From the OP:
"* If there was a collapse of society (no central government, no economy - basically, like the world depicted in The Postman) "*
I was being a bit playful. I am by nature a people pleaser and a very nice person. It’s hard for me to think of the situation that is presented in The Postman. However I’m smart enough to know that studies have shown that good people will revert to what ever is needed for survival. In a ‘what-if’ scenario regardless of what skills you possessed or goods you owned, I could have them at gunpoint. However, I’m guessing the OP meant what would you need to survive on your own.
Speaking as someone who has owned and known horses most of her life, I think you are overrating the need. The average survivor is not going to be traveling that much. You’re going to be working too hard farming, making tools, creating shelter and defending yourself.
Unless you plan on being marauders.
As for beasts of burden, working animals, you’d be better off with oxen, cattle, mules. They are far less prone to injury, much hardier in general, stronger, and can be used for milk and meat as well. (Not like you can’t eat horses…)
Remember too, that for most of our history, people walked. A lot.
Spices would be more precious than gold, just as in the old days. Because once they’re gone, they’re gone, trade routes to the East being, er, disrupted and all.
The only post-Apocalyptic fiction that picked up on this idea, to my knowledge, is Lucifer’s Hammer.
Correct. But they are still more effective as a resource than a horse.
Again, horse ownership wasn’t that common, and often when people had the resources to have domesticated food/work animals, they went with multipurpose, hardier types-probably in this order- chickens, goats, sheep, cattle, oxen, donkeys in there somewhere, mules, horses. Horses are harder to keep, more prone to injury, less endurance, and less useful for work.
For transportation they are more comfortable and faster than oxen, but remember, you are too busy trying to survive to travel much.
Antibiotics will be worth even more than spices. Yah, they expire eventually - but until then, they’ll be worth whatever you care to charge. (What wouldn’t you pay to save yourself from pneumonia, or an infected leg?) Of course, you’ll also need guns. (Who wouldn’t you kill to get antibiotics if you needed them badly enough?)
Eventually, paper will be valuable - perhaps not incredibly so, because there are so many books out there, but still - eventually, it’ll be something worth hoarding.
Ice! If you can keep a freezer running, you’ll be able to live like a king for as long as you can keep it.
Stolen from astro’s thread on ugly guns, we have this shotgun, made out of copper pipe.. I imagine that folks will be wanting things like that, especially if they’re built to work on black powder (since those things can be made fairly easily if you know what you’re doing and have the right materials, just ask the Gorn).
That gun looks like a good way to lose part of your face.
Black powder can actually be kind of tricky to make, and extracting and purifying sulphur is no mean feat. I think you could only justify the time and energy for producing it on a very large scale i.e. to support an army or regional production for hunting and protective use; manufacturing gunpowder from raw sources for personal use would just be too time consuming.
In the absence of a functioning state, the single most valuable thing in the world is people on your side: your family, clan, gang or tribe. A group of about fifty to one hundred people who you all know by name and face (and who know you), who all mostly get along and more importantly are all loyal to the group. Everyone else in the world will be two-legged animals who are competitors at best and enemies at worst. In a lot of southern families, just including everyone who’s at least a first cousin and their spouses and kids will give you the needed numbers.
As StGermain mentioned, you want horses that are what are called “easy keepers”- they can get fat even on nothing but unlimited fresh grass. Similarly, any other animals you keep should be the now rare breeds that were common in preindustrial times, that survived on basic food, minimal shelter and almost no vetinary care.
If you’re going to stockpile things like pepper and coffee, try to get sealed jars of the whole peppercorns or coffee beans, rather than the ground. Will last much better.
A note on alcohol: distilled spirits do have the advantage of keeping almost indefinitely. The average liver can only process so much a day, and that amount served watered down into “grog” could be part of a daily survival ration. Not to mention that bottles of “the good stuff” will always be more desirable than rotgut.
Good point. I am thinking about my clan right now- savvy older folks (and one bad-ass AARPer), a pretty tough bunch in the 30-45 range, but too many little kids and babies right now. We need to put off the collapse for at least 10 years if possible.
But we’ll need to recruit- I only have about a dozen folks.
My dad (in his 60’s now) would be very handy- that man has teh mad skillz. Make fun of that Boy Scout shit all you want, but my dad can do stuff, make stuff, camp rough, cook stuff and repair stuff like nobody’s business. Eagle Scout, Vigil, Silver Beaver- you’re damned skippy I want him on my team.
Deal me out of the post-apocalyptic card game. I’d want good opiates for a comfortable suicide as alluded to in a prior post.
But if I had to play, I’d want small, useful things for barter, toothbrushes, dental floss, aspirin, needle, thread, toothpaste, things with an indefinite shelflife. Some “luxury” items might be good for barter and easily stashed —perfume, anti-prespirant, shampoo. The stuff would have to be easily stashed and moved in case you suspected that someone might be onto your hiding places.
In actuality, I can’t envision a situation where the vast majority of us would have any say. If the system failure is due to cosmic cataclysm, yet the majority of the population is still living, the people with the REAL guns are the ones making decisions. That’s various members of the armed forces. I suppose they would set themselves up as warlords eventually coming to some sort of stasis of MAD (mutual assured destruction), because they wouldn’t really want to use the arsenal as there would be no replacements. Those of us with useful skills would be spared/enslaved. Those with no skills would be considered unnecessary.
The only situation where I can imagine hoarding to be effective, would be if some disease indescriminately wiped out 70% (my arbitrary guess) of the population, yet leaving climate and resources much the same. If the number of survivors is below a certain threshold, the resources are going to be so plentiful to not be an issue for a while. Survivors will view each other as assets not liabilities.
Which is kinda why women need to find a spine, because it’s obvious quite a few men are looking forward to the benefits of that.
You can’t enslave someone against their will, believe it or not. The reason colonizers gave up trying to enslave native american indians was because in most cases the indians would rather die then become somebody’s property. Either prepare to fight your own damn husband to the death, or prepare to wipe his boot off your ass forever.
Stealth mode is recommended against a stronger opponent, btw.
