some foods can be made outside of the methods of traditional agriculture.
In ww2, the nazis were making butter out of coal. You chemically alter coal to turn it into edible butter.
In theory, we could take the energy from power plants and use it to grow algae and eat that. Spirulina and Chlorella are complete proteins.
Humans don’t ‘need’ carbs to survive. We can pretty much survive on just fat and protein (people live for years on low carb diets). But we could use chemical processing to convert the cellulose of trees into edible glucose.
We could also synthesize glucose out of CO2 produced from coal plants.
It would all be expensive and time/labor intensive, but it would keep people alive. This assumes the infrastructure necessary to do all this is still available though.
I think having a good water filter would be a sound investment. I’ve heard Katadyn filters are the benchmark in terms of quality. I’m thinking of getting one of their gravity filters.
Speaking as a diabetic, who has had A1c tests done for two decades:
The technical term for what is being tested is a blood test for glycated hemoglobin; the function being tested is “HbA1c”, but everyone – laymen, doctors, scientists – commonly refers to it as an “A1c test.”
I disagree. The more complex a system, the more durable it is. Complex social systems are more adaptable, and have more redundancies; if one part fails, other parts will take their place. Complex systems function much better in catastrophes than simple ones.
Nope. Just to buy gasoline, you need the station to have power, their computer systems to be up, the card system to be up & communication should be up to talk to the card system/your bank. The last two have an offline mode where they will approve txns below a certain amount if they are down, but that’s for the expectation of some short-term service interruption, not a end-of-civilization scenario.
I respect that you’re trying for a more realistic scenario, and that the OP also ruled out the “out-there” scenarios (Aliens/Zombies), but said OP does postulate a complete Economic or Electrical collapse. At that point, the sort of resilience based on diversity is missing a huge chunk, not a single point failure.
IMHO, of course. Now, one thing not mentioned, is the failure regional, national, or world wide? Because you are still correct, that a regional outage could probable be compensated for relatively quickly (huge QOL loss in the effected areas for years/decades though), national would be extremely hard to deal with (lots of refugees in that scenario) but worldwide? True SHTF.
@StarvingButStrong could give us a better idea of what they want, but I assumed given both the mention of it actually being SHTF and timelines mentioned that they’re thinking of world-wide economic collapse or power loss.
Which is why I said that I don’t believe a world-wide or even national collapse is possible. Civilization has too much inertia.
Furthermore, I believe that in many cases, the belief that it IS possible is nothing more than thinly veiled classism or racism - that the untermenschen are just waiting for us to loosen our grip so they can eat us all in our sleep.
It’s not just about life expectancy in modern life though, it’s about productivity. And in a SHTF situation, productivity is vital.
Without my BP meds I won’t keel over and die tomorrow, or even next week. But I will spend 2-3 days per week crippled by severe unrelenting headaches. And it greatly raises the likelihood that within a couple of years I would suffer a stroke of some sort. That would further destroy my ability to feed myself.
High BP is only one of the conditions that would be crushing me without pharmaceuticals. Like I said above, it wouldn’t be too long before I just laid down and starved to death in my sleep.
I would recommend a Berkey instead. My reasoning is that it’s built to use whatever filtering media you can gather or create if supply lines break down. Make your own charcoal, gather some sand or wash the sand you’ve got, tear up some books and reconstitute the paper, whatever you can do to make the water safe and good-tasting. (obvs, boil and cool before you pour it through.)
That makes sense as they are so DIY. It’s a shame though, in a state with so many natural disasters. Sometimes perfection is the enemy of the good. And really, if you’ve boiled the water and added charcoal, you are better off drinking than not.
I have tended to think this way as well-- there’s never really been a huge collapse in civilization since civilization started. Things change, regimes fall, disasters happen, but humans are very resourceful and tend to quickly rebuild, no matter what.
There are two factors I can think of when it comes to modern society that are different than we’ve experienced before in the history of civilization, that may argue against that, though:
The atomic bomb. We’ve only had it for 80 years, a blink of an eye in historical terms. A major world-wide nuclear war would be a definite SHTF scenario.
The fact that we rely on a global network of trade powered by fossil fuels. When, not if, the oil runs out, if we haven’t prepared for that scenario with alternate forms of energy, we will most likely have a worldwide economic collapse that will create hardships that might even rival the outcome of a nuclear war.
One other is that we travel more and faster than ever before. So pandemics already faster and farther. A disease as infections as covid and as deadly as ebola could take out a huge fraction of the population. And there’s precedent. Much of the US lost more than 95% of its bats due to the accidental introduction of White nose syndrome, a Eurasian bat disease.
And the black death led to a lot of social change, and whole towns being abandoned, if not outright collapse.
Not in our lifetimes anyway. But of course a major natural disaster could occur, like an Earthquake. So having some food, water, light sources, etc is a good idea.
Local collapse only. While the Black Death did have far-ranging consequences, it didn’t lead to the collapse of any countries or social systems, despite killing nearly half the European population.
Yes, and despite the massive death toll, trade continued.
The population may have been more locally resilient than we are, though. And it did lead to massive social upheaval. But… the vast majority of the deaths were directly from the plague, and not from the following “apocalypse”.
The population in Dark or Middle Ages Europe, both local and global, was already at equilibrium for subsistence, or at least small scale low-tech, agriculture.
We are not. Not even close. And especially not locally; our urban areas are at a scale that would need vast nearby areas to feed them all. Areas that by simple plane geometry, cannot be both big enough and near enough.
A widespread failure of communication tech, transportation tech, or fuel supply would trigger near-instant famine for vast swathes of the world’s populace. No resiliency there.
It can be argued that Norway collapsed, it had to give up its sovereignty and join the Scandinavian Kalmar Union. But that’s being pedantic. In general, you are correct.
In general, you are correct.