Survival of the Richest
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How will these bunker building individuals be viewed by survivors? Inevitably society rebuilds, yet these folks probably won't have anything of value to offer a new community. It's very possible they even lived a life of luxury while everyone else starved.
I think they will be in for a rude awakening when or if that time comes. To that end they're probably not building survival bunkers, they're building tombs.
The sponsor/ruler's ability to survive the apocalyptic event would be dependent how good they are at political/psychological manipulation/intrigue. I'd say most upper management would survive.
What are your Mad Max skills? If the nuclear apocalypse comes and you survive, what useful skill do you have that will let you continue to live without the rule of law? Can you build a house? Fix a car? Grow crops? Butcher an animal properly? Land an airplane? I've always though everyone should have at least a few of these practical hands-on skills, in case the shit hits the fan. What good are your computer programming skills when there's no more electricity, let alone functional computers? So, you're a social media marketing manager for a global brand? If that's all you know how to do, you'll end up some local warlord's sex slave.
Why would "security forces" listen to some formerly rich corporate CEO? What has he to offer them?
You have a SERIOUSLY optimistic view of the Mad Max type aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. Fix a car? Land a plane? Those questions imply an assumption on your part that an awful lot of support systems will have survived. (For instance, I'm not at all sure that fuel deliveries would continue to be made after a nuclear apocalypse. I'm even less certain that the electronic systems of most planes and autos will survive the nuclear unpleasantness unaffected.)
Indeed the main item as usual is how to get your army to listen to you. A hard people skill. Logistics is always useful as well.
A trade or skill is a good fallback in case of exile or loss of resources.
The ones to dominate in groups tend to have social engineering skills, or "Ben Linus skills" you could call them.
They don't need to know how to start a fire, or fire a gun, or fix a car. They can just get other people to do it for them -- not for money, but because they can con them in to it, or exploit their weaknesses, set them against one another, or bribe them with promises.
This is a problem is too small group in a survival situation. A viable group should have the size of a village at least - over 100 people of some diversity.
Otherwise it is very fragile.
Obviously enough resources to start with.
Setting aside how loaded that statement sounds, the role in question could easily involve espionage and assassination.
After all, the medieval feudalism did arise in what was essentially a post-apocalypse world.
I know in most apocalyptic movies they aren't around, but it seems likely some of them would be.
Well... one of those is true.
These people are not wealthy by accident. They were not gifted their riches. They have acquired their wealth through pattern recognition, through being right when (almost) everyone else was wrong.
Someone here asked me a few weeks ago why I felt travel might not be so easy in the not-too-distant future - I held my tongue. Not so now.
I spend a lot of time rubbing shoulders with these intelligent, cynical assholes - and while I lack their dizzying material wealth, I find myself having my brains picked frequently on technical solutions for the apocalypse, as I made my much smaller fortune through - you guessed it - pattern recognition. All successful businesses boil down to individuals who can, to some degree or another, predict the future.
Why does this matter? Why am I defending them?
Firstly, I’m not defending their moral worth. Some of these folks are perfectly lovely, others yet you get the feeling are thinking about asset stripping your organs, and set up dead man’s SOS timers before going to a meet, particularly if it isn’t in public.
It matters because they are almost certainly right. This interglacial period is a bug on the windshield of time. This century and a bit of liberal democracy is a mere blip on the radar. These post-war decades of unfettered growth are a fluke, an artifice built on nothing but itself.
Is the planet going to explode, Death Star style? Unlikely.
Is it going to become a place largely hostile to human life? Probably.
You might think that it’ll take a massive event - all-out war, total crop failure, diabolical climate change - but the reality is that it doesn’t take much, and the more interconnected and interdependent our world becomes, the less it takes. We haven’t created resiliency, we have created points of failure. The internet is the ultimate amplifier and feedback loop - information and its impact now spreads and distorts like never before, waves overlapping and interfering constructively and destructively, creating ripples in the fabric of human civilisation. Those amplitudes can only grow so much before said fabric starts to tear, buckle and break before the strain.
No, this is a chaotic system, with multifarious inputs, and a few well (or badly, if you rather) timed shoves will send it way off “normal”.
There are also those who have taken a page from Asimov, and are attempting to hasten the Event, as a crystal of civilisation is more likely to survive a well planned and rapid demolition than a slow, aching, chaotic collapse.
A flood here, a drought there, an insurrection over there, an environmental disaster there, a refugee crisis here, a small food shortage, an interruption to power supplies, a market crash there, a bread riot here, a mass exodus here, a closed border there, martial law here, panic there, sell-offs here, no economy here, no food here, no security here, no life here.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Can we beat the rush and tar and feather these people now and ride them out on the rail or possibly a one way rocket?
This almost sounds like a parody
Most of CEOs and managers aren't leaders of this sort - they have to pay people to follow them. The second the deal is bad and they cannot rely on contacts and politics, they are left in a ditch.
The things these folks are afraid of will mostly not directly be a danger to them. Massive amounts of money can directly protect you from epidemics, rising sea levels, inadequate food and water, and even nuclear war.
Unfortunately, such events, and others, cause social unrest, which can devolve into chaos and war. This is what they are trying to protect against. It's not rising sea levels per se. It's pissed off and confused people searching for food and water and trying to enact revenge.
There are many strategies for dealing with this. Isolation is one. Pre-emptive cooperation and guild-building is another. Doing whatever you can to keep the social system stable and mitigating reason for collapse seems like a good option as well.
Very tight evolutionary bottleneck. Likely sparked the first of migration waves out of Africa.
After all, they are billionaire hedge fund managers. As in investor, when your portfolio is sufficiently large, you invest a significant fraction of it in a way that is consistent with the need to survive an improbable but highly devastating outcome.
If I had 10 billions of dollars, I might invest 8 or 9 of them optimistically or philanthropically. That doesn't mean I can't also spend the remaining dollars and a couple of days per week trying to make sure my family is ready to confront whatever improbable calamity I think they might need to face in the worst case.
I don't feel that they ever have fun.
Because the poor have always been surviving, since the day the were born. It's ingrained into their being. The rich don't have this instinct to survive, they're detached from it.
Anyway, it got me thinking about the rich people building bunkers in New Zealand.
I don't think they'd last very long to be honest. The farmers will be the ones to survive. The billionaire who's bought a bunker in Queenstown doesn't know how to handle their shit in the outdoors, it's not a boardroom out there. The cocky who's been walking up and down those hills all his life does. He's spent 12 hours a day out there for decades, he's probably hunted more animals than he could ever remember, he's used to being out there and handling his shit. He also probably owns a horse, which is going to go a lot further than a 4wd or a motorbike.
The survivors will survive, not the rich.
This isn't like the homesteading days. Most of the poor still buy food from grocery stores (with cash or ebt) like anyone else.
The main problem for them will be, as usual during war and upheaval, personal physical security. Probably access to potable water too as wells fell into disuse. And obviously getting to start - initial plants and seeds.
Machinists should be able to figure things out too reasonably quickly. Reuse is big in most such situations. The more advanced hardware might be less useful or hard to maintain, but again basics are reasonably easy.
And are those machinists able to do a lot of machining without power or delivery of new stock? You are still thinking several layers of interdependence and abstraction above the long-term reality of a breakdown of civil society -- you should think less industrial revolution and more 12th century technology IMHO.
Of course, now that I write all this out I realize where I would place my bet: the Amish will rule the post-apocalyptic future...
2. The most accessible power technologies are wind and tidal power. Plus you can use human and animal power easily enough. And it is easy enough to make big unwieldy batteries. This is at most 16th century tech with initial development in ancient times and was initially done with ancient equipment. As long as someone remembers how it is done and how electricity and motors work, it would get done.
The hardest part is metallurgy and more advanced chemistry. That took centuries to figure out very well, though a lot can be done with wood or reed.
You can do a lot without semiconductors or with very junk big ones scavenged from about anything. Scavenging plastics is easy too.
3. The biggest risk would again be personal security and mental health. These risks cannot be avoided but can be mitigated. Medicine would be set back by centuries. Advanced food preservation techniques would be unavailable... Leisure would be very limited at least initially.
Maybe these wealthy people know more than I do, but I've just seen literally billions lifted out of abject poverty and apocalypse-like situations in the last 20 years alone in China and India.
We haven't had a major war in more than half a century. Disease rates are lower than they've ever been. Dying from hunger was a very real thing for the majority of the world, but it's a problem we've erased quite a bit.
We do live in a today that has more medical advancements than yesterday. But is our lifestyle/life really healthy when looking at it for the long term? Are the widening gaps of socio economic imbalances really good or neutral for our society, again in the long term? And those advancements in science and technology reaching everybody evenly? I doubt all of these.
In Bangalore I drink packaged drinking water in a so called posh residential area. There is a village next to my apartment complex where people drink ground water and if they are lucky the water supplied by municipality. Both sources are unsafe and contaminated. They can't afford the packaged water. They also did not contaminate the water they drink. We (the richer part of the society) did.
I personally believe rich are leaving (now this may not be in a well planned and intentional manner) the poor behind in the race of survival or something like that.
No, it is not hidden from me. I am from the hinterland. I moved to Bangalore 7 years ago. Before that 4 years in college which was semi rural and before that it was pure hinterland. The divide/gap what we see today was not this wide 10 yrs ago, or 20.
PS. I am not pointing to any specific Govt. Just the modern times.
We're basically poisoning ourselves right now. >30 % of children have chalk teeth nowadays, meaning their teeth are utterly broken and unusable right off the bat. Humans are becoming more and more infertile. Cancer rates in children and young adults are going through the roof.
I also wouldn't say a scenario like that has become less likely, depending on how you look at it, especially in the context of US nuclear force modernization [0], it could actually become much more likely.
Because irrational people exist everywhere and I have no doubt there are plenty of people around, some of them probably in very powerful positions, who are still busy "wargaming" a thermonuclear scenario in which they could end up as "winners".
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
As for the war threat - both sides had their hotheads during the Cold War, but in the end they were overruled.
Surely you can come up with something more substantial than that? It's not 2009 anymore, that kind of intellectually lazy wallstreet bashing doesn't do much.
Now they do even less of anything than they did in 2009, seeing as how passive investing has been essentially proven to be the better strategy for 99.9% of people and the other 0.01% of actors represents large HFT firms that are not reliant on any one individual manager's insight and knowledge.
You might want to look into that. It hasn't been proven at all unless you were thinking of investing in a fund of hedge funds, which nearly nobody does.
The money will be the reason people don't _walk away_ sooner, but you can rationalize it as them being shallow and only interested in your dough when they finally do, and never need to gain that particular self awareness. There's always more people to churn through.
Source: dealt with such a client.
Why wouldn't they unleash their previously created swarm of kill-bots / bio-agents / nano-bots?
Killing the rest of the population is clearly the best course of action for the ultra wealthy.
They don't even have to wait for "the event". As soon as they have sufficient technology to reliably kill 99% of people, what will stop them from doing it?
If only a handful of ultra wealthy go down this path, the rest will be forced to follow or risk getting eliminated. It's like the nuclear arms race but without the global fallout.
Reminds me of: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/04/quiz-which-dystopia-h...
In Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief novels, almost all of those uploads become slaves. Processing modules in clusters, serving oligarchs.
> As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.
They're selecting for cooperation.
I think this pretty accurate. The author clearly doesn't agree and feels that this is a false choice VCs have made. I don't agree. I think the author overestimates the degree with which we (the human race/or any intelligent beings) can "create" solutions. Solutions/Inventions are not created, they are DISCOVERED. With the invention of Fire, the wheel, the internet or even facebook, the potential arrangement of atoms which lead to that invention were always there: we didn't create those things, we merely discovered it. There's such vast oversupply of talent creating things everywhere: 100s of projects are submitted to product hunt every day (sure that aspect can be considered creation), but figuring out which ones are usable and which ones will be used, consumed and monetized and be successful: that is Discovery.
Probably very little. In my experience, there is limited overlap between interest in basic research and interest in making things with immediate use. People interested in the latter will suck at the former because they will not be motivated.
How can I protect the most possible people and build the best functioning society post collapse to ensure the survival of myself and my progeny.
This gives the lie to the idea that the captains of industry are great men they aren't great men they are toads towering above our lives and yet beneath our contempt.
Quality gardening tools will go a long way in the post-apocalyptic world, I think. And doing so is far less likely to earn you a place in the guillotine, than being a bunker-resource hoarder.
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew."
Wouldn't the guards simply torture you until you opened all of the locks?
Putting in a wrong password, or excessive physical damage, will cause it to trigger, destroying the valuables.
Yes. Or just shoot you in the back when the door's open. Or something else.
Long-time survival in the event of society breakdown lies primarily in one's ability of re-building it, at least on a small, local scale. After all, sitting in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere might keep you alive for a while, but only until your food runs out, or your tools break and you lose your ability to sustain yourself.
For a long read, I recommend Rushkoff’s books, like ‘Throwing Rocks at a Google Bus’, etc. A common theme of his is supporting local businesses to support companies like Amazon from ending up destroying most competition.
In reality, the landscape would likely be filled with neo-feudal warlords and gangs fighting for control, competing and looting everything in sight - without the interest to rebuild or maintain anything: same short-term interests they apply for natural resources with extra urgency of survival and competition.
Without a functioning government and democracy civilization reverts to earlier tribe-like patterns of power, which don't allow for a collaborative society to exist in one place. All the former wealth and social connections they have wouldn't amount to much, the bunkers can't exist forever even if they have thousands of years in supplies.
They'll be found and opened by other survivors to loot resources or just exploded to prevent competition. They don't expect the world treat them as part of zero-sum game they play with it. They taking the bet people will not change or respect earlier laws and customs.
The author idea that preventing The Event is a more viable strategy is dismissed, because its obviously cheaper to bet on smaller projects and its contrary to egoistic drive. They're not concerned for the course of world history, they're concerned with their personal little world.
The world electricity generation,transport, water supply and food production networks can't be replaced at smaller scale: internet and communications that glued the people together would be replaced by slower methods and disconnect the world. They are even unlikely to survive without modern air conditioning and clean water, which will disappear with electricity - even if electricity exists the new owners of plants will dictate its prices and availability.
A few post-apocalyptic novels touch the idea of elite emerging from bunkers totally unprepared for the disaster world they avoided, until the resources run out.
Interesting! Any recommendations?
"there will still be a desperate land shortage before the year 2000 if per capital and requirements and population growth rates remain as they are today." pg 60
It's 2018. Where's the desperate shortage? Also on HN today is talk about the new "vertical farms" that use far less resources than flat farms.
For example, an amoeba dividing at its maximum rate will form a ball larger than the earth in 24 hours.