Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

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Even if a bunker for rich couples included a fully equipped intensive care unit with an operating bloc and a team of doctors and surgeons on call.

In a post apocalyptic world, there is no medical school. Once your health staff is dead or too old to continue, you're on your own.

In a post apocalyptic world, there are no high tech factories to manufacture medical equipment. From complex machines to basic surgical masks and gloves, bandaids, morphin, syringes, vaccines, gloves, none of those are manufactured anymore in a post apocalyptic world. The factories have been destroyed. The skilled workers who knew how to operate the machines are dead or who knows where.

Okay, so let's say that your bunker for rich couples with a mini hospital also includes a factory to manufacture medical equipment.

Gloves and masks are made of plastic. Petroleum products. So let's say your bunker for rich couples with a mini hospital and full staff complement and a medical factory now also has an oil extraction operation and a refinery on site. You need petroleum engineers. These engineers have families and will expect to be well taken care of. Replacing the engineers with robots? You're gonna need a robot factory, built by humans. And so on.

See where I'm going? If you take this reasoning to its logic end you arrive at a full society.

No one can survive well in the long term without a modern society and all of its amenities, including government, public services, and taxes. Exactly all that would cease to exist in a doomsday scenario. Unless you are prepared to accept a standard of living worthy of the Middle Ages.

Every man for himself is a libertarian fantasy.

There are levels of survival.

Yes, in a post-apocalyptic society you probably won't be able to get your medical gloves. But you will be better off that the middle ages, because you'll know about sterilizing your instruments and so on, you'll have medical textbooks and trained doctors who will know that leeches are not in fact useful for treating headaches, ear infections or hemorrhoids.

You won't be able to fab computer chips, but if you have a good stockpile of cheap arduino stuff you'll be able to make machines and automate aspects of your life.

You won't be able to create petrol to power your vehicle but you (or some handy McGyver type) probably can modify existing cars to run on firewood (like almost every motorised vehicle in continental Europe was during WWII).

Our existing knowledge alone would make the survivor's post-apocalyptic lives far, far better than the middle ages.

> You won't be able to create petrol to power your vehicle

The future is solar punk. Electricity is easier.

...although yes, for my notional post-apocalyptic Tesla kit, there's a wood-burning generator.

Prepping and bunkers are not about surviving forever with a luxurious standard of living, but about surviving for 2-5 years until some semblance of society re-forms. It’s actually an optimistic bet: that we don’t devolve permanently into warlords and subsistence survival, but instead whatever apocalypse that comes is temporary and recoverable. I don’t know any preppers or survivalists who think their bunkers will sustain them forever.

I used to consider myself merely mildly curious about prepping, but 2020 has convinced me we are much closer than we think to every man for himself, to the point where I am almost seriously looking for private, defendable land tucked away in the mountains with fresh water, juuuust in case. Not for a permanent The Road scenario, but to weather a temporary storm.

I guess the problem of hiding out waiting for society to reform is that you get no say in it. And being in the out group is dangerous when things devolve. ‘Cause historically it’s not really into rugged individualists out for themselves but along cultural and familial lines. Bunker style prepping, particularly in a place you’re not a part of seems more about denying the reality of the predictions these people make than anything else.

> No one can survive well in the long term without a modern society and all of its amenities, including government, public services, and taxes.

No one can survive in the long term, full stop. Modern civilization makes it significantly safer, more comfortable and longer, but rest assured, there are plenty of humans on planet Earth who survive just fine without governments, public services and taxes.

> there are plenty of humans on planet Earth who survive just fine without governments, public services and taxes.

I disagree. Let me look up a checklist of failed states.

Yemen. Libya. Somalia. Syria. DR Congo.

Hmmmm. Exactly the worst countries to live in.

Now let me look up checklists of countries with the highest levels of human development index, life expectancy at birth, and income per capita.

Norway. Sweden. Denmark. Canada. The United States. South Korea. Singapore.

All countries with well established governments and public services infrastructure, and a social safety net (this is somewhat less true for the US).

Most humans living in places without governments and well organized societies live either in the middle of literal warzones, desert wastelands, or are indigenous tribes living far from civilization.

Bunker survival can be nice and pretty for a few years at most, but the idea that modern technology has abolished man's dependence on his community is a fantasy.

> or are indigenous tribes living far from civilization.

Yes, and they survived this way for thousands of years.

You teach your children what you know, pass on your knowledge and improvise where you need to.

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