Southern Britain is a good bet. Plenty of sun, plenty of water, plenty of resources. Geologically stable. No pesky supervolcanoes about to blow either. And safe in the short and medium terms from other groups of survivors by virtue of being on an island.
I would take the Stephen King approach in The Stand and head for Las Vegas, if I could make it there. Hoover Dam is hydroelectric, so we would have electricity for the foreseeable future. But I don’t know how much maintenance it would require to keep running.
Regards,
Shodan
Depends on how much global warming and how much domestic animals and plants survive. Upstate New York wouldn’t be bad especially if it will be several degrees warmer. Cold isn’t that bad and there is still plenty of wood around. Plus all kinds of crops grow there without irrigation (especially wine grapes :)), including cattle. With the right expertise you may even extract some natural gas in certain locations.
That was my thought as well- abundant fish and shellfish, plenty of rainfall, non-challenging terrain (i.e. not a lot of rocks or hills), forests not far inland, rarely gets below freezing in the winter.
Basically do as the Karankawas did on the Texas Gulf Coast- spend summers inland hunting and winters on the coast, eating shellfish.
If you know where to live (i.e. can get a topo map), hurricanes wouldn’t be that big of a deal; all you really have to watch out for is wind, since the power can’t go out, and if you pick your place right, flooding’s not much of an issue.
It’s one thing to support a hunter-gatherer lifestyle when that’s what your people have done for generations. But this scenario assumes that a small number of modern people have to suddenly live without all of the support that civilization provides. That’s really difficult.
Many of us have no clue, for example, how to start a fire or ride a horse. Many have never had to hunt or fish and then prepare the game to eat. For example, one episode of the show that inspired the OP started with a live bull. Later the characters accidentally killed it. The next scene showed them sitting down to a steak feast. How many of us know how to butcher a cow?
In my upstate NY scenario there are hundreds if not thousands of cattle in every county. Considering that we aren’t going to be picky about which parts are the tastiest, I’m sure we would be able to go through a few botched butcherings before we figure something out by trial and error. (My best guess without Wiki’ing: drain the blood before butchering, then hack away and separate the obvious organs and bones.)
On the other hand, then we’d definitely need fire there to make sure we don’t get live fecal bacteria in our steak.
I assume you would be acquiring books on subjects like first aid and medical care as well as butchery. But really, our lives are built around a whole lot of civilization.
As for where to live, I’ve heard that the Sacramento River delta is unusually fertile. Some of the fruit and nut trees in the farms there would continue to produce without needing much in the way of care. So you might be able to eat quite well without too much effort.
An island in the Pacific. One normally reached by setting out on a 3 hour tour. That’s what this show is about isn’t it? I realized this during the last episode, wondering why I kept watching. It really is Gilligan’s Island all over again, a group of people isolated from the rest of the world, in this case they are isolated from humanity because the rest of the world is dead. (What happened to all the bodies?).
Anyway, more directly to the point of the OP, Malibu is a pretty good idea. Decent weather, very near to a large metropolitan area where there are plenty of stores full of goods to survive on. Probably better would be somewhere in the southeast because the fresh water supply to SoCAL won’t last, and there isn’t enough rain to support much agriculture. All those avocado trees must be dead already.
You get a knife and you start chopping. It’s not hard. I’ve certainly butchered sheep with absolutely no training. You cut off the skin, take out the guts, and hack apart the joints. Done. For a whole cow you’re going to have a lot of waste but who cares? No need to use every part of the buffalo when there’s plenty more cows where the first one came from.
In a cozy catastrophe where 99.99% of humans drop dead in a week, leaving the survivors with a mostly intact infrastructure and plenty of canned goods still on the shelves, forget about agriculture. Nobody is going to be farming. People will become scavengers for the first decade, grading into hunting and gathering as the canned goods rust to bits.
Hunting is only hard when there are other people around killing all the animals. Or when you don’t have firearms. Yes, killing a buffalo with arrows and spears is hard. Killing a squirrel is hard if you have to hit him with a rock. If you have a BB gun then killing a squirrel is really really easy. Killing small animals is very easy with a .22. Killing birds is very easy with a shotgun. Killing deer is very easy with a 30-06.
Maybe people will try to maintain vegetable gardens to get some fresh greens in the generation before they learn what wild plants to gather. But agriculture is finished for hundreds of years until population densities rise to the point where hunting and gathering can’t support the population any more. And by that point the chain of knowledge of agriculture will be completely broken, and they’ll have to re-invent it from scratch. Maybe they’ll have an advantage if some varieties of domesticated plants and animals survive.
Pastoralism is an option if people have kept horses and cows and sheep. Horses are so useful I have to imagine that when the cars start breaking down the first generation of survivors is going to capture some semi-feral horses and teach themselves how to take care of them.
NIMBYy
I think that gardening would quickly become pretty widespread. I realize LMOE is a silly sitcom, but they showed one of the survivors starting a vegetable garden pretty quickly, and I think that’s realistic. Lots of urbanites have at least some experience with gardening, whereas very few of us know jack about scavenging wild plants. Plus, there will be an abundance of seeds available as long as scavenging holds out.
But yeah, big-time agriculture in the sense of growing rows and rows of crops and feeding them to livestock, that’s gone for many generations.
The coastal tribes of the PNW lived quite well off the land and sea. Considered to have one of the highest standards of living for a pre-agricultural group. But pollution, deforestation, reduced salmon runs, etc. have ruined some of the best sites.
The valleys near the US Pacific coast are really good for agriculture. Mild weather, multiple irrigation sources, etc. I’d go with the Willamette Valley myself.
Sounds like a lot of overthinking going on. A typical supermarket, even after the perishables have rotted, has enough canned meats, fruits and vegetables in stock for one person to eat well for many years. Within a 2 hour walking radius from my current suburban home there are no less than 15 major supermarkets. Add in the canned food in restaurant store rooms and a handful of people could survive a lifetime and never travel more than 10 miles. Find a bike and you extend your resource pool by a factor of 10.
A group of “a handful” of people is not going to be able to repopulate the earth anyway without some sort of divine intervention. The gene pool is just too small. The general consensus is that the minimum number required for long term survival is 160 (80 male and 80 female). If diverse genes are guaranteed, that number may come down to 80. That’s still much more than a handful. Focus on surviving for a couple of hundred years until the gene pool collapses or disease wipes out the remainder.
Do they know of each other’s existence? Are they together in a group? How many are there?
I don’t think the question can be reasonably answered without more specifics.
No, that’s silly. Yes, there will be a dramatic genetic bottleneck and lack of diversity. But contagious disease is now over as a problem for human beings. Yes, if a new version of HIV hits the human population and there are now no longer any people naturally resistant to HIV then we might have human extinction.
But things like the black death and smallpox and the various plagues that affected Eurasia don’t have enough population density to maintain themselves, and the small founder population means that most human infectious diseases including the common cold are going to go extinct. Pre-Columbian America was largely free of infectious disease, including colds and flu.
How do you know this? Do you know the medical history of everyone who is going to survive? Anyone of them might be a carrier of a contagious disease? Or any one of them might have a genetic defect which will be passed on to the children.
I said contagious disease. If one person has a contagious disease, then everyone in the band of survivors gets exposed. Then what happens? Once the survivors are no longer shedding virus particles, then the disease is extinct. It can’t spread because everyone has already been exposed. Viruses where you get sick once and then are immune to that particular strain are gone.
As for genetic diseases, of course those could be more common. I was talking about contagious diseases. Due to the founder effect and inbreeding the odds of expressing any particular allele that makes it into the founder population is much higher. But that doesn’t mean the allele gets more and more and more common, until everyone is born with a lethal recessive gene and humanity goes extinct. How would that work? If there were ten founders, and one of them is a carrier for a bad genetic disease, then that allele will be present at 0.05 probability in the founder population (1 in 20), and so we’d expect 90% of the F2 generation to not have the allele, 9.75% to be carriers, and 0.25% would express the gene. That means if there were 400 grandchildren, odds are only one of them would express the allele. And of course, it might easily be that none of the first generation carrier’s kids even get the allele, and so it goes extinct in the second generation.
The numbers mentioned in your article are for a population that has to maintain itself at a particular number over multiple generations. There’s no such constraint on the catastrophe survivors.
I saw a television program call “After Man” or something, I think.
They claimed that bad things would happen to nuclear power plants left untended. “Bad” as in massive radiation releases.
So I’d take that into consideration.
That kinda leaves a cluster of states around Wyoming.
http://world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-T-Z/USA--Nuclear-Power/
It’s cold in Wyoming, though. I live there now.
I’d like to think that during the course of the pandemic that killed off most of the population that the nuclear power plants were shut down properly.
Exactly, which is why I suggested a place with lots of marine resources like the Pacific Northwest. It’s relatively easy to gather shellfish - prying them off rocks at low tide or digging clams. During salmon runs they can be caught with comparatively little effort. Even a small band of survivors will probably have at least a few people who have done some recreational fishing - certainly more than have tried to farm anything more than a few vegetables.
It would certainly be a lot easier than agriculture for beginners. The food is already there, you just have to gather or catch it. Admittedly this may take some practice to become really proficient, but it’s a heck of a lot simpler than agriculture. With agriculture you have to select the right crops for the right soils, then pick the correct planting time and the right time to harvest. If you guess wrong, you’ve lost your seed for next year.
Hunting and gathering may have a bit of a learning curve, but in a rich environment like the Pacific Northwest it would be a lot more forgiving of mistakes than trying to farm. Even in a harsher environment, hunting and gathering may need to tide your group over until you get the hang of farming.