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How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
- igolden 8y agoDef going to start referring to the apocalypse as "The Event" from now on.
- ForHackernews 8y agoDon't think about The Event! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X888i7hzvP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X888i7hzvP0
- dsabanin 8y agoI feel like this rich people paranoia can be summed up as an old adage: the more you have, the more you are afraid to lose it.
- igolden 8y agoRight. "No one would help me protect my bunker out of respect, trust. Let's put electric collars on all the guards and horde the food source."
- OliverJones 8y agoCheck out Neal Stephenson's fine novel SEVENEVES for a vision of what happens at The Event. Yeah, and the final few minutes of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. These plutocrats are indulging themselves in a fantasy about their inherent superiority.
- JTbane 8y agoPretty saddening to read- instead of spending their billions to fight climate change, the rich have the "fuck you get mine" viewpoint. Hell, some of 'em probably made their fortunes on coal and oil. Then again this could just be human nature.
- kanox 8y ago> instead of spending their billions to fight climate change Does Tesla count or are we still calling Elon a scammer and fraud because he's not producing electric cars fast enough?
- zzzzzzzza 8y ago"not producing electric cars fast enough" Oh, you mean literally lying about how many cars he is producing, fabricating timelines when he knows they are 100% impossible, libel-ing people, lying about self driving and giving a dangerous name (autopilot) to his driver assist, going on insane witchunts, and taking all the credit for other peoples work (e.g. martin eberhard)? All while producing crap tons of scrap and rework in his factory that literally invalidates the thesis that the cars are somehow environmentally friendly? Cars that are great at accelerating and suck at stopping, and thus have a much higher fatality rate than other luxury vehicles (on par with sports cars)? Yep pretty sure we're still calling elon a scammer and a fraud.
- TYPE_FASTER 8y agoI think the two things we should be doing are 1. Working on getting off the planet and 2. Working to save the planet. Elon is working on both. I'm a believer.
- ahelwer 8y agoIt's kinda fun to have backup plan upon backup plan. I've definitely gone down this rabbit hole with online account security; was considering buying a safe to store a backup yubikey & some paper passwords, but then I had to consider how I might store the safe combo if I forgot it, and so on - your contingency planning creates more surface area from which additional problems grow.
- bryanlarsen 8y agoI suspect that many of them are putting resources into both fighting it and escaping it. At least that's what I would do.
- wolfgke 8y ago
- ALittleLight 8y agoMaybe I'm just in a skeptical mood this morning, but I have a hard time believing that a cabal of really rich CEO types are going to turn to a single person to field technology questions ranging from crypto currency preferences to how you manage your guards in a dystopian future. The intro to the article has the author reviewing a wide and diverse number of topics with these business guys for an hour. It made me curious what his qualifications were. His website mentioned that he's a "Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens". Again, not the first person I'd turn to if I wanted to talk technology. I just have a hard time believing the story in the beginning. The author thought he'd be giving a presentation to an audience. Instead, he's in an hour long counseling session with some executives. Why would they do it that way? Why wouldn't you tell the expert what you're doing in advance and the topics you're interested in so he'd have time to prepare? Why not talk to individual domain experts in subjects you're curious about?
- dmode 8y agoYeah, that's the first thing I thought. Note that their questions were also not limited to technology, but veered into philosophical questions like "how do I maintain authority". If the author is an expert in that many fields, probably deserves his speaking fees.
- caymanjim 8y agoThey work for hedge funds. They are used to aggregating information from a number of sources to, literally, hedge their bets. You can be sure that he was one of many experts they consulted.
- kgin 8y agoThis story is a great conversation starter that will spark a lot of great discussion. But it's so perfect, I have a hard time believing it actually happened the way it's told.
- ggg9990 8y agoI’ve read so many stories about these plans and they all have the same flaw... nothing stops an ex-Navy SEAL from taking all of this stuff from them when money is worth nothing (as it will be in an apocalypse)
- Steltek 8y agoIt's intriguing to see rich people feeling just as out of control as the rest of the planet's population. I wonder what that really says about the current state of society? It seems like wealth inequality really benefits no one at all.
- sarreph 8y agoI think it also says a lot about the human condition — wealth and power just bring a new set of worries and psychological conundrums, especially if you’re already inclined to want to be in control of your life.
- na85 8y agoWell, I know that I don't have the funds to preemptively build a giant shelter, wall off some fertile land, and then store some seeds in the shelter so that I can grow food after society collapses. I can't afford to buy a giant container ship and ride out the apocalypse offshore by farming on the deck, away from the angry mobs. But I bet Thiel or Zuck could afford that. Seems to me that wealth is a definite means to surviving "the Event".
- GW150914 8y agoA giant container ship with food is just pirate bait. A walled off region full of food is raider bait. Hoarding resources in the face of desperate people in the absence of law and order is suicide, but these guys can’t conceive of a future in which they don’t command some form of control and respect so they plan this way. The only feasible way to survive long term is either to form a large, well armed group of raiders, or a larger, better armed community full of skilled people who have each others’ backs, probably intermarried and interbred; clans and tribes in other words.
- na85 8y agoYou might be right but I think that's entirely beside and irrelevant to my point, which is that with money, you have a greater capacity to effect change of any sort than without. Including in terms of prepping for the apocalypse.
- jorblumesea 8y agoWhat world will you inherit, provided you survive? Short term thinking is exactly the problem. We are all in this together, and your millions in stocks and etfs are worth nothing if the entire world goes to shit. Sadly Gates is the outlier, not the norm, when it comes to how you use wealth.
- dk1138 8y agoI'm not wealthy. I've had these same concerns. My wife and I have looked at locations to buy a house in an area that is least likely to be impacted by shifting weather, has farmable land, and is isolated from the coasts to avoid the ~1Bil+ migration once the mideast gets too hot. There are a lot of really smart people on this site. Am I being crazy? I look at the modern political scene and things going the opposite way of improvement. I look at corporate endeavors to privatize vital commodities (looking at you, Nestle and water). We are seeing each year get worse and worse from a climate perspective, and while there are a lot of brilliant scientists and engineers working through solutions, a lot of eager youth to fix the sins of their elders—is it too late? Or at the very least, isn't it a valid to think that we may be too late and plan accordingly? For the mega-rich, how is the process different from any other time in history? Isn't the answer to build an army?
- gxs 8y agoI don't think there is a right answer to this. Given enough time, it's certainly possible if not even probable. But whether that is within 20 years or 200 years is likely impossible to predict.
- arethuza 8y agoIf you build an army why would they remain loyal to a rich person once riches and legal ownership cease to become meaningful concepts?
- qbrass 8y agoBecause you built the army properly and instilled that loyalty in your troops before needing to test it.
- 394549 8y ago> Because you built the army properly and instilled that loyalty in your troops before needing to test it. That presumes a lot more focus and attention than I'd assume a hedge fund billionaire would be able to devote to a low-probability bet. Also, unless your name is Erik Prince, you probably don't even have the skills. When the SHTF, your head of security (who put in the time to earn the loyalty of the troops) is going to be king. Honestly, I think the best survival strategy for a billionaire in a post apocalyptic world is to stockpile supplies to be explicitly given as gifts to whatever community forms near your hideout. It's foolish for the ex-CEO to try to be king of a new world where he has few valuable skills, but he may be able to survive by ingratiating himself with the the nearby communities.
- sandworm101 8y agoFools and thier money. If they want to spend thier millions preping for the zombie outbreak, so be it. Id rather them hire people to build bunkers than sink those dollars into bitcoin futures.
- carapace 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 > Purporting to be an investigation into the UK's contemporary "brain drain", Alternative 3 uncovered a plan to make the Moon and Mars habitable in the event of climate change and a terminal environmental catastrophe on Earth.[1] > The programme was originally meant to be broadcast on April Fools' Day, 1977.
- nohat 8y agoWhat percentage of your networth is considered socially acceptable to spend on preparing for disasters? For a billionaire buying a new zealand vacation home is like most of us spending a couple hundred bucks on, eg a water filter, first aid kit, and non perishable food, standard preparations that FEMA recommends.
- cmiles74 8y agoI think this is a big part of the problem. That the 1% has become so insanely wealthy that they believe it is less expensive to prepare for the end of the world rather than take on some the cost of preventing it. Their belief that it would be better to start over with a small population (the 1% themselves, obvs) then to work to improve the world as it currently stands. And, of course, the naive belief that they can make plans robust enough they might somehow survive "The Event".
- mariushn 8y agoPlaying devil's advocate: Why wouldn't the 1% plan work? They would settle in NZ & AU, with a marine army defending against the rest of the world, which would be busy anyway fighting for survival against one another and climate. Use latest tech to keeps these lands habitable and self-sustaining. Maybe even expand to a space station in 50 years.
- cmiles74 8y agoI think it's just too brittle. If we look for examples of similar bunkers, there are a couple military sites but nothing (AFAIK) that's been inhabited long term. Their concerns about keeping the guards on their side seems valid, that could turn out to be intractable. If the whole world does crumble, they'll have to be able to build everything from raw materials, including sourcing all of those raw materials. And so on and so forth.
- mariushn 8y agoWe're talking about 2 small continents: entire AU & NZ, not bunkers. They can definitely be self-sustaining.
- sp332 8y agoLots of discussion from when this was first posted on Medium. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17468558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17468558
- olefoo 8y agoThe thing is; there won't be a "the Event" there will only be a long emergency and it's already in progress. Systems won't fail all at once and new temporary systems will be built as things change. But if these fools think that that they will be able to keep their power and influence by doing the same things that made them wealthy they will be an amusing and schadenfreude inducing sideshow that most people will barely notice because they're too busy figuring out how to beat the heat. The way to survive the transitions we are facing now is not to use today's wealth and influence to make yourself a warlord of a post-apocalyptic desert. It's to build cooperative societies that can make deserts bloom in difficult places and provide shelter from the storms to come. You cannot expect to maintain effective technologically adept societies by fear and coercion. You must be able to offer hope and inspiration if you want assistance of any level of cognitive complexity.
- GW150914 8y agoThe funny thing is really that they’ll hoard resources and power, but all of their power will mean nothing. A warlord isn’t some clever, greedy dick, it’s the guy who murders that dick and takes over his hoard. If you really want to prepare for an apocalypse, be the head of one of these idiots’ private armies. When it falls apart, you casually blow his brains out and take over.
- olefoo 8y agoKeeping a private army fed, equipped and healthy is a hard problem; especially if you cannot rely on the large scale infrastructure systems that provide all of the advanced technology, effective medical care and civil order we take for granted. What you are describing is a fantasy that would collapse with the first cholera outbreak.
- ordinaryradical 8y agoThis article misses how "unbridled capitalism" has radically improved the lives of the global poor. While I consider myself left-leaning, but it's amazing how often left-of-center folks get this one wrong. I don't want a corporate dystopia either, but the number of people that have been lifted out of extreme poverty by the globalized economy is staggering. What I think these articles truly represent is the psychic unease of the Western middle class, which has not been helped by this revolution but has seen their influence and social mobility wane. They realize (rightly, I think) that their societies face an existential risk from extremely concentrated wealth and concoct these narratives as a way of trying to signal that problem.
- jupp0r 8y agoI agree wholeheartedly. When having this discussion I like to show people this graphic [1]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Two-centuries-World-as-100-people.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Two-ce...
- darwin142 8y agoSo we have improved the lives of some and toxified our planet in the process, potentially making it completely unlivable. Do you actually think that is a good deal?
- AJRF 8y agoget a grip, of course its not.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sunstone 8y agoBezos' 10000 year clock would be a good place to hide a hidey hole like these guys are planning.