How the Apocalypse Will Bring Out the Best in People
psmag.com
psmag.com
Their stories of what it's like are so vastly different than what you would expect. Do yourself a favor: dig in and read.
"Well, unlike the majority of you (I assume), I actually lived several years in a period of savagery and killing, during which nothing - food, water, electricity, phone, clothing, sense of safety, school, the ability to go out in public, etc - was available, except during totally unpredictable, brief and sporadic occasions. "
A collection: https://www.metafilter.com/137458/In-war-not-everyone-is-a-s...
My Favorite: https://www.metafilter.com/78669/What-if-things-just-keep-ge...
http://www.rapidtrends.com/surving-argentinas-economic-colla...
I spent quite a bit of time thinking about that, trying to figure out what to do in order to be prepared for a realistic disaster. What I ended up deciding was that I can afford to help my neighbors (and whoever else may show up). I have an extensive first-aid setup, stuff to purify water, tons of trash bags, and some easy-to-prepare food. If we have a major disaster in my area, I plan to distribute as much of that as I can. For a fairly small investment I have enough stuff to keep everyone on my street healthy and fed for about a month even if their pantries are empty. No Mad Max necessary.
As an interesting side note, as part of that process I did some calculating on relative costs and discovered that you can buy enough storable basic calories (white flour, stabilized cooking oil, and sugar - no health food here) to feed about 100 people for a month for less than it costs to get a single mid-grade rifle with no ammunition (about $1000). To me, that's the best answer to the idea that being prepared means getting armed to the teeth and fighting off the ravening hordes.
I may be wrong, but I agree with the thesis of this article that people tend to band together and try to help each other in a disaster, so I built a plan around that assumption.
In my world view, you're better off with "A kind word and a gun", food etc. plus the ability to restrain bad actors, should any turn up. Some just might, as seen when an EF-5 tornado roared through my home town of Joplin, MO, but tornadoes, at least, have very limited effects, you don't have to walk far to get out of the areas of destruction. If the New Madrid fault goes you've very much want such preparations already in place.
Nuclear War Survival Skills, get a PDF to see if it's interesting to you (e.g. http://www.oism.org/nwss/), get the green softcover for when the lights go out and for accurate patterns for the Kearny Fallout Meter: http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-Expanded/d... (it says something about the times that Amazon is keeping it in stock, they didn't a few years ago) or from the publisher (previous link).
This is the bible of expedient nuclear war survival, everything from quick to build shelters to sprouting wheat to avoid vitamin deficiency diseases, based on many years of serious research at Oak Ridge, and tested, they'd go so far as to hand a copy of shelter plans to average American families, and then videotape them following the plan, and improve the design based on that. Vs. too many of those classic Civil Defense shelter plans drawn up by bureaucrats in the Beltway that would kill their inhabitants due to too little ventilation to remove heat and humidity.
Maybe then check out his recently published Jungle Snafus ... and Remedies, his hardcore work on survival started in WWII, and he started thinking about nuclear war survival in the mid-late '30s (sic) after learning about the idea of nuclear weapons while at Princeton (quite a few people thought and wrote about it before the details were worked out after E=mc^2 and all that, see e.g. the SF of the pre-end of WWII era).
Then Bruce Clayton's magnum opus, Life After Doomsday, get the Dial Press paperback which has annotations and comments made after the first edition: http://www.amazon.com/Life-after-doomsday-survivalist-disast... And perhaps check out some of his other works, the food for others concept was not, as I recall, originally published in Thinking About Survival http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-About-Survival-Bruce-Clayton/... but you'll find it there (probably originally published in an issue of the hard to find Mel Tappan Personal Survival Letter).
The other two major intellectuals of the era were Jerry Pournelle, see his two relevant novels coauthored with Larry Niven, Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall, and Mel Tappan, start with his Tappan on Survival: http://www.amazon.com/Tappan-Survival-Mel/dp/1581605099/
The obscure and now very expensive used Bad Times Primer by C. G. Cobb had insighs, especially on survival on a budget, I didn't find anywhere else at the time (there is of course the new wave of "prepper" thought and literature that's no doubt worth checking out that might cover things like that): http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Times-Primer-Complete-Survival/dp/...
Finally, Total Resistance http://www.amazon.com/Total-Resistance-H-Von-Dach/dp/0873640... is the manual on sane armed resistance and such, commissioned by the Swiss Non-commissioned Officer's Association, very Swiss vs. USSR invasion and '50s-ish, it's not written by wild eye idiots. Much updating and thought is required, of course, but I would start with that foundation, and for best reading quality, track down the original hardback, I think the publisher reproduced the paperback edition from it.
For modern works, I'll only note The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Survival-Manual-Surviving-Econo... since it's written from the author's experience of a less than total collapse in Argentina. See also people's writeups of the much worse collapse and warfare in post-Cold War Yugoslavia.
That being said, a firearm that you don't practice with isn't much good either. If shooting was as easy as the video games and movies make it look...
On the other hand, a lot of this is scenario dependent. Bruce Clayton advised using the metric of "how many firefights do you think you can survive?" as a guide for how much ammo to store. I myself, if I expect a scenario to be survivable and am by myself, prefer something like a bolt action Scout rifle in .308/7.62 NATO used in shoot once and scoot mode. My evil black rifle in 5.56 NATO (which I'll note requires something better than FMJ ammo to be effective) is reserved for situations where I want to make the best account of myself and/or are with other people in a mutually defending scenario.
All of this is just blowing my mind today. Who knew the "apocalypse" was just another 1-percenter meme, and that the self-styled "free-thinkers" walking around believing it -- including me -- were actually engaging in the most craven, compliant subservience against their own interests!
Interesting thought, that's never occurred to me before. It does seem strange now that you mention it that everyone expects their neighbors to turn into flesh eating monsters when the lights go out though, particularly when there's so little evidence to support the idea. It would be interesting to trace it back to its roots to see how it got started. Maybe it's an ancient holdover from the Bronze Age Collapse.
Most of us hunt our own meat, grow our own vegetables, build our own cabins and get our own firewood. Tons of people up here are already living entirely off-grid.
We all agree, our biggest problem would be lack of gasoline to run chainsaws, and none of us really has a solution to that. Cutting firewood by hand would be doable, though it would be a full time job to get enough for the winter. A decent size house will burn through roughly 10 cords in a single winter.
Many Yukoners would have to band together. Newer homes in downtown are electric heat only, they always start to really worry when the power is out for more than a couple of hours in winter (happens all the time)
Do you keep a giant pantry full of pickled vegetables? Is it meat and bread only?
Of course, there are supermarkets too :)
To me it seems like the future - if there's a drawback I don't really see it. Mass produced such a house minus the solar cells shouldn't be much more expensive than your average American house with air conditioning. The whole structure can be very light, so earthquakes shouldn't be an issue either.
Why arent't we all building this? Is there some problem I'm missing? Is energy simply too cheap to bother?
Useful for extra-planetary construction, too, though I would be surprised if the idea isn't already used to some extent.
[1]: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/when-a-woman-is-raped...
Rural Alaska is a very, very different place with a different population and a different culture where survival and resources are a real, daily concern.
Most of the rural US has easy access to running water (parts of the West may be an exception) via a well, and real law enforcement is plentiful. Which is not to say county sheriffs aren't mostly crooked, but it's generally a genteel crookedness as opposed to "yeah rape is OK" crookedness.
Look, generally speaking, people are decent and have morals. The vast majority do. Shocker I know, but it's true. Most people aren't racist, homophobe, rapist assholes. Doesn't matter where they live.
Rape and sexual violence are pretty common.
You might want to find a trustworthy source of numbers. Here's one for England and Wales: http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandj...
Seriously, from age 16 to 30 all I dreamed about was getting away from the city and moving into a rural cabin. Then I did and learned the truth. These days I'd sooner gouge my eyeballs out with a spoon.
Alcohol is possible - but it'd probably be a considerable overhaul. Most stock saws really don't want to run on gasoline that has any ethanol mixed in, although you can use E10 if you have to. And really you should be using at least 89 octane, if not the 91 high-grade stuff.
Chainsaws are also all pretty much two-stroke, so you'd have to keep a stock of the mix-in oil, or you're going to destroy your crankcase and pistons. Also, unless you want to burn up your saw bar and chain, as its whirling around at thousands of RPM, you need to have a good stock of either actual bar and chain oil, or, in a pinch, regular 20/30 wt engine oil.
What is the R-value and ACH [1] airtightness at 50 PA of such a house? I've been researching using two feet thickness of Pittsburgh Corning FOAMGLAS with an airtight building envelope that conforms to PassivHaus airtightness standards, and comparing the capital outlay of that with the anticipated opex cost savings. But I live in a far more mild climate than the Yukon, so my payoff period is measured in many decades.
Also, trees are small and take years and years to grow. I have no idea how much land you'd need to make that sustainable, but it would be absolutely huge! I'm thinking hundreds of acres.
I grew up in Maine, and it's pretty common to go through 8-12 cord of rock maple, beech and ash in a winter. A lot more BTUs in that than pine, but a lot of houses are drafty old farmhouses... We only used pine in the fall and spring when we needed a quick fire to drive out the cold in the morning and heat up the hot water.
Diesel fuel is subject to the same problems without special additives and precautions.
what's the interior temperature at that rate? Surely you can do with less if you can live with a lower temperature...
When it's past -40C outside, I jam six of the biggest logs that will fit through the door of the woodstove in every ~6 hours. I even set my alarm for the middle of the night, otherwise it will be too cold in the morning.
The living room has the heater - a very interesting contraption, it's basically a stove that heats up the whole wall and a small bed, no smoke/heat is wasted.
Well in -20 degrees winters, water freezes near the windows (single glass) and entrance door. Inside it's about 15 degrees tops, but since you can sit on the heated bed, it's pretty livable (tho not by modern standards I guess).
My grandmother still prefers it over the bigger new house.
My main point is that in a catastrophic scenario, you can definitely do with a lower interior temp, even 10 degrees...
If a complete societal breakdown should occur--the traditional global-nuclear-war apocalypse, a major governmental/infrastructural collapse in a large, developed nation, etc.--things get rougher. People may start off being civil and helpful, but modern urban society is utterly dependent on food grown on farms spread across thousands of miles and distributed via high-tech infrastructure. If that stops for long enough, in a large enough area, then people start to get hungry, and things start to get really bad.
I still find the article heartening in general. Disasters on that scale are not terribly likely in the modern world. Still, it's worth considering.
I see some parallels in our modern world. We have a slash-and-burn air-assault style of war that leaves millions homeless and infrastructure in ruins. Refugees are mounting alarmingly. At some point, they'll become 'sea people' and we'll all have a hard decision to make.
As to survival kits, I tend to think that combining the standard survival kit for winter in the northland with the basics a person would take deer hunting and fishing would probably go a long way.
1) short term disasters are a bit different but a lot of madness tends to hit - see all the rioting in mini-disaster scenarios
2) Character is what you are in the dark. - Dwight L. Moody
The subculture paints a world of black helicopters, and roving gangs of George Soros funded Black Lives Matter cannibals, ISIS EMP attacks, Supervolcanos, and so we're going to have to secretly leave cities by shooting our way out to our hidden mountain cabin ("Never tell anyone where your redoubt is. That's basic opsec.") Oh and along the way you'll may want to hand over boxes of ammunition to strangers for needed supplies.
The thing is though, I totally get it. It's a problem. How long can you hold out with resupplies? How can you pack this better? How can you reduce weight? It's an engineering problem. The right wing conspiracy theories and and that up it neighbor is just waiting for the right moment to kill, eat you, and your skin into a jaunty hat is just absurd wish fulfillment fantasy.
Just like anything in life, you need to separate the good information from the bad... thank god for people that are "different". :)
Initial looting isn't the only public order issue. Its desperate people when supplies run low, taking what they need to survive from other desperate people.
If it's man made, they will want to blame someone, so people will be more aggressive towards anyone else.
If it's a natural disaster, everyone accepts that everyone else around is in the same situation and will help as much as they can right away...
but no, it does not bring any good. instead people do atrocious and horrible deeds in the name of greater good.
So, I would say, "No, apocalypse can destroy humans but not change them."