I immediately get stuck on the fact that I only have a quarter tank of gas in my car and no knowledge of how to hack gas pumps and if the apocalypse hits I’m ferdamnsure not going to pay for gas. So I need to first learn how to siphon. I assume a gascan and a length of hose are all I need but I’ve never tried it in real life.
And things like hacking google’s frontpage? Now I gotta learn coding and webpages and cryptography because only the top director of Google Doodle left his password on a sticky note…
It’s actually fairly easy…but bring along some gum as your mouth will taste like gas for hours if you don’t. Anyway, there are hand-operated siphon pumps available at all hardware stores and they are more efficient. Hell…it might be easier to just change vehicles when one runs low on fuel.After all there will be an abundance of them around.
I’ve never worked at a gas station. I would have assumed they run through the POS. I suppose I could look around for a manager who might have a key card…
The net will be down after a few days/weeks. Probably wouldn’t find the person that way.
I would go on a long tour. I would make an road travel itinerary up of landmarks and places I’d like to visit for at least the next several years and make several thousand copies of it. It would note the specific date and times I would be at particular landmarks as I go along. I would do a few loops through North America and then down to South America and back. Along the way, every hundred miles or so I would brightly paint a garish color on an abandoned car that is somewhere conspicuous on the highway/road or wherever. Maybe mark buildings or landmarks too. At each of these I would leave a copy of my itinerary. So for example if someone finds a car I painted in LA two years previous, they can see from my itinerary that I’m due to be at the CN Tower in Toronto in 2 weeks and start heading out to meet me.
After 5 or so years of doing this I would look for a boat that I could operate to get me to Europe. Hopefully I could self teach the operation of it with manuals etc and learn of the best historic weather windows to do it. I am thinking Newfoundland to Iceland etc. must be doable it I time it right. Alternatively I might try going from Alaska to Russia. I’d have to research that.
Once across the ocean I continue my tour through Europe, Asia and Africa.
I think about this stuff sometimes. If there were only two people left in a state, and no modern tech (phone, internet, radio, etc.) was available, could they find each other?
Sure. But they’re not going to be twitter/facebook/usenet group users. I think people are dramatically underestimating how irrelevant the Internet is to the day to day life of billions of people.
I think my best bet would be to start fires. Big, smoky fires. Of course, I’d need a way to prove they weren’t just random fires caused by the downfall of civilization. So I’d keep them under control. Let them burn for, say, a day or two, then put them out for a while. Then repeat.
Unless they’re within what… a thousand (?) two thousand (?) miles of each other the hard part will be hooking up. Supposing she’s in Tokyo and you’re in New York? Then what?
The electric grid would probably be down within minutes, but that’s no fun, so assuming the internet and all websites stayed operational…
I’d go to all the large news websites and post in the comment section of all the stories on the main page. Those sites would be where the other person would be likely to look, and that’s the only way you’ll be able to change content on them, if they just think to look at comments.
Then I’d look for large sites that automatically show the newly submitted content. Do Pinterest, Photobucket, etc have a “recent images” page? Does eBay have “new auctions?” Do any large chat sites show recently logged in users? Does Amazon show recently purchased items? Many won’t show new content, but I’m sure many do.
Assuming both people are looking on the internet (big assumption), thought to look for altered content (another assumption but any net savvy person should think of it before long), and given the fact that you can make your mark on all the suitable large sites in no time, I think the two might notice each other pretty soon.
In fact, I can think of dozens of places where people sit around radios listening to shortwave broadcasts if they want news of the world. Even if they had dependable electricity to run a computer, its cost would likely be equivalent of several years of pay.
If I’m one of the last two people left alive, how the heck am I going to know that exactly one other person is still alive? For all I know there could be dozens, hundreds even thousands and it would still seem like the same empty world to me until I found someone else.
my own takeaway from the OP is that, there is no centralised communication point on the Internet. if you want to broadcast a message to everyone who’s using the Internet, how would you do so? currently, what happens is you depend on others to disseminate that information for you, provided that they deemed it to be interesting enough.
with the OP’s restraints, i think releasing spambots on every other website is perhaps the only option we have to send the message across.