While I’m looting, I will pay particular attention to the spice racks. Spices aren’t coming back anytime soon, so spices will soon be as good as gold for bartering purposes. (As they were in the old days.)
I have to take a handful of medications every day. They are literally keeping me alive. Even if I begin looting every pharmacy in town, at some point I will need more medications to be produced. And as important as these are to me, I obviously also have to deal with the same survival problems as everyone else. Sure, people lived without the comforts of civilization in the past, but they spent their entire lifetimes learning the necessary skills. Most of us don’t have that luxury.
I have actually discussed this with my partner, and we decided on a relatively painless suicide.
I was also going to reference Dies the Fire. I heard about this book here on the SDMB, and after I read it I started thinking about this scenario. In the book, the people who acquire things like horses/carts and weaponry (swords, bows/arrows, etc. because gunpowder doesn’t work) and get out of town are the ones who survive. One group starts an agricultural society by gardening with seed grain they have salvaged. Other groups gain power because they have good weaponry and skills to gain and maintain control of assets like food.
I would probably gather up camping gear, knives, hunting stuff, stuff to make fire, and as much lightweight non-perishable food (rice, oatmeal, dried fruit, meat jerky) and hunker down in the woods until things settle down in the populated areas (i.e. people die off) then I would try to carve out an existence on the land and scavenge houses and stores for more supplies whilst protecting my family from violent scavengers. I would also try to stockpile heavier things like fuel, fresh water and supplies in a hidden location at my house, like buried under the basement and come back for them at a after time.
Funny, so many here intensely dislike firearms and openly want the choice of civilians to own them removed, yet here we are, talking about the end of days and so many want a gun.
Me? I am armed up. Think Tremors basement (almost). Over 30,000 rounds of ammo in multiple calibers. Paranoid? No, I just dig guns and bought a crazy amount of mail order ammo a few years ago when copper, lead and tin prices started moving up. Basically, I pre-paid for a decade’s worth of sport shooting and training.
If I can make it home, and my wife does so too, we bunker down. I am capable of defense in depth with precision fire out to 600 yards with consistancy. At night, too.
The whole thing is a terrifying thought and the apocalyptic movies of the past few years have me fascinated. Like a train wreck, I gotta watch.
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Bunker in.
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Give myself a clear field of fire by capping most of the neighbors and leveling their homes. I can do that - trust me on that.
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Figure which branches of the family probably survived and get the shit together that I need to reach them.
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Never trust a zombie.
Cannibalism. I am not exaggerating when I say I could probably kill, butcher, and prepare a human being for cooking. If the situation warranted, of course. Think of all the two legged prey animals in such close proximity, all that nourishing protein and fat available if only the moral restraints are removed. Not much different than the other mammals I have processed.
The will to survive is a powerful instinct.
Here’s what always mystifies me about these discussions.
“Civilization collapses, what do you do?”
What does that even mean, “civilization collapses”? Some kind of planet wide disaster? If there’s some calamity that wipes out the infrastructure needed to maintain civilization, your problem won’t be the lack of civilization, the problem will be whatever it is that smashed your city. The problem will be enemy soldiers, or nuclear craters, or the Yellowstone supervolcano, or the Canary megatsunami, or the global aerosolized ebola pandemic, or the zombie hordes, or whatever.
Think Katrina. Did civilization collapse in New Orleans? That’s one way to look at it, but it’s a stupid way. Civilization didn’t collapse, a hurricane hit the city. The people who survived didn’t do so by turning into bandits and shooting anyone who came onto their territory, they survived because they were part of a community of people who helped each other.
So unless there’s some sort of switch that destroys civilization yet somehow leaves the people and the infrastructure around them intact, then the disaster won’t resemble any sort of “collapse of civilization” survivalist porn scenario. If a meteor hits the planet the problem won’t be the lack of civilization, the problem will dealing with the aftermath of the meteor strike. And the people that survive will be the people who don’t turn into bandits. The bandits are going to be shot by the rest of us normal people who are trying to survive.
Survival doesn’t mean holing up in your suburban three bedroom house and shooting anyone who comes near. It means being part of a group that makes an effort to restore services. Electricity, water, sewage treatment and so on aren’t magic that will suddenly stop working if we stop believing in them, unless we’re talking a situation where the laws of physics suddenly change, like in an SM Stirling novel.
Civilization doesn’t collapse in 72 hours. Civilization will only collapse once the last civilized people are dead. Given enough disasters that last long enough, eventually this will happen. But it will take years or decades, not days. You don’t wanna be like this guy.
How you react will depend a lot on how you expect to survive and what you expect to do afterwards.
If this happens the ability pf government to co-ordinate will be very limited. No radio, no telephones. So expect no help for weeks if not months. That leaves people on their own. For the first couple of days thing will probably be fairly calm, but once even a few people start running out of food and medicine there will be looting, and that will spread fast. So the 72 hours idea isn’t too bad. After that there will be civil unrest and the highways are going to be gridlocked with no way of getting them moving again.
As Der Trihs notes, most people are going to die. Like 90% of people. At best, cities have around two weeks food available in them. Water is going to be an even bigger problem, especially in warmer weather. Without the reticulated supply there is only about 72 hours worth of water in the city, if you’re lucky. In the sudden shutdown the OP describes there’s probably only 24 hours. Most people won’t even conserve what is in their toilet cistern, so they will have literally what is in the fridge and the hot water systems.
If you are on a river or lake that is safe to drink untreated, you will have access to more water. However with no running water disease is going to be a massive problem. It’s a massive problem in 3rd world cities without running water, and people there have adopted techniques to dispose of their waste and get water from other sources. In western cities people don’t have clue how to cope, and that lake or river is soon going to be filled with faeces and unsafe to drink without treatment.
In winter heating is going to be a major problem. It’s astounding how much fuel people need to keep warm, and even by demolishing buildings things are going to get grim within a few weeks.
As the food, water and fuel in cities and towns are used up and epidemics become rampant, people are going abandon the cities and spread across the countryside like a plague of locusts, eating, destroying and contaminating everything they can reach before thy die in droves like, well, a swarm of locusts.
So you are going to have to get out of Dodge, and a long, long way out. Which leaves two options.
The first has been suggested: gather supplies, hole up somewhere and wait for a couple of months for the vast majority of people to die. I really don’t like this idea for several reasons. Firstly you have a real problem with fuel in winter and water at any time. Most people aren’t going to be able to get the 80 or so litres per person they need within 72 hours. But if you start coming out to collect rain water you are going to be found by others. Fuel presents similar problems. My second objection to holing up is that you when you leave the surrounding countryside will be scorched earth. There will be no chance of finding any food or clean water for hundreds of kilometres around any major city. That’s going to make it tough to get out.
My preferred option is to leave ASAP. Get a hold of an all terrain vehicle in any way possible. A largish diesel SUV with a trailer ideally. Take at least 8 weeks worth of food. Load up with all the obvious stuff like food ,firearms, a tent etc, so a stop at a camping store is a good idea if you don;t already own this. But don’t get carried away. The highest priority is to stay mobile and survive the first few months. A lot of stuff, like tools and even extra ammo, is going to readily available for free after that 90% of the population dies. It’s not like there is going to be a prolonged war that will use up those resources when there is no food over most of the world. When peope die of starvation, disease or homicide you can take whatever you need. One item that will be essential is a good mountain bike. You will run out fuel at some point, and a simple bicycle will enable you to move rapidly even on roads choked with traffic for many years.
Plan your route before you leave. Avoid major cities as you travel. Select a spot as far from major cities as you can find, within 10 kilometres of so of largely uninhabited hills or mountains so your water supply is reasonably secure. Find some place that is secluded and has enough trees for fuel. Dump the vehicle at least 10 km or so from where you intend to settle. Hide it if you can, but don’t expect to re-use it. Then walk in using your bike as a wheelbarrow. 8 weeks of food may seem like a lot, but if you’ve been able to choose the right food it should only be one trip.
Now you can hide for the next couple of months. If you’ve selected your location wisely and you for move around as little as possible, you should be able to go a couple of month without ever being seen.
At the end of that time most people are going to be dead or dying and immobile. At this stage you can start exploring the local area carefully and obtaining any additional supplies or occupying abandoned buildings.
After that things will get really tough.
Which I gather is exactly what the OP is positing.
But that magic switch only turns us into individual atomized survivalists if we somehow all suddenly decide to stop working together and somehow turns every human being on the planet into a sociopath. In 72 hours.
It could happen, with enough orbital mind control lasers.
An EMP won’t destroy civilization, it only destroys some electronic equipment. It doesn’t destroy the engineers who can get everything fixed, eventually, if they aren’t shot by a bunch of rampaging sociopaths.
The people who survive won’t be those who hole up by themselves and hoard food, water, and bullets. Because even in a situation of total savagery, the savages who work together always beat the savages who try to go it alone. A gang of 10 people who work together to strip and salvage houses is going to make short work of the guy holed up in his basement. And a gang of 100 people will make short work of the gang of 10 people. And what if we got together a gang of 300 million people?
There probably wouldn’t be that many people left on the planet without civilization. Probably not even a tenth as many people. There’d be no way to feed most of humanity, nor do most people know how to survive without civilization. And the general chaos and disease will push the population down below carrying capacity.
War Nerd had a nice columnabout this kind of scenario. His basic conclusions: it’s all about the water and organized groups like churches will probably dominate.
So my strategy would probably be to try to find and join some group that looks likely to survive and would take me.
Lemur866, thank you for articulating those points exactly.
No, it will do that simply because food and water will run out for the majority of the population within a couple of weeks. At that stage working together simply ceases to be an option because there is no more food or water. You only need to look at what happened in past famines to see what occurs. Waves of refugees abandon cities and start travelling in small groups across the countryside, taking whatever food and water they can get.
The magic switch doesn’t need to turn people into sociopaths within 72 hours to produce individual survivalists. That is an inevitable consequence of sudden-onset famine.
Eventually is the key word here though. If 90% of the population runs out of food before things get fixed, then you will have social collapse and masses of refugees.
You will note that I never proposed rampaging sociopaths. That largely is a fiction. However swarms of desperate and hungry people are a risk to anybody with food, as evidenced by instances where aid workers have been seriously injured by mobs of staving people. We’re not talking “Mad Max” here, simply normal people trying to avoid starvation. Some people will kill others to avoid starving.
And of course if there is no food, how does the engineer keep working?
First off, I’m not talking about a situation of savagery. This is a situation where the food deliveries simply stop and the water ceases to flow. People can either travel to get food, or the can starve. Of course those people who have holed up and hoarded food, water, and bullets will not face starvation at all.
So how does working together make anybody’s survival chances any better in this situation?
So now you are saying that violence and savagery are inevitable. I can’t keep track of your argument here. You start out saying that savagery is not optimal, and now you argue that it is the only workable tactic.
Of course that’s nonsense. The idea that a gang of 10 people can make a living by tracking down individuals and taking their resources simply makes no sense. Even if they can find enough victims, and even with the odds at 10-1 in their favour they will all be dead after 10 such thefts. 10 individuals holed up with food and ammo have a much, much better chance of survival because they have the necessary resources, with no need to search for it and no need to risk violence to obtain it
This idea that a raiding lifestyle is workable makes no sense and is contradicted by all of human history.
Well, of course you can’t support 300 million people in North America without civilization. But where’s the magic wand that removes the civilization, yet leaves the 300 million people still standing there ready to resort to cannibalism? A disaster can kill people and destroy infrastructure, but it can’t destroy civilization unless the survivors decide to stop working together.
A disaster is a disaster. What disasters have destroyed civilization? Even World War II didn’t destroy civilization in Germany, or Russia, or Japan, the countries that were flattened the hardest.
A megadisaster won’t destroy civilization. It could mean a lot of people will die, but it doesn’t mean the end of civilization, it means we’ll all have to work at crappy, dangerous, unpleasant jobs for years until we get things back in order, and we’ll have a lot less freedom to tell our boss to get bent, because there will be plenty of people lining up to work at that upleasant job.
The new rulers of the post-disaster world will be the people who get factories running again, who get the trains moving, who get the electricity back on, who get the water pumped in and the shit pumped out. It won’t be random guys running around shooting each other, because no roving bandit gang can hope to compete with guys who have factories that turn out guns and ammunition by the boxcarload. And if a bandit gang somehow seizes the factory, well, then they now are the guys who have to run the factory if they want to keep it working. There might be an ugly new aristocracy running things after the disaster, but you can’t run a factory along the same lines as a bandit gang.
This is what civilization IS. The old-timey feudal aristocrats of the medieval era were just bandit leaders who, rather than ride in and loot the peasants every few years, move in and set up shop, and the loot is now called “taxes”. But some bandits figure out that a smaller chunk of a bigger pie is worth more than a bigger chunk of a smaller pie–you can shear a sheep every year, but only skin him once. And so the Mongols who ravaged China become the new ruling class of China.
Like meat? With a shotgun, even a city boy ought to be able to feed himself on birds/squirrels/cats/rats while learning to hunt. Also potentially useful as a signaling device, in addition to obvious offensive/defensive utility. Ammo can be scavenged or reloaded…but having a few black powder weapons available as backup isn’t a bad idea. I’d also want to score a compound bow ASAP, for situations when stealth is necessary.
Other things I’d be interested in:
Dogs. Very useful as a poor man’s security system. Could be eaten if facing starvation.
Coins. Metal will likely have some value.
Drugs. Aspirin, pain killers, antibiotics, anything else I can find.
How-to-books–the Foxfire Series, medical, engineering, chemistry, mechanical, agricultural.
Tools–any available.
Blankets, clothing, shoes.
Eyeglasses–with no one to make more, they oughta be good for trade, plus I need spares.
Binoculars.
Livestock. Chickens for meat/eggs, Cows or Goats for meat/milk, + leather.
Booze. Drink it, trade it, use as an antiseptic.
Blades. Weapons and tools.
Candles/Sterno/fuel oil
Rope
Matches/lighters/flint & steel
Batteries
Flashlights
Destroy the infrastructure, and they can’t work together. Most of them won’t even know where other people are, much less be able to organize anything. And in the collapse of the population, there won’t be any organization because there won’t be any food or water to go around; getting a hundred people together will just result in them killing and eating each other.
And I wasn’t talking about there only being less than 100 million people in America; I was talking about there being less than that in the world.
The ones that left empty, abandoned cities like the Maya.
Which means the disaster in question would be bigger; WWII is by no means the worst thing that can or has happened.
You assume that will even be possible. You assume there will be enough people with the right knowledge to do so; you assume that there will be enough people, period. And in one spot too; a million survivors spread across the continent can’t rebuild a civilization; they can’t even find each other.
No; most likely we go back to scattered tribes for a while, and eventually build back to a primitive civilization. But we may never again be able to reach our present height, with all the easy to get resources gone.
With the exception of crude oil, where did they go, pray tell? I’d figure all of the easy-to-get resources would now be even easier to get, what with the previous civilization having dug them all out of the ground.
And crude oil’s no biggie: there’s still plenty of coal around, so at least a 19th century level of technology is possible: and from there, is it so difficult to jump directly to solar/nuclear/what have you?
More than anything, civilization and technology rest on ideas. And unless all the books are burned and memories are erased, our putative descendants would still have it a lot easier road to civilization than our distant ancestors.
Regarding water: There are lots of small ponds and streams leading to larger creeks and rivers around where I live. With a simple backpacking pump filter, you could easily have plenty of water available. Even without the filter, the creek water is probably safe enough. Unless there is a serious drought, there will be plenty of water (in the northeast at least, where there are lots of streams and rivers). Also, where I live you don’t have to dig down far to reach ground water.
This of course is assuming that there is no terrorist attack on water supplies with toxins or bioweapons, or a nuclear or toxic waste disaster affecting streams and rivers…
Also,
It wasn’t like the Maya were wiped off the face of the earth: they had a continuous post “classic” civilization right up until the Spanish arrived. Indeed, the Mayan civlization is still extant, after a fashion.
So, any examples of a civilization actually being “destroyed” except via conquest (another bigger, badder civilization coming along) or extermination? (Neither of which would fit the OP’s scenario.)