This line is key, well beyond the raiding idea. An individual prepper is less likely to endure than someone who has a role in a larger team. So that becomes the question for me: is there a way for me and each of us to be useful to a team that together has the ingredients of survival? More useful than what we cost in resources?
- Solar + batteries
- Agricultural community
- Skills in carpentry, welding, plumbing, electric
- EV
- Guns+ammo
- lotso wildlife
- plentiful water
- fertile land
- not too many medical issues, although I’d have to be careful with the asthma
So, depending on the shit/fan ratio, maybe a while?
I live in a suburb, close to a city. There’s just not enough food supply here for the number of people. There’s not enough land per person to produce enough food locally, either. Without modern transportation, most of us are going to die.
(I guess i could walk to upstate NY. Not the richest farmland, and the people already there probably want it. I’m just not seeing my odds as being good.)
I live in the NW corner of Oregon, big forested area also close to the Pacific Ocean and Columbia river. If SHTF there will be no game rules. My yard is full of deer and Rosevelt elk on a daily basis. I assume there would be other people around and that game would rapidly be used up.
The River always has some kind of Salmon or other fish running in it. The Ocean has clams, mussles, beach fishing, crabs, etc. All free to just pick up. I would have to be an invalid or a seriously stupid person to ever starve here, A lot of the things we eat here are harvested rather than bought at a store, the absence of stores will not matter. Nobody really needs electricity. Plenty of clean fresh water within a short walk of my home.
I also have some nice weapons and a lot of ammo if the need for that ever comes up. And I have a garden with berries, grapes, whatever I want to grow if I took the time. The forest is full of things to eat if you know what you are looking for, I do.
I think I would be fine.
If I decide that I want to live, the only long-term survival mechanism will likely be cannibalism. Predatory humans who prey on the old and weak like me would be turned into proteins.
But in the event of Captain Trips, there’s no way I’m going to Boulder, CO or Las Vegas (to freeze or roast) in order to find community with like-minded individuals.
We have maybe a months supply of food. But what about water? Assuming that fails, maybe a week’s worth of beer and juices. Neither my wife nor I can walk more than a block or so. I’me guessing two weeks to a month.
One word - Stuxnet. Okay, that took out nuclear centrifuges but a different virus that takes out water plants or the electric co(s) such that they can’t be fixed quickly (I believe the gov’t has already looked at how vulnerable they are but that doesn’t mean they’ve been hardened) & our civilization will quickly break down. Most city dwellers don’t have prepping supplies, no room. Suburban houses have a pantry but I’m guessing the majority of people would run out of food within a couple of days…tops! (Look what happens when there’s a snow storm forecast; there’s a run on French toast fixin’s & TP & most people are only snowbound for no more than a day, maybe two.
Growing plants is going to take a while until you get your first edible return, & that’s assuming you already have seeds & it’s the right season - What happens if SHTF happens around Thanksgiving; you’re not even planting crops for a couple of months.
Around here I could almost catch the long-legged, white tailed rats (aka deer) with a damn fishing net they’re so tame. After a month or two the easy game would be gone, though & then hunting would take up real time
I’ll also take a few months or less. I do think my end would be by either complications of lack of fresh water, or some other medical issue, rather than the stereotypical death of getting killed by marauding bandits. I think there’s just way too much space, and way too few people who would take up the roving bandit lifestyle, for that to be something that most survivors would have to worry about.
Thank you soooo much, LSL Guy!
I’ve been reading the replies with interest. I’d say, overall, that we are quite a pessimistic lot here on the Dope. 
And believably so, I think. One of the continuing stories of civilization has been how the human population has grown and grown, especially the last two or three centuries. This has been made possible by two main factors:
- We figured out how to produce way, way more food and get it distributed.
- We figured out how to keep people alive long past the point where we “originally” would have died and thus supporting us would not be a problem.
So there are many billions of extra humans that want to eat, and lots of those billions are less than top-of-their-game producers.
At the same time, there really isn’t very much more productive land than there ever was. We’ve just figured out how to make each acre more productive. We have pesticides and fertilizers and seed variants that produce more good stuff per plant and especially immensely more productive machines for planting/tending/reaping those crops.
The problem in SHTF situations is that almost all of that stuff is technology based, and goes away once we can’t import unlimited fertilizer stuff from any where in the world, can’t brew up old and new pesticides, and especially can’t keep feeding fuel and spare parts to all those combines and whatever. Let alone run the trucks and trains and cargo ships that move the final products from the, say, Del Monte plant in Hawaii to the rest of the world.
The number of calories available per human will simply nosedive … until enough humans die off to rebalance the books.
That’s just how it is.
With some variation, mainly on where you happen to live. If you’re a rural farming family, things may go fairly well. You will no longer grow the XXX thousand tons of grain you used to, but I’m sure you can figure out how to grow enough food to keep your family fed and trade for the items you can’t directly grow.
Suburban people? Some may do well. Especially those with an acre or two sized lots, and who had gardening as a hobby.
City people? By and large they’re screwed. How much food do you think can be grown in Central Park as compared to how many people currently live in NYC?
My biggest issue would be the loss of the internet. At that point, how would I ever figure out the meaning of all the initialisms and mystery terms folks love to use? Maybe in such a dire scenario people could learn to spell out what they mean like the old days but I think at this point people are just too comfortable with encoding their various scrawlings to ever stop.
Thankfully, for those who didn’t know, @kenobi_65 provided the details for SHTF in the second post. C&R when applied to firearms is almost always “Curios and Relics” but the specific class is really secondary to @bump’s point.
Hope having it spelled out clears up your confusion and frustration.
This is not true, at least in Europe. I’m pretty sure city people will get to control all the important vehicles and weaponry, and farmers in all the adjacent areas will be forced to comply to the new “regulations.”
“International trade” will have two main centers: those producing fuel and those producing food.
I’m a fat, middle aged mouthy woman. If I survive whatever the initial thing is and get picked up by some group for whatever purpose, I’m likely dead pretty quick. If I do get picked up by some group for whatever purpose, I’m likely dead pretty quick (see above, re: mouthy).
Moderating:
Maybe you meant this to be a cute way to inquire what those acronyms are, but it came across as hostile. Please don’t attack other posters outside the pit.
But I’ll give you the last one. A1c is the result of a blood test that gives you a good measure of your average blood sugar over the past month or three. It’s a blood test followed by diabetics and pre-diabetics, and as such, is one of the most commonly followed blood tests. I have no idea what the letters and number stand for individually, and neither do most of the people who track it. I’m sure Wikipedia could tell me, but for practical purposes, “A1c” is the proper name of the thing. It’s just a moderately common word you don’t happen to know.
I don’t believe in societal collapse. It’s never happened before, and it’ll never happen in the future. Even the so-called fall of Rome was just the breakup of one large state into multiple smaller ones. The human drive toward civilization is too great for any disaster to overcome, and the human ability to survive disaster is far greater than you think. People don’t die that easily.
And yes, that includes city-dwellers. If the people of Leningrad survived a 3-year German siege, your city can survive a power failure.
I’m in a suburban (urban region) environment, so I consider my chances virtually nil unless I can escape to a rural environment. First of all, large urban areas like Chicagoland are going to be targeted in a nuclear war. For those outside the immediate blast radius, there will be a dearth of food and clean water. Survivors will be killing one another for the meager resources left, and disease will run rampant.
If, however, I can escape north to an sparsely populated area, I can provide shelter for myself. I can shoot animals for food, fish, etc.
The chance of doing this via land is virtually nil. Even if you escape, the roads will be choked with traffic, cars out of gas, and probably numerous wrecks. The workable option is to take a boat all the way up Lake Michigan into Lake Huron in order to access the upper peninsula of Michigan. It’s huge area of virtually unpopulated land.
As mentioned, A1C is one of the ways people measure blood sugar control among diabetics. An A1C of 7% or lower is considered ideal.
My point was that an A1C of 10% is considered uncontrolled diabetes, but even with uncontrolled diabetes, life expectancy only drops by about 4 years. So a person can still live into their 70s with uncontrolled diabetes. Maybe instead of dying at age 79, they’d die at age 75. Its the same with anti-hypertensive medications. I think those add 1-2 years to life expectancy. so maybe someone with well controlled hypertension dies at age 78, but someone with uncontrolled hypertension dies at age 76-77.
however those are averages. I think how it works in the real world is that about ~20% of people with uncontrolled hypertension die 10+ years earlier, but the other 80% live as long as they would’ve lived either with our without the medicine. Its not like ‘every’ diabetic loses 4 years. Its more like a small % of diabetics lose 10-20 years, but most only lose a year or two of life expectancy.
its my understanding that all forms of primary care and pharmaceuticals only add about 18 months to human life expectancy.
Life expectancy has grown by about 30 years in the 20th century.
About 25 of those years came from public health advances. Sanitation, clean water, quarantines, vaccines, car safety regulations, work safety regulations, food safety regulations, anti-smoking efforts, etc. Mostly stuff to control infections and accidents.
42 months in advances in life expectancy came from hospitals and surgeries
18 months came from outpatient care, primary care and pharmaceuticals.
My point was that if people couldn’t get their meds for hypertension, diabetes, cholesterol, etc that their health would be worse, but people wouldn’t be dropping like flies either. Most would still live into their 70s, they’d just have somewhat worse health. However there would be a subset who would’ve lived to 80 or so with their meds, who would’ve died in their 60s from diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc. without their meds.
For the purposes of a SHTF scenario, losing access to medications to control diseases of aging and lifestyle would suck, but it wouldn’t result in immediate mass deaths. Just more disability and illness.
But if food is gone, things will go south fast. Take the year 536, for example. Many think it was the worst year to be alive. It was marked by mysterious darkness, extreme cold, and widespread famine. This was caused by heavy volcanic activity, which led to an unprecedented volcanic winter and darkness. They say a massive volcanic eruption spewed enormous amounts of ash into the atmosphere. As a result, a thick fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into total darkness for almost two years. The sun gave off dim light without warmth, dropping summer temperatures and initiating the coldest decade in over 2,000 years. Snow fell during the summer months in places like China, destroying harvests globally. Mass starvation spread from Ireland to China, which very likely led to cannibalism. Depleted food supplies and weakened immune systems set the stage for the devastating Plague of Justinian in 541 CE, which wiped out a massive portion of the population.
I feel otherwise. Our economy is incredibly complex and has a myriad of moving parts. And if just a handful of those parts stop working the ripple effect will shut down most of the system.
It does no good if the people in your town know what to do in a crisis and all show up for work if the people who work two thousand miles away in a factory that makes a critical part your town needs to keep going stop working.