you're not trying to relive some Swiss Family Robinson fantasy but trying to live in a way which makes you and yours less dependent on the intricate workings of society, irrespective of whether any doomsday-scenario ever comes to pass or not. The less dependent you are of the trappings of 'modern' live, the less you'll suffer for the loss of such. I saved the best bit for the end: you'll most likely be happier in the here and now by becoming more self-reliant and less dependent on 'modern' society and its... lures. That does not mean you have to become a Luddite or back-to-the-land hippy, it just means you won't feel lost by not being part of the herd which follows the latest craze, sports the latest gizmos and relishes in the latest fad. It also means you won't need to think about 'prepping' anymore, just like people who cycle to work won't need to think about going to the gym to get some exercise as they made it part of their normal life.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  If you're in a sparsely populated area (e.g. New Zealand), you could likely hunt for food for years before food security became an issue.
  - lancewiggs 9y ago
    Well I guess there are the sheep and cattle to eat, and they would go wild. But we have no native mammals, and the imported tahr and pigs are notoriously hard to hunt.
    - toomanybeersies 9y ago
      Tahr aren't hard to hunt if you know what you're doing. It sounds cliche, but in order to hunt a tahr, you have to think like a tahr. Once you learn their habits they're fairly easy to find and easy enough to shoot. There's really big numbers up some of the valleys too. I've seen mobs of up to 30 before, and they just tend to stand there like idiots while you're shooting at them.
- wiredfool 9y ago
  A real doomsday prepper _is_ a subsistence farmer. And hopefully one that doesn't rely on external inputs, and has a water supply that's not affected by climate change. Learning how to farm it is essentially equivalent to currently farming it, or if not, then you need a few years of supplies to make it over the startup transient. With no reliable external input.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  What good would the concept of "ownership" be in the face of societal collapse? Push comes to shove, the only law will be "might makes right", so the only way to prepare for the worst is to be able to defend your assets. Being someone or friends with someone who has access to advanced weapons seems like a minimum requirement, but most important is to have a very wide social network with valuable skills to fall back on and start trading with.
- drjesusphd 9y ago
  I imagine it would be difficult to predict what would be arable land after a climate catastrophe. If climate change is bad enough to affect the global food supply, chances are that means what used to be arable land isn't anymore.
red75prime 9y ago
> quite alot of bags of rice Optimal average temperature for rice growing is 23-26C [0]. Current annual average temperature in, say, Japan is 16C. A remote place with access to water and fertile soil, a lot of weapons and you're all set. [0] https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/48657 https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/48657
- richjdsmith 9y ago
  Yea, but knowing how to plat rice seems critical to this plan... I know I'd be in trouble.
  - jhauris 9y ago
    You got me curious, and I found this article about people growing rice in Maryland without flooded paddies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/rice-grown-in-maryland-farmer-sees-a-future-that-doesnt-involve-flooding/2013/12/16/e4b6ccee-523a-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b572c9eab0eb https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/rice-grown-in-...

toomanybeersies 9y ago

At least when I lived back in New Zealand I had an emergency plan. I wouldn't call it a doomsday plan. With the likelihood of earthquakes and other natural disasters leaving you without help for days or weeks, it's only sensible. No need for global unrest to cause problems. You don't need to be a doomsday prepper to be prepared. And you don't need a complete collapse of society for things to get uncomfortable for you. You should have at least 3 days of food and water, as well as other essential supplies (blankets, first aid kit, radio) in a bag or convenient location, ready to go in an emergency.

czechdeveloper 9y ago
You said it great. It's not only "i can still buy anything anytime and all my energies and water work" and "Mad Max". Being prepared does not mean I expect Mad Max world.
CapitalistCartr 9y ago
I live in Florida. Only having three days of food during the Summer is irresponsible. A week of non-refrigerated is realistic. People who laugh about "prepping" haven't heard about hurricanes.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Having less than a week worth of rations (as in canned / dry food) is irresponsible regardless of where you live. During the “great storm” we had in London where we had like maybe 5” of snow fall and everything stopped working I had people seriously complaining and telling war stories about going hungry because they couldn’t get food delivered... Like seriously any small scale natural disaster or even a local utilities outage can cause issues to so many unprepared people it’s not even funny. I keep some basic canned / dry food enough for about a week for 2 people, 20 liters of bottled water and several high capacity charged chargers and I live in W2 London.
jschwartzi 9y ago
Even having a basic first aid kit at hand can mean the difference between life and death in a lot of cases. I keep a tourniquet and quick-clot gauze in my first aid kits because ambulance response times are commonly 30 minutes around here. If you have an arterial bleed you're going to be in pretty bad condition by the time the paramedics arrive unless you can control it. I've never seen an off the shelf first aid kit stock those items. Most of the off-the-shelf kits can barely treat a scraped knee.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Spooky23 9y ago

That’s a extreme position. Use the experience of folks living in NYC after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. Things to consider: - Disruptions to communications. - Disruptions in emergency police/fire/ems response - Gasoline and diesel gone in 24 hours (or worse... I was on a coastal island where a hurricane suddenly turned -- all gas was sold within 6 hours of the hurricane warning!) - Electricity disruption - Mass transit shutdown - Shutdown this of highways and other roads. Basically, there’s a 72 hour “oh shit” phase (priority: your safety), 4-10 days of the new normal formulating (priority: protect your property), and then the new normal (deal with consequences, if any). How to prepare depends on risk. If you live in a floodplain or on the coast, you should have a clue about how you’re going to need to think about a couple of weeks post flood or hurricane. In other places, it’s probably good to think about what to do when a snowstorm knocks out power for a week.

sulam 9y ago

Personally I am hoping for large scale carbon capture. Environmentalists hate it because it’s too deus ex machina — if you believe it will happen then nothing we emit now matters. I take the tack that we _must_ figure it out because the alternatives aren’t tenable. As a species we do well when it’s clear what we have to do, and I’m bullish that we will figure out how to remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere before climate change effects hit the insane point (insane = 100M sea level rise and mass migration that puts what’s happening now into the “small effect” bucket).

seiferteric 9y ago
I wanted to believe this, but I think it could be too late. Doing so would require gargantuan amounts of energy that I think could only come from fusion but that is at best 30+ years away from first net energy. Even then it would take some time to build enough capacity, and lag effects in the environment mean we will almost certainly see some pretty effects in the next 100 years.
- sulam 9y ago
  With today’s technology, yes. There’s good science being done right now that is much more efficient. And all our current approaches are chemical engineering, but I personally think organisms modified with CRISPR could be a better path. You’re just trying to get them to do what they already do, more quickly, and I think that’s in the realm of near-term science fiction instead of magic.
mark-r 9y ago
The problem with carbon capture is one of scale. Even though we're adding immense amounts to the atmosphere, it dissipates quickly. It's a minuscule percentage of air, only .04%. To remove significant amounts of carbon requires sucking in stupendous amounts of air.

kiliantics 9y ago

Armed revolution is starting to look more and more like the only reasonable thing that could stop this runaway train. Politics is not working. There are many eco-terrorists out there and they have put a lot of thought into this: https://deepgreenresistance.org/images/decisive-ecological-warfare-infographic-highres.jpg https://deepgreenresistance.org/images/decisive-ecological-w...