So far, no one has convinced me it would be possible for a large enough group to sustain humanity to get its shit together and build an effective shelter in one week’s time.
Am I wrong?
I don’t think you are. You might have tiny groups of people survive, but you’re probably talking about well below 1% of the population. Build an underground / underwater city to sustain 100,000 or 1,000,000 people indefinitely? That’d be a decades-long project, and even then, it’d probably have a very tenuous grasp on sustainability.
If the United States government found out tomorrow that a giant meteor was going to hit the Earth in a month’s time, I doubt there’s much good they could do for 99% of Americans. After Hurricane Katrina, Sandy, and the recent round of flooding in Louisiana (to offer just a few examples), I have very little doubt the government would not mount an effective response. They might not even have the first hearing on how to mount an effective response scheduled before the meteor strikes. At best, they might get the President and some staff members holed up in Cheyenne Mountain or something, but what good is a President without a country to lead.
I think it’s more likely that a few rich billionaires might be able to buy up some old mine shafts and stock them with pallet-fulls of MREs and the necessary HVAC & sanitation equipment. They could probably take their family and friends, and some security team, maybe some scientists, who knows.
If we had a decade or more of warning, and we could somehow convince people that survival would be chosen by fair lottery, then maybe everyone pitches in and hopes they’ll be chosen.
Anything less than that, and I think the whole thing falls apart. Some humans survive for a while as scavengers and cannibals. Eventually the population drops down to whatever the new carrying capacity of the planet is, which might be 0, depending on just how much sun is blocked out.
A billionaire filling a mineshaft with equipment and security isn’t going to work, unless they somehow keep it a perfect secret. Because there are a lot more people starving on the outside who want to get in than people on the inside to keep them out.
It’s possible that there are enough patriotic soldiers willing to sacrifice their lives for the political elite to survive. But I’m not sure. It’s one thing to charge bravely into battle with your comrades in arms to protect your country and way of life. It’s another thing entirely to stand guard at your post to protect the elite while your family literally starves.
Except mushrooms don’t grow on thin air and darkness, they grow by digesting the energy in decaying plant material. You need fresh composted plant waste to grow mushrooms on, and once a batch has eaten the nutrients in that compost you can’t grow another batch.
I predict total human extinction brought on by sepsis from infected ingrown toenails after being repeatedly stubbed on things as we wander around in the dark.
But more seriously, I’m fairly confident it is possible to plan for survival of five to ten years for small pockets of humanity. Beyond that, I dunno.
Given what I’ve learned about the subject because of this thread, the people on the outside are more likely to be freezing to death than starving. Anyways, there’s probably a middle ground somewhere short of “perfect secret” where only a handful of people know about the shelter and are easily-enough dissuaded because they don’t want to be shot trying to enter unwelcome.
There are already huge existing self-sufficient bunkers and others under construction:
Nuclear submarines are limited only by food, so if they had a few hours to take on additional stores they could conceivably survive a year or more.
If the OP scenario is a year or so, it is likely a considerable number of people (along with much stored knowledge) would survive. Relative to earth’s population this number would be small but sufficient to rebuild civilization. As the severity and duration of the scenario increases (say the sun goes out completely, or twilight-like darkening for 5+ years), then the chances diminish that a significant number would survive.
Let’s go over your first link of 10 “bunkers”:
- It’s a seed vault, not a people bunker.
- It’s a rumor about a secret complex under Denver International Airport.
- Not too many details, and nothing about whether it is ready for sub-zero conditions over a long period of time.
- It’s a nuclear bunker-again, nothing about its readiness for extended periods of sub-zero temperatures.
- It’s a bunch of reinforced rooms under a hotel built in 1958. Like examples #3 and #4, probably a great place to store popsicles once the sun goes away.
- Deep in a mountain, but to get warm we need to get deep down. Not sure if it is set up for a sudden extreme and extended drop in temperature.
- Secret bunkers right under the city built by Stalin during the cold war for air raids. Again-not fitting the bill.
- Another complex built into the side of the mountain. A little sturdier than most of this group, with more long range planning…but this one is designed as an alternate Pentagon, and you won’t get an invite. And, as with the others, it is built for a nuclear strike, not a complete absence of old Sol.
- It’s a command center designed to keep the war going, not a survival center designed to host people for a long period of time.
- A command facility with some underground bunkers. More popsicle storage.
If the powers that be had some foresight, the could place massive quantities of food in containers around the world on the ocean floor that the nuclear subs could retrieve when needed. A bit of secrecy and knowledge compartmentalization and the food being hard to find/get at and a bunch of it spread around and the nuke sub crews could probably hold out until the subs quit working. Which with a bit of luck could be a long damn time.
Yes, but if species survival is the goal, they’d have to let (yuck) women aboard the subs and that’s simply not done, old bean.
(actually, the U.S. Navy started letting female officers serve in subs in 2010 and female enlisted ranks in 2015. France will allow limited female personnel on nuclear subs in 2017. The U.K. qualified three women for submarine service in 2014. I’m not sure about Russia, China and India - the other three nations that have nuclear subs - but I’ll hazard a guess they’re not as liberal)
I don’t see why the internet would have to go down. If we had electricity we could still run server farms to save info.
Of course getting replacement parts for when the computers break in a few years will not be easy. But that is more than enough time to gather entire libraries worth of books via printing off pdfs and collecting physical books.
More than 1.5 billion, at a very conservative estimate. That’s based on the estimate of > 500 million family farms in the world (which produce 80% of the world’s food.
Let’s go over your objections:
The thread title is “how do we rebuild and maintain civilization?”, given a small kernel of human survivors. It is NOT “would they let me in the shelter”, or is there some perfect shelter that would guarantee survival for huge masses of people. It is simply could civilization be rebuilt.
Re all the statements about “no mention of sub-zero survival”, people survive in extreme sub-zero temperatures every day on earth – with no specialized survival bunker whatsoever.
In the coldest inhabited place on earth – Oymyakon, Russia – the average winter temperature is -58 F, and it has reached -90 F. Yet people have lived there for years and survive OK – without any underground or nuclear-powered facilities: What It's Like Living in the Coldest Town on Earth | WIRED
How long people in these existing bunkers could survive in a cold/dark scenario obviously will vary based on two things:
(1) The exact scenario. IOW is it just somewhat cold/dark for about one year as in nuclear winter or a super-volcano, or is the sun essentially gone for several years?
(2) Specific bunker provisioning and preparation. E.g, exactly what equipment do they have, what range if situations are they prepared for. The full range of this is not publicly known. However it would be crazy to spend millions of $ building a large mega bunker and only prepare for a narrow range of conditions or a very limited duration. Some details are listed here for large commercial shelters: http://www.terravivos.com/