How would billionaires not only survive, but attempt to keep their elite, upper-hand status, in an apocalypse?

[Dewey_Finn]

@Exapno_Mapcase

He thinks a self-sustaining colony will insulate him from the terrors because he knows there’s no answer on Earth.

Does anyone, including Elon Musk, think that a Mars colony could be self sustaining, independent of supply deliveries from Mother Earth? There are so many raw materials and manufactured goods that Mars will not be able to produce.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

You know that, and I know that, and well over 8,000,000,000 people on Earth know that.

Does Musk? I think so.

Some people respond to knowing that the earth will end by giving away all their possessions and standing on top of a hill, hoping for a miracle that never comes. Maybe this is Musk’s cope. He will spend all his trillion* on the project and still be left on top of a hill with the rest of us.

* With the drop in SpaceX shares, Must is no longer a trillionaire.

[LSLGuy]

Earth is doomed in the long term measured in billions of years. Humanity in the medium term of millions of years.

You, me, and Elon are doomed in the very short term measured in a few decades max for sure, and more probably 20 years max.

No need to climb that hill in our lifetimes.

[Alessan]

@solost

I guess the degree of the apocalypse would matter. If it was a ‘soft apocalypse’ where, say, a plague had destabilized society but there were still plenty of people and infrastructure left on the outside, and rebuilding in a generation or less would be reasonable, gold should hold its value.

The thing is, people die - gold doesn’t. If an apocalypse kills of the majority of mankind, the market will be flooded with gold from blasted banks and jewelry looted from the homes and bodies of the dead, causing the price of gold to crater. Fewer people X same amount of gold = gold is worth much less.

[Ike_Witt]

Well, here is hoping that Starlink will fail and cause a Kessler syndrome cascade and keep him stuck here with everyone else.

[Little_Nemo]

@Filbert

They think they’ll continue to win if civilisation collapses because they’re winners, so obviously amazing. Many of them probably kind of want civilisation to collapse because they’re bored now; they already won and the game stopped being interesting.

I think they feel that our system is holding them back. They don’t see that our system is holding them up.

[Wesley_Clark]

@solost

But at some point they are going to have trouble, either from outside: the desperate survivors pounding on the reinforced bunker door, who eventually figure out how to break in; or from inside: a bunker crew mutiny. If I’m a low-level bunker engineer, what’s to stop me from either sabotaging the life-support equipment, or refusing to fix normal wear and tear, until I get what I want?

Luckily this is a serious issue since all governments require consent of the governed in one form or another. Either through incentives or fear.

The security apparatus will know how to overthrow the billionaire anytime they want. Methods as mentioned include making the security soldier’s families survival dependent on servicing the billionaire. Or letting the security services know they will have large amounts of power when they eventually return to the surface.

A bunker is not designed to be lived in for eternity. Its probably only for a few years. Even an asteroid like the one that killed the dinosaurs would only make the surface unlivable for a few years.

Supposedly this is a major reason billionaires are pushing for robots so much, because they’d rather have programmed robots as servants and security than humans with their own needs.

[DesertDog]

@Wesley_Clark

Even an asteroid like the one that killed the dinosaurs would only make the surface unlivable for a few years.

Best guess is a decade or two of cooling due to ejecta blocking the sunlight then a rise of temperature due to greenhouse gasses for hundreds if not thousands of years. Just how big are those freezers full of Chilean sea bass and filet mignon?