I’m not talking about an asteroid falling on your head, or wars of WMDs, really. Well, maybe I am, assuming the real destruction happens somewhere else, and there are no deadly poisonous clouds heading your way. But you can’t expect any outside help for the forseeable future, except for whatever you can take or barter from others around you. You don’t have electricity unless you have generators, and you have whatever gas is in the cars and the underground tanks at your local stations.
What I’d like to know if you think you might live in a place and among people who could band together and maintain a society that would be worth living in, should there be a collapse of governmental authority and the power and communications grids.
Oh, yeah. Living in earthquake country as we do, we try to keep a healthy supply of the necessities on hand at all times. I also try to maintain good relations with all the Mormons in town too.
In times like this, it pays to be a paranoid gun nut. What I have I can protect. What I don’t have I can take.
I have emergency kits and ablout 2-3 weeks’ food. However, I would guess that before we could build a new society, I’d be felled by respiratory problems or blood sugar dysregulation. So have fun without me!
This has been done before here, but my 24k dialup doesn’t like searches much.
We could last indefinitely, barring serious injury. As long as there was gasoline or diesel fuel, loss of outside power sources would be inconvenient but not a killer. We were out of electricity for 24 days following hurricane Opal in '95 and the generator did just fine.
Once the fuel was gone, we’d still have horses for transportation. We’d then have to start manually drawing water from the well instead of using the electric pump, but that’s workable. There’d always be plenty to eat from this farm and the surrounding forest. I’ve got enough guns and ammunition to start a small revolution.
Life wouldn’t be as much fun, but we could last for years, probably decades.
Morality is a result of civilization. Take away one and you cripple the other. To protect myself and my own, there are no rules. If you must die so that we may live, so be it. Society only makes it politer. It doesn’t change the basics.
I think I’d do pretty well in an apocalypse. Working at the musem has given me a lot of skills that most people don’t have-- I can churn butter, make soap, and I know how to preserve food without refrigeration. I also know which plants around here are edible and which have medicinal properties. I know how to hunt and butcher meat and in a pinch, I could spin and weave my own cloth.
IN my opinion, the best goods to stock up on, pre-apocalypse would be booze and cigarettes. Those would be extremely valuable trade goods.
Gasoline goes bad after a while, so don’t depend on being able to use what’s in underground tanks for very long. The natural gas supply might last longer, depending on whether the pipes remained intact, but it really wouldn’t have a lot of uses for home heating without an electric blower.
I have a funny feeling that should ‘bad things’ happen, the Type-A’s will take each other out first and then may run out of bullets after that. Only the police and National Guard would normally have replacement supplies of ammo shipped to them. Others feel that the Type-A’s will pick on the weakest targets first because its animal/human nature to.
If you are staying put, I’d imagine that Stealth would be the key to survival: no lights on at night, no obvious signs that you are home, and your home would need to be organized and set up in a way to best delay/impede intruders while you stop/kill them.
Of course, you’re only good for as long as you have the threes; you’ll die if you go more than: 3 minutes w/o air, 3 days w/o water (toilet tank included), or 3 weeks w/o food. I’d imagine that main highways would become scavenger parking lots, with people living close to the roads picking off and stealing the goods(food, water, ammo, whatever) from the bodies and cars of people caught in the traffic jams trying to get out.
There’s always the question of cash, and whether it will still be worth anything in an emergency.
Still, I forget who it was, but some survivalist once posted about surviving a catastrophe. They wrote that to survive a catastrophic event, one should know at least 3 different people in 3 different areas who 1) you would trust your life to, 2) who live someplace with a natural supply of fresh water and 3) who live more than 3 days walk from any of the major population centers.
Keep in mind that, though, that even Chaos doesn’t last forever, and that very few disasters will ever rid the land completely of trees and ropes, so be careful who you kill and why you kill them.
The last time we did this (I can’t find it, but I think it was a thread about how much you have in the way of provisions in your house in case of an emergency) I was the poster that time around who said that while I have a fair amount of canned goods that can be eaten cold and a fair supply of water on hand, it’s the fact that I’m a gun owner that doesn’t have me stocking cans of beans up to the ceiling.
It’s not that I’d necessarily be going around and picking off the neighbors just for some Cheez-It’s, it’s that I’m prepared to go scavenging when and if I need to while remaining relatively safe. Still, if it comes down to me dying of thirst or you dying of a gunshot wound……
I would use my camping/backpacking experience/knowledge to survive. I would pack up a backpack with my tent, sleeping bag, water filter, camp stove/fuel, etc., and a bunch of topographical maps and a compass. And I would get together with a friend of mine who is a bow hunter, and set off into the woods. With as many deer as we have around here, food wouldn’t be much of a problem. We could also build traps for small mammals like rabbits and squirrels. There are so many squirrels around here that I don’t think it would be hard at all to get them. Also, I would bring a fishing pole and supplies because there are plenty of fish to be had in local rivers and lakes (barring contamination of the water supplies).
I definitely know my biggest obstacle is location. Living in Phoenix doesn’t provide one with much of a natural water supply. Assuming that I could amass enough water, I’m not too nervous. I shoot well and know where I could acquire a few guns on short notice in a crisis. I know how to clean and gut fish, I’m assuming that gutting small mammals is a little different, but not too hard to pick up. I’ll eat what I need to, I don’t require medication/glasses/etc. A big concern would be creating fire once my cache of lighters ran out. Rubbing sticks together never worked out for me.
I’d start boning up on my guitar playing–I’d have plenty of time to practice–and try to make my living as a musician. No electricity means no music other than live; so there’d be lots of work for musicians!
I don’t think this would work. If there was a disaster large enough to seriously disrupt the power and transportation networks so that having enough food became a serious problem, there would be very few places remote enough to escape the surge of hungry humanity. If you can walk there from a major population center, so can millions of other people. If the disruption lasted longer than a few days, the chance of surviving, starting from a city, would be very slim indeed. Maybe if you were already out in the woods when it happened.
Personally, I think I’d be toast, unless I got to an unguarded gun shop quickly.
Not me, not for long. I’m a dazzling urbanite and require the mechanics of civilization to live.
I am also somewhat cynical about the ability of groups of humans to work together and avoid murdering each other, without the influence of civilization to hold them back. **Silenus ** and **Cluricaun ** are good examples of what I mean.
So let me get this clear, guys (and why am I so sure that you’re both male?) - if I have an extra couple of water containers, and you’re running out, you would consider murdering me to get my water?
That’s the world I don’t want to live in, thank you very much.
