Not enough people left now to post in it.
Sorry - I’ll see myself out.
Rome absolutely fell and it was an absolute apocalypse in a lot of places for a lot of people. True it\ looked very different to people in different locations and in different bits of society, and at different times, but to say it “never fell” is a massive understatement.
Almost universally for the Elon Musks of the late Western Roman empire (who are the people who wrote the histories, or they were written for at least) the fall was absolutely the end of the world. Everything they considered important ended (including for many of them their lives). All the preping the ultra-rich are doing (as discussed in the article posted above) has strong “Romano British elites paying the Saxons to fight for them after the legions left” vibes to me.
For everyone else while they there was no universal experience, a lot of places it was just as bad for them. The Roman empire had a sophisticated economy, where the all of society was dependent on long distant trade for staples (not just the elites for luxuries). This economy was centered on the legions, this meant in the regions (like Britain and Northern Gaul, where a large percentage of the empires population were based) where the majority of the legions were based, when the legions left this economy disappeared and the result was catastrophic for everyone. There were some regions where the roman economy did not have deep roots (either because you just had a tiny roman-ified elite and everyone else carried on as they had before the romans came, or because the economy was based on Mediterranean trade that pre-dated the romans) and were not so affected (or even benefited from the collapse in the short term) that was the exception not the rule.
And as a historical analogy modern global society is alot more similar to the former (with the whole population dependent on long distant trade for everything the need to survive) that the latter (rural peasantry working the land without caring whether the rich guy in the big house speaks latin or german)
This reminds me of Woody Allen’s “kidnapped” routine. “My father has bad reading habits, so he gets into bed at night with the ransom note, and he read half of it, y’know, and he got drowsy and fell asleep.” The full quote says something different and more important.
Note especially the line that I bolded. The Roman Empire did fall but it took lifetimes. Some of the Roman elite moved farther east and thrived. Those that stayed didn’t.
But where is “farther east” in a modern collapse of civilization scenario? Bunkers make no sense when one can flee to a working wealthy area. No one here has posited a worldwide almost instantaneous disaster that would hold off long enough for the bunkers to fill but leave every spot on the rest of surface near uninhabitable for a conveniently short time. SF writers do it with handwaving. The OP just ignored it. You cannot. The actual situation must be known to the last dot before answers are possible.
It used to be easier before modern communications. James Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton satirized the situation back in 1902.
Bunkers only made sense in the context of nuclear war. And even then they were never intended for permanent inhabitation. It was just that due to the exponentially nature of radioactive decay the longer you stayed in them the better (if you stayed in them a day you would protect yourself from the same amount of radiation you’d receive in the next week, stay in them a week you’d protect yourself from the same amount of radiation you receive in the next six weeks, etc.).
The fact that the super rich are considering them as way to survive something other than nuclear war shows (as if further evidence was needed) that they are not galaxy brain geniuses who earned their fortunes with their superior intelligence and decision making.
I just watched an interview with a contractor who builds bunkers. He said that the number one item that all the tycoons want, is a home theater system. Libraries are second. Food tends to be a larder of stored foods. Stuff like hydroponic gardens are rare.
The impression I got was that the moguls want a comfortable place to ride out a short crisis. They don’t expect long-term collapse.
So, basically a place where they can lie low safely while the rest of us deal with the real disaster… so they can then walk out and say “ok now that the worst is over, how can WE still be the overclass in the rebuilding”.
They might be saying “why are those heads stuck on sticks over ther…”
And “Why do I smell cooked pork?”
Easily obtained protein is always welcome, and you can render the fat for a number of uses.
Sad part for me is I’d almost surely perish early in the cataclysm so I would not have the pleasure of seeing their faces…
Once the roads stop rolling and the semi-trucks and railways stop moving products, every urban and sub-urban area will run out of almost everything in about a week. Rural areas might last a bit longer but not much. People don’t realize that every truck rolling down the road is carrying around 40,000 lbs of something. Something needed or wanted. That will stop.
Depending upon where you live electricity will stop, water service will stop, and civil protection services, like the local sheriff and police dept. hospitals and EMT services will stop. The military may function a bit longer but those people expect to get paid too and may just go home to their families. Oh, and prescription drugs will stop too. You got a 30 day supply? That is all you will ever need.
Farming will stop. Food production and processing will stop. There are a huge amount of processing plants that take care of the food you need. They also rely upon workers who expect something for their efforts. Food does not come from a grocery store or some vast food warehouse. It comes in fresh and there are not large stockpiles of even canned goods.
Rich people in bunkers will be prime targets for those looking for supplies, and the bunkers are not going to be safe for very long. In fact, the people will be trapped inside. There isn’t a bunker built that you can’t smoke the people out of, one way or the other. Even the average person growing and canning their own food just become targets for others who have not done so. Grasshopper and Ant story, except Grasshopper has a gun.
If it is Winter a whole lot of people will die. If it is Spring or Summer they will just die a little later.
Bartering services will be your best bet. Do you have a skill that you can barter with others for food or suppies? Don’t tell us about your IT computer programing skills. The other best option is having a large family, or local group of people, that you can combine with. The group is more likely to have enough skills to be viable.
Basically rebuilding the structure of society back up, one little tribe at a time.
Great book on bunker-builders and consumers: Bradley Garrett’s Bunker: Building for the End Times
IME, Ant also has a gun in this scenario. In fact, Ant is more likely to have more guns.
Yeah, Niven/Pournelle, Lucifer’s Hammer.
Yep. ammo and canned goods will be money.
But other than total Nuke war, there is no way Civilization will collapse.
Whar about a Carrington event just a bit stronger than the one that ocurred in 1859 ?
Wouldn’t it fry all the electricity and electronics, all around the globe?
That’s a technological collapse (and not even a permanent one), not a total collapse of civilization.
Following such a proposed event, it is not realistic to believe people will suddenly just turn on their friends, families, and neighbors and go straight into Mad Max apocalypse mode.
It will represent a major emergency but people will do what they do in emergencies - a few will be total idiots about it and most will do what they can to get by and help those around them. What will happen is people will band together into the largest communities that are realistically sustainable at that time and maintain familiar forms of government and infrastructure, i.e. the mayor of each town is probably still going to be mayor after, the police force will still be the police force, and so on, while things get recovered.
In other words, some level of civilization and polite society will exist, mainly because most people don’t want to live otherwise. Most people aren’t salivating at the idea of turning feral and robbing/killing other people and only held in check because they have electricity.
I’m not so sure. On one hand I agree society is more durable than post-apocalyptic fiction would have you believe. On the other hand we’ve setup our society to be very fragile, where all the things that keep us alive are dependent on very complicated supply chains from all over the world. Once that first shipment of food fails (and the shipment of parts/fuel that the shipment of food needs, and the shipment of raw materials the oil refinery needs to keep making fuel, etc. etc.) I can see stuff going south pretty fast. And it wouldn’t take much for that to happen, i’d be concerned what would happen with a significantly more dangerous variant of covid (say something that has a 10% mortality). Once most essential workers have personally seen someone they know well die it’s going to be hard to get them to show up to work.
I forget what book it was, but I recall part of the back story was a massive collapse in which a lot of people tried to survive in bunkers.
The made the distinction between survivalists, the people who built bunkers and lived in them in relative safety for years, before emerging into the new world, and actual survivors, those who were stuck in the outside world, and so had to deal with the actual problems of surviving and thriving under the new conditions. When the ‘survivalists’ showed their faces, they met a lot of people way smarter and tougher than them, who quite quickly made the survivalists second-class citizens.
Complicated yes, more fragile than a completely local economy yes, but everyone involved in the long-distance supply chain has a very strong vested interest in keeping their part of the chain going. If the system were as fragile as hypothesized, then it wouldn’t take a worldwide catastrophy to cause collapse, it would be happening left and right due to debt defaults, border skirmishes, pandemics, and political upheavals. Those things are (sadly) happening routinely, but the worst to come of it was a few months where toilet paper was hard to get. Even economically devastated countries like Venezuela are still nominally functional.
Perhaps David Brin’s The Postman? In the backstory, some civilization-survivable calamities are exacerbated by a bunch of survivalists who pitch the whole thing into a general collapse. It doesn’t quite match the second paragraph in the particulars, though.