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My sincere hope for my family is that weather patterns are 'nice' and we survive without significant fallout exposure. It's not as unlikely as it sounds, depen

My sincere hope for my family is that weather patterns are 'nice' and we survive without significant fallout exposure. It's not as unlikely as it sounds, depending on where you are when the bombs fall. Beyond that things will not really be that bad. Society maintains continuity even through insane events like the black death or cities being bombed into ruins. I think this is because humans are socialized for a very long time, and have very little experience living through apocalypses, and have a hard time accepting the inevitability of their own deaths. Society doesn't break down during mass starvation even. Speaking of mass starvation and lack of clean water, that will be how most people who survive about 3 days post nuclear war will die. This is easily avoidable, water filtration/sanitization solutions are extremely cheap, or even free if you have a bucket and some sand. Storing 1 year of calories takes so little space and is so cheap it isn't even a consideration. Mass starvation will not be a problem in the long run because it will be a huge problem much sooner. People will starve in the 2 months post event because of the temporary breakdown in logistics. After 6 months trains will be running again and there will be plenty of food, and no cities full of people to eat it.

tablespoon 4y ago
> Storing 1 year of calories takes so little space and is so cheap it isn't even a consideration. Please explain. My gut feel intuition is that you have to sacrifice at least a typical American closet's worth of space to do that.
- ltbarcly3 4y ago
  A 50 lb bag of rice would feed you for 50 days and you can fit about 8 of them in a grocery store cart.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > A 50 lb bag of rice would feed you for 50 days and you can fit about 8 of them in a grocery store cart. So that would be like 1/4 of a US closet for one person? I know rice will get bugs if you don't eat it in a reasonable amount of time, so that would be a concern.
nosianu 4y ago
> Beyond that things will not really be that bad. Apart from a gigantic global food crisis for at least a decade - see this comment for just a "small" nuclear war, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34448255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34448255 - and the disruption of the supply chain that makes what happend during COVID look like nothing at all happened there? Which means you can also forget about a lot of daily necessities like lots of chemicals and medicines, even if you yourself don't use them directly. Good luck going into forests trying to get enough wood - together with tens of millions of other people from around you. Never mind food, after the first year, which can probably be covered from the reserves. Asia and Africa will be quite busy dealing with a large population they can't feed any more, anybody who can attempting to flee and they won't take "no" for an answer at the borders. > After 6 months trains will be running again and there will be plenty of food, How, magic? (see linked comment and the study there, and remember that's only a "small" nuclear war they are talking about there) . [silent sigh] Why am I even participating in this kind of discussion... I guess it's early morning and I'm procrastinating.
- ltbarcly3 4y ago
  Again, you only need enough food to feed the people who are still alive. You don't need international supply chains to grow food. In fact, here in the US we have far more food than we need, not exporting it will mean we have an absolute glut. The rest of the world will lose access to that, but that doesn't effect me. Enough wood? I live in a forest. You can't have it both ways, either cities are so full of flammable material it causes an ice age if a few of them burn up OR there isn't anything to burn to boil water to make rice, you can't have it both ways. Tens of millions... Sorry, this state has 50 people per square mile. There aren't 10 million people within a 100 mile radius of me. Supply chain? They didn't have an international supply chain 100 years ago. They barely had one 50 years ago. The world will be fine without one for awhile. You are just not correct on any level here. People were trading and able to survive perfectly fine and even thrive 2000 years ago, with iron age technology and not much of that. 1 year after a nuclear war people would be rebuilding, 10 years after and day to day life will be very much like it was before the war. Here is a map of the amount of rail in the Soviet Union in the 20th century. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/RailUSAvsUSSR.svg/1920px-RailUSAvsUSSR.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Ra... You can see that they went from basically 0 rail to a massive amount of rail in 20 years. How did they do this without a global supply chain and while fighting 2 world wars? It turns out people are more than capable of addressing problems even under trying circumstances. They don't just say "supply chain disruption!" and give up and lay down and cry. [big sigh, shakes head, big show of having to deal with people despite of how much smarter and more important I think I am]

tablespoon 4y ago

> Storing 1 year of calories takes so little space and is so cheap it isn't even a consideration. Please explain. My gut feel intuition is that you have to sacrifice at least a typical American closet's worth of space to do that.

ltbarcly3 4y ago
A 50 lb bag of rice would feed you for 50 days and you can fit about 8 of them in a grocery store cart.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > A 50 lb bag of rice would feed you for 50 days and you can fit about 8 of them in a grocery store cart. So that would be like 1/4 of a US closet for one person? I know rice will get bugs if you don't eat it in a reasonable amount of time, so that would be a concern.

nosianu 4y ago

> Beyond that things will not really be that bad. Apart from a gigantic global food crisis for at least a decade - see this comment for just a "small" nuclear war, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34448255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34448255 - and the disruption of the supply chain that makes what happend during COVID look like nothing at all happened there? Which means you can also forget about a lot of daily necessities like lots of chemicals and medicines, even if you yourself don't use them directly. Good luck going into forests trying to get enough wood - together with tens of millions of other people from around you. Never mind food, after the first year, which can probably be covered from the reserves. Asia and Africa will be quite busy dealing with a large population they can't feed any more, anybody who can attempting to flee and they won't take "no" for an answer at the borders. > After 6 months trains will be running again and there will be plenty of food, How, magic? (see linked comment and the study there, and remember that's only a "small" nuclear war they are talking about there) . [silent sigh] Why am I even participating in this kind of discussion... I guess it's early morning and I'm procrastinating.

ltbarcly3 4y ago
Again, you only need enough food to feed the people who are still alive. You don't need international supply chains to grow food. In fact, here in the US we have far more food than we need, not exporting it will mean we have an absolute glut. The rest of the world will lose access to that, but that doesn't effect me. Enough wood? I live in a forest. You can't have it both ways, either cities are so full of flammable material it causes an ice age if a few of them burn up OR there isn't anything to burn to boil water to make rice, you can't have it both ways. Tens of millions... Sorry, this state has 50 people per square mile. There aren't 10 million people within a 100 mile radius of me. Supply chain? They didn't have an international supply chain 100 years ago. They barely had one 50 years ago. The world will be fine without one for awhile. You are just not correct on any level here. People were trading and able to survive perfectly fine and even thrive 2000 years ago, with iron age technology and not much of that. 1 year after a nuclear war people would be rebuilding, 10 years after and day to day life will be very much like it was before the war. Here is a map of the amount of rail in the Soviet Union in the 20th century. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/RailUSAvsUSSR.svg/1920px-RailUSAvsUSSR.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Ra... You can see that they went from basically 0 rail to a massive amount of rail in 20 years. How did they do this without a global supply chain and while fighting 2 world wars? It turns out people are more than capable of addressing problems even under trying circumstances. They don't just say "supply chain disruption!" and give up and lay down and cry. [big sigh, shakes head, big show of having to deal with people despite of how much smarter and more important I think I am]