Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in what a lot of survivalists pack in their survival kits, they're often referred to as "bug out bags", e.g. http://www.aussurvivalist.com/bugout.htm.

View on HN

Not exactly minimalistic - though obviously it deals with a different scenario to the one the author describes.

In a survival scenario where you can only take a few items then your priorities would probably be (this taken from a survival course I did about a year ago):

- Warm Clothes

- Water cleaning system of some kind. (Puritabs)

- Something to store water in (ideally x2)

- Knife

- Something to light a fire with

In the 48 hour scenario the blog post describes then that should handle the bare requirements for survival. The fact that everyone in the scenario described prioritises food shows that they were really quite ill-prepares. For a 48hr survival period food shouldn't really be entering into your mind until you have everything else sorted.

Quite close to what they taught us in our own survival course. But keep in mind that we were doing this during a communist regime. Maybe you don't know much about a communist regime, but food was the most important thing at that time. Although we were also identifying shelter and other necessary stuff, like the closest human presence, food was our number one unconscious priority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com