The Earth is about to to hit by deadly space rays.
A mysterious stranger tells you 99% of humanity will die.
He asks you if you’d like to survive. If you say yes, you, your partner, or if you are single, your best friend, and your up to three of your children or nieces/nephews will safely timeskip 'til the danger is all past.
The DSRs affect all populations equally, so to put it in perspective there’ll still be around 3 million Americans, and 12 million Chinese running about.
What do you choose?
Also, would it impact your choice if it was known that the surviving 1% all made the choice to survive.
I’m not on any medications that would go stale, and the one I am on would be easy to find. If I really need it at all.
The grid would go down for sure, but a diesel or gas generator would keep me going for years. If not indefinitely. Plenty of diesel in storage tanks. Or go with LP for that matter. Plenty of that stored too, though I know little about the transfer process other than a truck fills my tank a few times a year.
Eating canned and dried food would suck initially. I would have to relocate to do proper subsistence farming. I’d consider southern California. Though it might be too crowded/dangerous with others that are living hand to mouth.
Not that electricity is really a necessity. Sure would be nice though. I would work on setting up solar/hydro power for my group. Shouldn’t take too long, and while I wouldn’t have the internet to figure it out, I do have some books on it.
My money guy suggested we buy gold - like krugerrands - and keep them in a safe at home, to use when America collapsed. I told him, (1) there’s no reason gold will be worth anything, food and water will be, and (2) if gold was still a medium of exchange, I’d need weapons to defend it, which didn’t appeal to me. My wife and I decided we’d rather not be bit players in “Mad Max - Arkansas” and preferred to die.
For me, my life is given meaning by my civilization. As a survivor, I’d be shoved behind a plough and worked to death. No books. No media. No parties. No Kit-Kat bars. (Egad!)
I’m getting up in years anyway: they’d probably just decline to feed me, and I’ll die anyway.
I’m game for being saved, especially since it sounds like this apocalypse might not be as bad as some options. Deadly space rays should leave a minimum of collateral damage compared to options like nuclear war or asteroid impact.
Why would it be a negative to know the other survivors chose this too? Wouldn’t survivors tend to self-select for people who could cope with the apocalypse, making it a good thing? The only scenario I see being negative is if the alien is only asking assholes if they want to survive, but his statement about ratios of people suggests that he’s not.
Sure, I’ll stick around. But I will keep my suicide pills with me at all times. I like feeling the sun and the breeze on my skin, but I don’t have a lot of tolerance for pain. Modern medicine and convenience provides a buffer against pain. I don’t know what kind of person I would be if I had to endure teeth aches and broken bones just by gritting my teeth.
So my first task post-apocalypse would be to raid my local pharmacy and grab all the pain-killing drugs I could find. I’d also grab all the anti-histamines because I want to enjoy post-apocalyptic living without the fear of hives.
My life would be hell without air conditioning, and certainly a 99 percent dip in population would destroy civilization and electrical production. I’ll check out with the 99 percent. Boy, the Koch Brothers and the other 1 percent are in a for an interesting post apocalyptic world, which probably involves manual labor.
An apocalypse like that? Sure, I’ll take my chances.
It’d certainly be a lot more interesting than the one shown in The Road, or even post Global Thermonuclear War (although Mad Max did look sort of fun in a brutal lawless kind of way)
It would depend on which 12 million Americans would live, and where they were. If they were representative of the total population, virtually all of them would be in cities and have almost no usable skills for creating food, clothing, shelter. They would probably have a difficult time finding even the people nearby, much less anyone else. A lot of people would die within the first year, I would presume, due to starvation, cholera, exposure, untreated medical conditions, and going crazy. It would be really fucked up. Maybe if I were younger, but I’m not capable of grueling physical labor any more. Still, no more traffic jams, that would be nice.
Not worth sticking around for though. I think I’d pass.