Any plan for surviving an apocalypse has to have plans on time scales of Immediate, Short term, Medium term and Long term. And the requirements for each scale are different, and may be mutually exclusive, if something goes wrong. For example, for me, medium term survival would involve eating the potatoes I have on hand to stay fed, but long term requires me to keep the potatoes to plant, so as to harvest more potatoes in Autumn. Screw that up either way, and I’m going hungry at some point.
Jeez, the rampant optimism of some of you! Guess you’ve been reading books like ‘The Postman’ by David Brin?
As you say, to discuss this more accurately, we need to specify more clearly what kind of apocalypse has happened. Exactly what has gone down and why? Is this a one-time point-of-failure issue, which is probably fixable by a concerted emergency effort? Or is it a more generic ongoing situation? Stirling’s ‘Dies the Fire’ comes to mind.
In a ‘soft’ apocalypse, co-operation and pooling of skills might pull us through. Though I am still concerned about the urban JIT scheduling and food shortage issues.
If it’s more generic or longer term, then MacGyver fixes like batteries and steel wool are irrelevent. It comes down then to what is actually sustainable without relying on bits left over from the old world.
Most hard-core preppers make it a daily lifestyle, such as canning their own stored food, etc. In other words live as much self-reliant and off-grid as is practical for your circumstances.
I understand you can cut out just the eyes, sprout them in water and then transplant them to the ground when they’re started enough?
I think I’m a 4 or 5 in terms of knowledge, skills, and ability, but a 0 when it comes to desire to live in the resulting ‘society’.
Even so, they have been brought up in an industrial society.
I think they are living a fantasy. Where do they get the cans? Do they know how to make a steel can or glass bottle from raw materials themselves? Do they have the skills and time to make everything they need from scratch?
Technically, you can but it’s something fun to do with the kids; it would be useless for growing a meaningful crop.
For a start, you would need to be sprouting the eyes fresh, straight after cutting them out. You can’t eat potatoes in December then put the eyes to one side and sprout them 2 months later, they’d be completely dried or rotted by then, but they’ll only grow if conditions are ready for them to sprout anyway, otherwise they’ll just rot in the water, as you’ve probably not got artifical light or heat around. You can only actually do this in early spring, which is when you would be planting them anyway.
If you do manage to get potato plants started this way, they will produce a tiny crop in comparison to one from plants grown from a decent size tuber, becaus they’re starting from much more limited resources. You may get potatoes by the end of the season, but they’d likely be the size of marbles.
Finally, even if you could somehow grow enough plants for that to not matter, how many little jars of water with tiny sprouts do you think you can grow and care for on the windowsill? Enough to plant a small field?
I put myself down as a 2 but if I’m allowed to consider gathering some close relatives to ride it out with, our number rises to almost 4. Personally I’d be pretty lost, but my husband and some cousins together have many useful skills. We live in Northern NJ with loads of woods, water, shelter for the taking out in nature. I think we’d be OK.
‘The Martian’ immediately comes to mind. How realistic is that plot device?
The nice thing about potatoes is, you can grow them in almost anything*. About half my first crop was grown in 5-gallon buckets, which give you about 2-4 pounds of good potatoes each. You could start those indoors, or in a makeshift greenhouse, at almost any time of year. That would give you a decent supply of seed potatoes to plant outdoors in the Spring.
You can also harvest them at pretty much any time after their flowers bloom, and get useful potatoes, but of course, the longer you leave them, the bigger they get. You can do the math on when to harvest for more seed potatoes to maximise your overall yield.
*Buckets, planters, special grow bags, garbage bags, bales of hay, you can find videos on all those and more.
We keep a year’s worth of dry staples and 2 week’s worth of bottled water on hand, our house electricity is off the grid and there’s a borehole. That plus skills and location mean we should do alright.
Well, you’re not immediately screwed anyway. Lots of contingencies.
I’m resourceful, and have a lot of relevant skills. And i live in a density populated area and depend on taking modern drugs. I give myself a 1.
Mostly because of the near-disasters (water crisis, power grid failures, a little pandemic) we’ve already had.
I’m not quite sure how to answer the poll. Since the poll seemed to focus on skills, I gave myself a 5. But in reality, I might be screwed.
I’m an engineer. If I’m using stuff in my current house, I already have a generator, and I could easily rig up a fancy compound like Bill from The Last of Us.
If I needed to relocate to someplace in the middle of the woods, I could do that too. I spent a lot of time camping out in the woods when I was younger (a lot younger). I also did several “outdoor challenge” type things, one during warm weather and another specifically geared towards winter survival. I’m old and out of shape now, so it wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun, but I don’t think I would have any difficulty surviving.
I have several weapons. Sure, they are antique collectibles from WWII and earlier, but an M1 Garand is just as effective now as it was back then, and I could even hunt with my Civil War era musket if I had to. A Model 1853 Enfield musket will easily take down a deer, and it’s surprisingly accurate compared to a modern rifle (just VERY slow to reload).
If we get some kind of warning before it all goes to hell in a handbasket, I’d probably order a lot of ammo and a bunch of canned goods, but even with no warning I think I’d do ok.
But where I am really screwed is modern medications. As long as I can stock up on meds, and they’ll keep for many years, I’ll be fine. If I can’t find a good supply of meds, I’m probably headed for a stroke or kidney failure at some point.
So, if I can find meds, I’m a 5 on the poll. If I can’t get meds, I’d probably rate my chances down to about a 2 or 3 on the poll.
I can’t really judge this in the presence of my fellow gun-toting humans, but - pretending the apocalypse wipes them all out so that nobody comes to steal from us - 3.5. I’m reasonably competent with tools and guns, my wife has rendered fowl and I’ve been there for field dressing deer (which we have plenty of), so at least we know the process, and we grew vegetables until it started to feel like too much effort for too little payoff.
If all my neighbors are still around, however, it all ends up the same as a zombie movie.
There is no such thing as a “soft apocalypse” in a scenario when the power grid goes down. Think of the supply chain disruptions during COVID. Store shelves were nearly empty in a weekend. No power and internet means no logistics, closed ports, and trucks not running. The overwhelming majority of vehicles would stop working. Most gas stations wouldn’t be able to pump gas. Almost no one has phones that don’t require power anymore, so communications would be limited or non-existent. It’s hard to imagine anything other than complete chaos within a week.
Certainly a 39-inch barrel gives you a long sightline!
Ignorant question - what fuels your generator? How much of that fuel do you have on hand? How long will it last with continuous use? How will you replace the fuel when it runs out?
Another ignorant question - where is the middle of the woods from where you are at? How do you get yourself and your stuff there? Will others be doing the same thing?
I kinda enjoy playing these “apocalypse” scenarios out in my head, and the details get pretty hairy pretty quickly.
If everyone dies but me - and I have access to all the local stores/homes/libraries - piece of cake.
It’s a gasoline-powered generator. I’m assuming that if we’re in an apocalypse-type scenario that I could make a couple of runs to ye ol local gas station and use a portable pump to help myself to some of the abandoned gasoline. But if the OP’s “stores have been stripped bare” includes local gasoline tanks, then I’ll need to find some other source of fuel.
The generator is powered by an internal combustion engine. All I need to do is adjust the fuel-air mixture and I can get it to run on alcohol. It’s fairly easy to make alcohol. There are quite a few common plants that you can easily grow in your back yard that can be fermented to make ethanol. Potatoes and corn grow fairly easily around here.
In the long term, I could rig up the generator to a water wheel of some sort, and fuel would no longer be an issue.
I live near Gettysburg, so the middle of the woods is the Michaux State Forest which isn’t too far from here. It’s a protected state forest so if I need to look for “the middle of the woods where no one else lives”, that’s the place.
Getting there with a bunch of stuff is easy. Just toss all the stuff I think I’ll need into the back of my pickup truck.
We need a lot more details about the OP before I can even start to speculate about what others are doing. I’m just going off of the assumption that I am either (1) staying where I am or (2) not staying where I am, and giving options for either scenario.
Gasoline (petrol to you Brits) deteriorates even in sealed tanks. It’s storage life can be extended by additives sold for that purpose but that only lasts so long. Figure that no gasoline more than a year old will run a typical four-stroke engine.
Maybe your engine can be run on alcohol but in a TEOTWAKI situation humanly edible food (or even liquor) will be too precious to be diverted in the quantities needed to keep an engine running. Possibly you could learn how to rig up a wood gas engine like cars in European Theater WW2 were.
And if you happen to have a honkin’ big 500-1000 gallon storage tank, will it be an obvious target for looters and marauders?
Which is why pandemic or even zombie apocalypses are materially the ones the survivors are best off in. An EMP apocalypse like the one in “One Second After” is probably the worst: the mass of humanity is untouched at first but then the survivors desperately consume everything and tear down what’s left of civilization before dying of starvation. There’s a trope out there about how after a major collapse there will be a stripped-bare dead zone 150 miles in radius around every major population center. Nuclear wars destroy lots of resources but also kill lots of urban dwellers.