Yes, gasoline “goes bad” after a while. It goes bad the same way canned food goes bad. You’re worried that old gas will be hard on the engine of your scavenged car? Yeah, that’s probably true. In which case you go find another car, one that’s been sitting in a garage out of the weather for the last decade. You might need to top off some fluids. But in any case, you’re not commuting to work every day and wanting to keep your daily driver in tip-top shape. Your car is a tool. You will be using it to explore, move heavy stuff back to base (like cans raided from a distant supermarket), quickly evacuate in the event of disaster, and so on.
The survivors of the end of the world will have a different definition of reliability for vehicles than we do. Yes, at first it will be easy to get in a random car and drive everywhere, and then it will get harder and harder. But the deterioration of the road system is going to be a bigger problem than needing to change the fuel filter more often. Where I live trees fall over and block the roads multiple times every winter. At some point your survivors are going to have to get out with a chainsaw every 15 minutes if they venture out of their base area.
We’re talking a “society” of a couple dozen people, at most. There’s no rebuilding. That’s a fantasy. Best you can hope for is to preserve some books and such so that in hundreds of years when populations have recovered the hunter-gatherers will have a head start.
I found some cans of tomato paste or tomato sauce in the back of the cupboard that were years past the expiration date. They looked like the acid in the tomato was starting to eat into the container.
The point is if your survivors want electricity then solar/wind is their best bet. Coal and Gas just aren’t going to cut it. Also the amount of driving you do is immaterial when the gas breaks down and becomes unusable.
Fun fact about MREs they have a one year shelf life after which the military requires a veterinarian to inspect the boxes and declare that they’re good for another year. (the boxes have heat sensitive stickers on them.)
Humans can theoretically survive almost anywhere, but there’s an ideal band of temperate climate where it’s easier to thrive. Too hot and dry and you’ll run out of water for at least part of the year. Too hot and wet and you’ll suffer from tropical diseases and rotted supplies. Too cold and your growing season is too short to be practical. A skilled survivor can overcome these obstacles, but given we’re talking about random apocalypse survivors, I’d say start with these green zones. Pick a spot near a major city for looting the remnants of civilization. Avoid nuclear plants or any other looming environmental catastrophe.
Yes, if they want electricity they’re going to have to improvise something. Which means they’re not going to have electricity. And I’m saying, yes, gasoline breaks down over time, but it doesn’t become “unusable” that quickly. Will it impact engine performance as it gets older? Yes. Will it gum up your engine with crud as it gets older? Yes. Will your car’s fuel lines eventually get clogged? Yes. Will water collect in your engine? Yes. Will it get harder and harder to find gas that’s been stored properly? Yes.
That’s different than “unusable”.
Same with canned goods. Cans exposed to the weather will rust in months. Cans that fall off and shelf and get dented can go bad. I’ve had a can or two that’s been sitting in the back of the pantry on the bottom shelf start to leak, and it turns out those cans were many years old, and would be unsafe to eat.
But the insistence that cans over two years old will have to be thrown out is just nonsense. If the can is intact, then the contents are still good. Yes, even after decades. How many cans will still be intact after decades? Probably not many, people will eat them, they’ll be stored in places that will eventually let in water, earthquakes or wind will topple shelves, and so on. But what matters is that the can remains intact. If it’s intact, the food inside is good. Yes, botulism. Inspect the inside of the can for blemishes. Any doubt, throw out the food. Or feed some to the dog. If the dog dies, then the can had botulism, so don’t eat the rest.
The point is, after the collapse of civilization our standards for food safety are going to be radically re-calibrated. It’s not worth it to eat a 10 year old can of beans that cost 99 cents, even if the risk of food poisoning from that can is extremely low, because it’s 99 cents and they’re making more every day. When you’re scavenging in the crumbled ruins of the monuments to Man’s hubris, your risk assessment is different. Either get used to hunting and gathering, or get used to subsistence farming, or get used to eating out of really old cans of food.
Mostly. Find a old guy. Ask him to show you how to test a can by bouncing a quarter off it. But yes- if the can is intact- and not bulging- it’s very likely safe.
Well then, better get started teaching yourself to hunt and gather. It won’t be that hard, animal populations should explode in a few years, and if you’ve got a couple of reliable firearms a big stock of ammunition should keep you in meat for a long time.
Yes, after ten years of cans sitting on shelves it’s going to be harder and harder to find good ones. But again, what causes food poisoning is failure of the can, not some mysterious aging process. It’s not aging of the food inside an intact container that causes food poisoning, it’s failure of the container.
I think you’ll find without hunters managing the animal herds their population will actually decrease. There were fewer deer and elk in Idaho when Luis and Clark came through than today because of disease and other problems.
All this talk about how long gas will be usable to drive your cars around overlooks the fact that without humans around maintaining the roads, they will be virtually undrivable in a year or two. Landslides, rock rubble, bridge and culvert wash-outs, cracks and holes from freeze/thaw cycles, trees and branches over the road… a vast amount of human effort goes into keeping roads open. I know where I live after the first winter the roads over the Cascades, Coast Range, and mountainous areas south of the valley would be impassable. Many of the secondary roads would be washed out after a year. I-5 would probably be OK for some time, so that would be a way to travel around the Willamette Valley, but basically your vehicle travel is going to be very close to home. Horses will be popular.
There are two different issues here, the short term and then several hundreds of years down the road, the time required to have a population sufficient enough to do more than small sized projects.
Looking at cans or no cans misses the point that if you are interested in growing a population, as is the given in this OP, “reinventing” older technology or methods or in order to utilize them will be required.
My parents would have been much better off in this scenario than I would, and being left with 1950s stuff would have been much better than 2015 things. My father learned how to be a mechanic growing up on the farm, as well as planting and all, where I am totally lost. He knew how to work on older cars, but the current electronic aided ones would be much more difficult. That said, trying to maintain modern machines for hundreds of years would simply not work out.
Why not Hawaii? On the different islands there is game and good land for farming. Heck plenty of stuff grows wild like bananas and coconuts. Plus their is always fishing.
On the mainland I’d go looking for an old Amish farm and as long as you have horses and know how to use them, you should be fine.
I understand MVP just fine. Do you have any studies that I can read that support your assertions, or am I stuck with the ones I found? That’s all I was asking.
Cheetahs, and Teddy Bear hamsters, are on one extreme end of the bell curve. Passenger Pigeonsare on the other end of the curve. Where do humans fall on the curve? It depends on a bunch of variables, but the studies I have seen and cited indicate an MPV of 80-10,000.
I think you can assume that stuff like cars and power plants will be gone within a few years. We’re looking at hunting/gathering/scavenging without power tools.
Starting a fire is hard. Maintaining a fire isn’t hard. I’ve done it for days, and the only reason I stopped is because the vacation was over and we went home.
Preparing game is likewise easy enough, especially if you have plenty of game to experiment on. You try to remove the viscera intact, to avoid fecal contamination, then then you remove the skin and then you cut it up however you feel like. Many animals have pits and pieces that taste nasty (scent glands and such) that will contaminate a small portion of the meat until you learn to recognize and remove those parts. But stuff like puffer-fish poison are extremely rare in animal. The hardest part may be finding and maintaining sharp blades.
Preparing wild plants is harder, because many have toxic parts and the edible parts need to be cleaned and/or processed. But except for some mushrooms, most don’t kill you in small doses, so you can experiment with eating a little. And lots of places would have leftover gardens with descendants of domestic plants. I get a few “volunteer” tomatoes every year. They aren’t as good and don’t yield as much as select hybrid tomatoes, but they are perfectly edible. Apples and pears rotting in the abandoned markets contain viable seed. It will take years for them to produce, but once they bear, they produce a lot of fruit, and the only real effort you need is to keep other fruit-eaters away. If you like to eat other fruit eaters, that makes it a little easier.
I think the best place for the survivors to go is far away from whatever killed everyone else. Nukes? Avoid the radiation. Disease? Avoid anyplace where there might be infectious dead people. Humans are quite adaptable, and could probably survive in most parts of the country. The only places that might not support a low population density are deserts, like the LA area.
Cold weather has costs and benefits. Food keeps when it is below freezing. There are lots of parts of the country that are cold but could support adequate game meat and fish for human survival. There are lots of fruits and some grains and tubers that grow fine in short seasons.
Sure, if they aren’t contaminated with whatever killed everyone else, there are some especially rich parts of the world, like the Pacific Northwest. But most anywhere could support humans at low density.
