I would be extremely unhappy.
Actually, I’d be better fixed than most. Live in the boonies, got ample food and water sources, firearms and ammo, horses for transportation, tools for cutting wood, land and implements for subsistence farming and so forth.
But I do like having electricity, air conditioning, coffee, watching football and the like. I could hack it if civilization collapsed, but I sure as hell wouldn’t like it.
Part of me feels like what we’re currently living is so much in dis-equilibrium with nature and the natural order that total collapse is the only thing that could correct it. I realize that it would be very personally uncomfortable and probably a lot of people around me would die (including myself), but somehow it just seems right to me, at least the way I picture it as a disinterested observer.
Nature sucks. The whole *point *of civilization is to not *have *to live with the natural order, which, let me repeat, sucks.
Thanks, but I LIKE running water, internet access, V&Ts, and the distinct lack of roving gangs of murderous looters.
I wouldn’t be happy but I think a struggle like that would be very interesting. I like interesting. Each day would be completely different then the day before it and the days and weeks wouldn’t blend together for a while. I don’t think it would be fun and I and everyone else would probably be miserable but I think a compartmentalized part of my brain would be smiling as I struggled to bring my friends and family through the horrors.
Several of my friends live in situations that would be quite conducive to us all surviving and I think my group would probably get away with less then 40% causalities. The biggest trick would be realizing the end was coming and the initial move to the places of safety while we are still separated.
Frankly, I think people are inclined to wildly overestimate their survival skills. There’s a reason that “May you live in interesting times” is not considered a blessing.
Well, if you want to be self-sufficient and live off the land and live by your own rules, you can do that today. Get yourself a rifle and a sack of wheat, get in your car, and drive into the country until you run out of gas or road, whichever comes first. Then start walking until you find a secluded spot. Build yourself a shelter, clear some land, plant your wheat, and hunt for your food until the wheat harvest. Shoot any human who tries to interfere. That’s a pretty good approximation of what your life would be like after the apocalypse, and you can it any time you like, you don’t have to wait for the rest of us. Or do you only want to play collapse of civilization if everyone else plays too?
The end of civilization = the end of insulin = the end of my boyfriend = suckage
I like things the way they are right now, thanks.
I notice that the anti-collapse people are generally coming from a “comfort” standpoint. To put another spin on it, when I think about collapse, I think about the idea of rainforests not being ruined so people can build more unnecessary and excessive houses. I think of sloths and monkeys not having to die out so some dude can have another SUV. I think of water supplies not having deadly toxins dumped in them, killing off any animals that come near. All this destruction seems so centered around human comfort, but seems horrifically and tragically sad when I think about the lives of the animals and of the well-being of the natural eco-system as a whole. I admit that I’m part of the problem, but I think it’s only fitting that humans are dealt with in the same way that we have treated the earth around us. In that sense, I welcome collapse and indeed the destruction of the human race-- or at least a retreat to a more ‘primitive’ (a word that conveys the wrong connotations in my opinion) time, even though it may be far less predictable and comfortable.
The interesting thing is that if civilization does collapse, the people who will survive are those who don’t let their local part of civilization collapse. The survivors aren’t going to be survivalist-types, they’ll be people in tight-knit communities that don’t allow the community to fall apart. The winners won’t be biker outlaws, they’ll be Mormons.
Well, what do you think is going to happen to the forests when millions of people are trying to become subsistence farmers? Economic and political collapse means the ecology gets worse, not better, even assuming no nuclear bombs going off.
And it’s going to take a lot of collapse to reduce the human population to 10% or so of where it is now. I suppose a nuclear war might do it, but the bomb blasts wouldn’t kill most of them, it would be the ruin afterwards. Disease, starvation, people fighting over the scraps, nuclear winter, ecocide.
Without the ecocide, how do you get a 90%+ human death rate?
If economic and political systems collapse and there is totally anarchy, I would think that widespread death would come quite quickly. No money means no medicine, little clean water, no disease prevention, people killing people for their food, etc. Under this kind of chaos, total collapse to me would suggest that people would become hunter-gatherers, not subsistence farmers.
There is a large difference between going back to a hunter gatherer society and having society fail around you.
When my friends and I have discussed it a big part is how we would form our communities; what jobs people would be suited for, how would school be handled, where we would be able to get iron or other staples. Once the people got together we would have some electricity and running water with-in weeks. The worst part would be the survivalist and alone portion while trying to get to safety. I find the rebuilding society to be the interesting part.
Lots of people simulate the survivalist portion on a weekly basis there is a guy in my office that spends a week a year hiking up into the Rockies in the winter to build a snow cave and survive of the land for a week. I think he’s nuts. While hunter’s and survivalists types would be needed while we were reforming society, not to mention my Army friends, I think that would be the worst part.
Hell, no. I like democracy, freedom, air conditioning, central heating, clean food, hot showers, TV, the Dope, the Internet, telephones, modern medicine and most of all my family’s personal safety 'way too much to welcome the collapse of civilization… even if I don’t mind watching movies about it.
You mean like Somalia? Somalia hasn’t become depopulated, and the people there haven’t become hunter-gatherers. And it’s not going to come quickly. What causes the collapse of those economic and political systems? If those systems collapse, what stops people from rebuilding new ones? Even places where the government has become outright genocidal like the Khmer Rouge only 10% of the population of the country were killed.
Suppose we had an economic contraction like the Great Depression, only worse. Very few people starved to death during the Great Depression, there wasn’t a population collapse. And economic and political collapse means that some new political structure takes over. The fall of the Roman Empire didn’t mean everyone died, it meant that instead of taking orders from a provincial governor you were taking orders from a tribal chieftan.
In a collapse, those social institutions that remain standing suddenly become incredibly important. If the US government collapses and the only functioning organization left is the Mormon Church, then suddenly everyone is going to decide to become Mormons rather than lay down and die.
Fair enough; but your Somalia example is predicated on a political and economic system has has largely been absent. In Western civilization, people have no fucking idea what to do in situations of emergency because they’ve never had to worry about it. Think about what would happen in this country if the power went out for 1 month. Compare this to what would happen if this happened in Somalia. I think the actions people would take, the level of chaos, and the amount of unrest (relative to the normal amount) would be very, very different. Westerners are not at all prepared to deal with such difficulties. If there is a sudden dropoff in economic conditions, there is not enough time for people to adjust to the difficulties in obtaining basic needs. Here in the US, we’d be totally fucked. If you, today at this very moment, were told you had no faucets from which to get clean water and no place to get food, you’d probably be freaking out, along with everyone else. People in Somalia are used to this idea and know what to do in this situation because they’ve adapted to it. They were never used to getting water from faucets to begin with. I suspect in the US, many would attempt to get food and water any way they could: stealing, killing, foraging, etc. I doubt the first action anyone would take would be to find plant seeds.Those who couldn’t do it would probably die, and rather quickly. I bet by the end of winter there’d be a huge number (10%+) of deaths.
I wouldn’t be happy at all. I, and the ones I love, would most likely die out. Living in Southern California means there’s a lot of people that would starve to death if the food ever stops being shipped in. If I move to a smaller city I’d still have to worry about being close enough to a big city so if there’s a mass exodus, I’d still be SOL.
The key is to find a small town in the midwest. Like an above poster said, those who survive will be a tight knit community. I also think certain gangs would survive. If the “good guys” are to survive they’ll have to make tough decisions, like who to let into their city, because you can’t feed everyone, and who to kill in self-defense.
But huge numbers of deaths is relative. If 30 million people starved to death in America it would be an unprecedented catastrophe. But that would only reduce the population by 10%.
And of course if tomorrow the water didn’t work and the grocery stores were empty, everyone would be in trouble. But how did that happen? Was there a war? Nuclear bombs? Riots? Asteroid strike? Something on the level of a planetwide hurricane Katrina? But anything severe enough to cause a total breakdown in the ability to grow food, put it in trucks and take it to where it needs to go is going to be severe enough to screw over the rainforest monkeys and giant pandas.
Rooting for a planetwide disaster to lower human population is like rooting for another Hurricane Katrina to get rid of the rats. You end up with a ruined planet and the rats mostly figure out a way to adapt.
I rather suspect that much of the strange and counter-intuitive attraction some people feel towards apocalyptic scenarios can be explained by the concept of “relative deprivation”.
That is, many people feel “deprived” in our society - because when they look around them, they are low on the social totem pole. An apocalyptic event at least holds out the possibility that this could be at a stroke reversed: all the fat cat rich folks would be killed by maurading bikers, and our heros will form a community of survivors that will inherit the earth. Or something of that sort.
Thing is, in absolute terms life would heavily suck. In our civilization, even the poorest person lives better than a nobleman a couple of hundred years ago. An apocalypse and the survivors will be living in the depths of misery, until of course they could re-start civilization …
Also, as others have pointed out, the survivors will happily eat the last endangered animals, if that’s what there is to eat.
Nice to see Malthus in this thread.
I’d be extremely unhappy. In fact, I can’t help but think less of those who claim they would be happy for billions of people to die, because they think it would benefit rain forests, sloths, and monkeys. I’d say more, but I don’t want to start a Pit thread.
Actually, my first thoughts were, “Well, I know a couple of ways to purify water, and we’ve got everything in the garden, plus our stock of seeds - if we could just get our hands on a few goats and chickens, we’d be doing pretty well…”
I’m not saying that everyone would think this way, but I think it might be more than you assume. I do think a huge factor in how people would react is whether they think it’s a permanent situation or a temporary problem, and if temporary, how likely it is that things can get back to “normal”. I think if it’s clearly a permanent situation, there would certainly be some panic and looting at first, but people would realize pretty quickly that all the existing food and water in the world can only last so long, and they’d have to start preparing for the long term.
Also, there’s a pretty interesting show on the Discovery Channel right now that’s very relevant to this thread.