I think a lot of people would be dead regardless if they panic. They would just die more quietly.
I guess the question is would you actually want to survive?
Like that movie The Road where Charlize Theron’s character is like “fuck this” and just walks off into the woods to die. Because what’s the alternative? Walk the Earth trying to avoid even worse forms of death? And to what end? Two dudes ain’t gonna rebuild civilization.
I suppose it depends on the situation and whether it’s reasonable to lay low and survive until most of the losers die off or kill each other. Once things stabilize maybe you can join some group of survivors in a farming community or something.
But I don’t really see the point of wandering some blasted landscape trying to eke out a living scrounging through garbage.
Just so we’re drawing a fair comparison here, the apocalypse scenario in ‘The Road’, while never specified in the novel, involved some catastrophic event that caused a seemingly permanent ‘nuclear winter’ style lack of sunlight that 10 years on, had killed all vegetation and pretty much all life forms on Earth except for a handful of people and the occasional skeletal feral dog. The most likely speculation I’ve read for what it might have been was an asteroid strike. Yeah, in that scenario I’d probably say ‘fuck this’ as well.
The apocalypse scenario I stated for the purpose of this thread is the power grid going down. Yes, it would collapse the global supply chain and cause great hardship and pain. Many would die, especially those who are dependent on modern medicine for day to day living. But it’s an eminently more survivable and rebuildable scenario than that of ‘The Road’.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I started the book. Skipped ahead a few chapters… yup, more of the same. A few more chapters…. nothing new. Then to the end.. still the same.
At which point I metaphorically threw the book against the wall (not literally since it was a library book). No interest in wasting my time reading a whole book in which for practical purposes, nothing happens…
It didn’t get better. I hated that book so much that when it got to the part with the roasted baby, I laughed. There’s dark, and then there’s stupid dark.
I was a pretty big fan of Cormac McCarthy since 1990-something when I found All the Pretty Horses on a stack of novels an ex-employee left on her desk. Probably still my favorite of his. Along with Suttree and The Orchard Keeper - the least McCarthy-ish of his books. I read them all - up to a point. By the time No Country and The Road came out, I was tired of his “style,” and thought The Road particularly tedious. Was pretty shocked that both books received such acclaim.
I was a solider once. I’m accustomed to embracing the suck. Cold, heat, hunger, all just an adventure to persevere through. So it’s not a mentality issue, just a skills issue. I can garden but I can’t farm, though I’m not sure there’s a big difference when your life is on the line. A 24/7/365 devotion to learning how to farm has got to be enough to at least live.
The real question for me in all these scenarios is the ratio of the dead to the living. If it’s a plague and pretty much everyone died, but survivors are still out there and the virus burned itself out, then there’s no problem. 50 years is only 18,250 days. I can raid a new house every single day for the rest of my life, never returning to the same house, and never leave my community.
Let’s say you find a pallet of baked beans in the back of a grocery store, fully shrink wrapped like it just got unloaded. You eat a can of beans every single day. By the time you’re down to the bottom row and you start needing to find a second pallet….20 years have passed!
So the question is, as always, not where am I going to find resources, but rather how many survivors do I need to share with.
I have heard this. What’s the chemical mechanism? If the tank is properly sealed, it presumably isn’t oxidation. And assuming the material of the tank is fairly inert, it’s probably not interaction with the container.
Hydrocarbons are in some ways rather unreactive… but could it be that unsaturated ones tend to polymerise over time? Paging any real chemists….
Some sort of hand pump should work, as long as the tank is not too far underground. Suction pumps are limited by air pressure, of course.
How long do commercial solar panels last? I guess we may not have a lot of good data about this yet?
Here’s the problem with your scenario and all the people in this thread who think having gone camping and grown some backyard tomatoes makes them a “4” - there’s no way that a society without electricity & modern technology could grow & transport enough food to keep 8 billion people fed. 90% of us are going to starve within the year, no matter how much pluck and resolve we show, and how cooperative we think we’re going to be.
There’s a post above where someone says they’d be a 4, because there are plenty of woods & water nearby “for the taking”. And they live in Northern NJ! There’s 20 million New Yorkers who are going to be fighting for that land.
I was thinking about this last night after I awoke and was falling back asleep.
If my present surroundings were just people-free, it would be no big deal.
If it was me vs everyone around me, I was having a VERY hard time figuring how that would work out in a way that wouldn’t be horrendous. I simply do not have enough faith in my fellow man.
If it were “nuclear winter” with no supplies a la The Road (I know, not the OP), I’d likely exit quickly.
Canned goods keep a long time, but not forever. I’ve had some that were still okay after 5 years, and some that have gone bad in that amount of time. I wouldn’t count on any lasting more than 20 years. It’s possible, but certainly not definite.
That’s cheating. OP didn’t say without electricity or modern technology. OP said without a power grid. We still have batteries, solar panels, and intact but inoperable Playstation 5s. Our tech didn’t just disappear. It’s simply idle. We can run stuff off of generators and whole lot of oil if we have to. We’d make it through because we still have enough population to specialize our economy. SOMEONE out there knows how to make a radio from a potato and an electrode, and they’ll show the rest of us.
The future of the species is on the line. If the Puritans could do it, so can we.
Y’all actin’ like this is your first apocalypse or sum’n.
The point was a very small amount, perhaps the smallest unit commercially available at wholesale, is enough for one person’s needs for 20 years. So that’s enough for 4 people for 5 years. And that’s just canned peas. What about bedsheets? Books and games? Window panes? Charcoal? There’s plenty just lying around, waiting to be picked up by whatever scavenger happens upon it.
Thanks to this inventory of resources, there’s plenty of time to convert everything to oil, gasoline, wind, or solar while we all learn to farm our 1/4 acre of suburbia.
I suspect the species would survive… but go through a severe bottleneck, and it would be a LONG time before anything like a current technological society re-emerged.
Clearly you didn’t pay attention in school when they were teaching about the first Thanksgiving.
“Without power grid” basically means without electricity or modern technology. And without that, the stores run out of food and other goods pretty quickly. In most cities, 99% of the stuff comes from somewhere else. So what happens when the population of the NYC metro (20 million), Boston metro (5 million) and Philly metro (6 million) plus all the cities in between take to the road?
If there are 100 million people still alive in the local area, then there are plenty of people to do regular jobs like getting the water pumps back online and driving the food into the city. Hell, the police and military are still active and effective.
If there aren’t enough people to do those jobs, then there aren’t enough people to fight me for now-plentiful backlogs of resources.
I’m somewhat surprised our local “pessimistic realist with a suitcase full of cold hard data” Stranger_On_A_Train hasn’t been in this thread. Maybe’s he’s just reading and laughing at the pollyannas.
Gasoline does degrade, but it will last a lot more than a year. I’ve had to start old cars that were left sitting for a while. The worst was a small pickup truck (Ford Ranger) that sat for more than 2 years on about half a tank of gas, so plenty of air in the tank to make the gas go bad faster. It took about an hour of fiddling (and a new battery), but I did get it to run, using the gas that was still in it. I then drove it around the neighborhood for about 15 minutes (again, still on the 2+ year old gas) constantly stomping on the gas and then stomping on the brake pedal to get the brakes to break free of the rust that was on them and operate properly. Only after I had the brakes working properly did I drive it to the gas station and filled up the tank (so at that point it had half a tank of good gas and half a tank of old crappy gas).
I then drove it up to my house, about an hour’s drive away. I drove it in to work every day for a week to use up all of the crappy gas that was in the tank. The tires had flat spots from sitting for so long, but those worked themselves out after a couple of weeks of driving it around.
I wouldn’t say the gasoline was in great shape after 2+ years, but the truck did run on it. It ran better once I filled up the half-empty tank up to full with good gas, but the old gasoline definitely did not prevent the truck from running. The gasoline would have been in better shape if the tank had been left full, but I had to deal with it as it had been left.
The two main things that make gasoline go bad are oxidation and evaporation. Oxidation relies on air being in the tank, so a full tank won’t lose as much gas to oxidation as a half-empty tank would. That said, ethanol breaks down chemically over time, providing oxygen to feed the oxidation process. Gasoline is a mix of chemicals, and some will evaporate out of the mix faster than others, especially if the gas is stored in a hot area. Some of those chemicals (again, especially ethanol) will also degrade over time.
Ethanol is often used to boost the octane rating of the fuel, so when the ethanol breaks down, the octane rating can easily degrade to the point where it effects engine performance.