Do they still make Chesterfield Kings? Because I haven’t had a cigarette in more than 40 years but would pick up a carton on my way home. Other than that, I wouldn’t do much differently than today.
The problem comes not so much because people go berserk. It’s that if you stop going to work, because you want to spend the last bit of time with your family, what keeps the lights going? To get food in the grocery stores requires farmers, truckers, guys who make trucks, diesel fuel, fertilizer, grocery stores, electricity, grocery store clerks, grocery store owners, and on and on and on. What happens when the businessman who owns the grocery store decides there’s not much point in accumulating profit when the expected rate of return on his investment after five years is now zero? He stops paying his cashiers, he stops ordering and paying for new stock. Do the cashiers keep showing up to work? Do the stockers keep putting food on the shelves? Do the truckers keep delivering food to his store? Do the distributors keep loading food onto the trucks? Do the trains keep delivering food to the distributors? Do the farmers keep loading food onto the trains?
Millions and millions of people are going to give up on working for the future. And pretty soon we start having radical shortages of all sorts of essential goods and services. And that’s when we start having breakdowns of law and order. People still want food, they just don’t see the point of working anymore. But food is provided by people working.
It’s not like 2 weeks after the announcement the cities are piled with rotting corpses of the starving. It will take time for the implications to sink in, people won’t believe the announcement, and so on. But over time more and more people drop out of the work force, and at some point “normal life” becomes impossible. The people wishing they could sit quietly at home waiting for the end won’t get that chance because to sit quietly at home requires somebody keeping the electricity and grocery stores and farms going. If the electrician who’s supposed to fix downed power lines is sitting quietly at home with his family, then everyone else has to sit in the dark.
4 years out? We would do a thing. People have an amazing way of ignoring the truth even when slapped in the face with the facts. We would go through those 4 years assuming either that Science would save us or that Science was wrong and the asteroid would miss. Even if proven that it would hit, most would predict that they could survive anyway. It wouldn’t be until literally the last minute that most people would get it through their heads.
@Lemur866 Thanks for saying what I meant more eloquently than I could.
The collapse begins for humdrum ordinary reasons amongst humdrum ordinary people.
Only once it gets well underway is where we’ll see the results of mass panic and of the Mad Max wannabes getting their chance.
The thing that I predict will surprise people is how short the time interval will be from [showing major strain] to [crazy].
Not to mention the conspiracy theorists who would no doubt disbelieve the science, and convince a significant proportion of the population that we were in no danger because X group is trying to achieve Y goals by claiming catastrophe.
That’s my plan. Also, drugs. Leave enough to off myself and any loved ones/pets at the very end.