Voted two but after reading the thread have reconsidered.
Survival skills? Do not possess.
Are my skills as a pediatrician actually useful without access to the medications I prescribe? Not in terms of actually treating disease too much.
But.
I could fairly easily bullshit my medical expertise as useful and be accepted as a team member. Even if my main usefulness would be reassuring about things and convincing people to NOT do the thing that would actually make the situation worse. Plus I could learn other skills, like foraging, fast.
Of note my wife is a therapist and would be the opposite to me - others might not think her skills would be of need to survive yet her expertise in helping people deal with trauma and loss would probably actually be essential in having our band of survivors make it to the next year. Much more impactful than my medical knowledge would be post apocalyptically. But harder to sell to a group of survivors.
Even if you haven’t done it in years, you probably have set a bone and stitched up a wound, and cleaned wounds, for that matter. There are probably a lot of sterile bandages knocking around, too. And bottles of disinfectant. You might even have knowledge about how to keep orphaned infants alive, how to deliver a baby, and what nutritional deficiencies look like.
I’ll help you hold your patients down and reassure them, until my meds run out.
That’s what I was going to say. @DSeid shouldn’t need to BS their medical expertise, they should have plenty of practical medical expertise and advice to offer, even without any modern medicine.
Yes I would have some actual useful medical skills but even in today’s world, maybe especially in today’s world, I am fond of pointing out, the pediatrician’s main skill is doing nothing, well. The comma position important! Explaining why not to start an antibiotic, as the common example, and instead give the mild ear infection a chance to get better on its own, is a large fraction of what we do. So yes being the authority to prevent the idiot in the group from doing stupid shit medically, and stick with doing nothing of harm at least as the better choice, is of value.
It does remind me though of an observation a friend of mine made years back. A century or so back doctors could actually do very little to alter the course of diseases and they were very highly respected. Because what they did do instead was spend time comforting and explaining what was likely to happen next. Modern times doctors can do lots more that cures annd effectively treats and in general are respected less because they do less of that comfort and explaining in the face of scary things.
So maybe we medical types would be paradoxically again valued more even as we can do less?
My surgical experience is limited to removing nasty splinters (and lancing my own infected wounds, and i guess relieving pressure under a banged fingernail for my dad) but there’s a reason i said:
That “reassuring” is an essential component of medicine.
If it’s zombies, I’m offering up myself as a sacrifice on day one. Based on the Walking Dead, I could either live a very stressful week or so, or end it immediately. I’m going with immediate death.
This is very true. Some years back I was registered with a medical practice, and there was one doctor there who, when you finally got to see him, would maybe ask you a couple of brusque questions and then spend 10 minutes typing on his laptop.
I sort of got the feeling he didn’t really want to be a doctor at all, and the patients were basically just an irritation? Not with that clinic any more, happily!
We have food, water, prescriptions, flashlights etc., suitable for a rather longish natural disaster, plus swords and such from being in the SCA for decades. So, sure, for a while, but not indefinitely. Maybe a month?
So I was thinking huge, long lasting solar storm that essentially destroyed all the electrical infrastructure - transformers, power stations, etc are damaged beyond repair. That’s the kind of thing that would take the entire, world wide grid down - anything less than that isn’t an apocalypse IMHO. To me, that’s an end of civilization event that’s going to kill the majority of the population within a year, because it would be impossible to get back to a food production/distribution system that supports 8.2 billion people before all the existing food stocks run out.
Nothing at all wrong with that of course, as long as we are clear on the practicalities of the extrapolation. What has failed and why? Where do you live, and what are your skills?
The first is a starting point, and almost everything follows from it.
In my case I live in an urban area in the UK. No real wilderness areas within easy reach, and a large population density relative to local rural acreage. No garden large enough to grow anything
As for skills: I’m an excellent programmer and electronic engineer. Very competent electrician, and handy with most tools for other crafts. Good broad knowledge of science and technology… I’ll put myself at 98% for that. But as we have said, knowing about something is not the same as knowing how to do it.
Done some camping and grown backyard tomatoes. But those are hobbies, not a lifestyle.
So how much of this is useful?
One thing no matter what–for everyone planning on growing their own food, seeds? Even commercial farmers rarely produce their own seeds. We actually have a large seed potato industry here, so there’s that. I assume there’s more to producing good seeds than just drying them out/treating them appropriately, but I have no idea. Also, of course, in the interest of water conservation flood irrigation has been largely replaced by center-pivot and drip. Both of those require electricity as does flood if it’s well derived. Cattle in Montana don’t need a lot of electricity (or fuel) to grow, and we could reinvent icehouses for refrigeration pretty easily.
There are complex reasons for that, including IP laws that make it risky for them to do so. But if it became impossible to buy seed, many farmers could save their own seed.
Seed saving isn’t actually too complicted for the most part, especially if you’re not planning on storing them for years. The important bit is knowing what you need to control and what you can just let get on with it - like if you’re growing multiple squashe types close together you need to tie the flowers up to stop them cross-pollinating and hand-pollinate or you can wind up with inedible even somewhat poisonous fruit, if you’re saving carrot seed you need to remove all wild carrot plants from the area or you’ll get useless thin inedible roots, but you can just pick some seed out of non-F1 tomatoes when you’re eating them and they’ll normally grow pretty well true.
I already save seed from a range of plants, either because some things are hard to get or just because it’s cheaper (like salad leaf). I could scale that up to an extent with a bit of planning. The tough part is simply the time and space it takes, especially for biennial crops like carrots, which don’t set seed until the second year, and you need to allow 40+ plants to flower (which means you don’t get to eat them) or you get progressively weaker seeds. Getting a decent range of stuff would require cooperation and trading.
That’s a good one- I had been trying to think of an an actual event that could cause the scenario I proposed- that the power grid goes down worldwide and indefinitely / permanently, but in such a way that people are left for the moment safe and unharmed. An enormous Carrington-level solar storm might fill the bill.
But not to worry— institutions like NASA and the NOAA are ready and able to warn us in advance if a solar storm is forming. Oh, wait…
Most of them are growing hybrids, which won’t come true to type. Some hybrids will produce mostly good plants in the later generations, and are easy to grow out to stable open pollinated varieties, but others aren’t. I’ve had some luck with peppers, and a total failure with eggplant. Corn’s likely to be particularly difficult, because there are so many types, the inbred parents used to produce the hybrids are often useless for anything else and the uselessness is likely to show up in the next generations, many plants are needed for seed production, and cross pollination can take place over many miles. Some other crops will cross pollinate with wild relatives over some distance, producing inedible or even dangerous results. Some need to be kept alive over the winter because they don’t produce seed till the second year.
Saving seed for the home gardener, for a few crops on which it’s relatively easy, is one thing. Doing so on a large scale and for a wide range of crops and varieties would be another matter entirely. It would work out better in some areas than others — in some areas there are already significant numbers of people doing this and/or growing open pollinated crops — and it would certainly work out over time; but we’d lose a lot of varieties and a lot of people in the meantime.
I’ve had perfectly edible tomatoes grow from random seedlings of hybrids. Potatoes are mostly propagated by cloning (cutting up a tuber and planting the pieces).
The survivors would probably revert to something like the apple situation in early America. Rather than orchards full of delicious cloned cultivars, they planted random seeds and had orchards full of random apple trees, most of which produced barely edible fruit that had to be processed into cider to be palatable. But that cider was an important source of calories.
Not only was cider an important source of calories (and alcohol), but cider was often primarily what they were after in the first place. Some apples make a lot better cider than others, though; not always the ones that are good for fresh eating. Probably the seedling trees that produced fruit not good for either were culled out or used for rootstock once people figured out grafting. It takes years to find out what a seedling apple will produce, though.
And as I said, some hybrids will produce a usable crop in the later generations; some won’t. And sometimes what’s lost is a particular disease resistance, which won’t appear to be a problem until and unless that disease shows up in your area.
Potatoes in particular, due in large part to their being grown from tubers, are liable to a buildup of disease problems through multiple generations. In many areas of the country potato seed tubers tend to run out over time; people replant their own seed for two or three years and then have to buy new seed due to diminishing crop; the new seed having been grown in areas with less disease pressure and often carefully grown in isolation.
And late blight travels considerable distances on the wind, and is weather dependent. A bad late blight year can wipe out potatoes and tomatoes over a wide area. There are a few varieties resistant to all current strains, but not many; and the blight itself is mutating, all the time.
Again — I’m not saying that all humans or all farming would be doomed. I’m saying that there would be a lot more damage than some in this thread are thinking.
They grew out a lot of seedling trees before grafting caught on in America. It had been known in Europe at least since Roman times (it’s well documented then) so presumably at least a few people knew about it. But the skills to actually do it weren’t widespread.
I would simply kill myself if society collapsed for good. That isn’t the kind of existence I’d want to live or the kind of world I’d want to live in. I’ll take my chances with the afterlife. Everyone else can have fun fighting each other over water and canned food and avoiding leather clad bandits.
