Laptop computers with a core 2 duo are quite cheap and often come with enough memory to be considerble computers. Take all your home movies and run them through ffmpeg to make them run smooth on old hardware. Find a bunch of videos about making food, soap, how to make a gassifier, grain mill.. think creatively. It is almost time. You know it. That is why you are posting this.
Google "prepper". There's a whole community out there of people who prepared for the absolute worst.
I witness a funny side effect of focusing on the body almost daily. I live in snow country. The locals here are bundled up in layers of sweaters, jackets, scarfs, hats. I am just wearing a t-shirt and they look at me like I'm an alien.
Plus, laptops very much do have internal button cells and typically will either throw an error when booting or require a complete reinstall of the OS if something happened to the encryption key system along the way.
Might want to have a linux install media (DVD + USB stick) available just in case.
Take soap for instance. People have made soap since the dawn of time - you just need fat and lye. But how do you actually.. do it?
For that you need instructions, which means either a library of books vulnerable to all sorts of ills, or a collection of pdfs and movies. If you go the digital route you need some kind of viewer.
There are plenty of other things that would be more difficult make, source, or do. How do you preserve food to modern standards if you don't have canning lids and can't make them, refrigerators don't work (some climates might not matter as much), or a local salt/nitrites source? Fermenting is one way, but doesn't work for everything.
In a society with soap-making potential (this is a fun categorisation) you'll need materials and capability. If you're in that situation, I sincerely doubt PDFs are going to be useful unless they've already been printed and/or frequently discussed, i.e. books and stories.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs may have issues, but it's surely a useful heuristic.
Pretty much everything you need to get by in the imaginary post-apocalypse world (which will be littered with consumer goods for a long time) you can find the Boy Scouts Handbook. The normal human solution to not knowing how to do or make something (historically) is to find someone who does and partner or barter with them. Trying to collect and carry around all of the world’s knowledge seems the least plausible way to go.
They are a wealth of information and quite common through to ~20 years ago. I imagine sets of these will remain somewhat common for another 100 years in peoples garages or on display etc.
Whoever thinks of Anything else, has never lived in the wild and will definitely be the first ones to die.
Here is one reason: As an absolute last ditch option, printed matter generally works well as a fire starter. Good luck doing that with a tricked out, pelican case enclosed rpi and screen.
[0] https://amiprepped.com/prepping/books-i-want-to-have-on-hand...
I'd add a few thousand books since they use little storage space.
I'd probably use regular phones like a Pixel 5, a few user-repairable laptops, and lots of USB-C cables and chargers. I'd make sure to have the means to keep them charged off-grid.
That ought to be enough. It's barely more than what I pack on long distance motorcycle trips.
Anything approaching a "true" doomsday would be absolute hell on Earth and I'd be ready to die. I live with a chronic illness and honestly doubt my medications would be available.
If society did crumble in the way that many fantasize about, I'd be seeing myself out pretty quickly.
To mitigate that I’d have some cheap easy to store replacements at hand as insurance. Things like raspberry pis, spare phone, camping style equipment, bike, car parts etc.
We also had a gas price squeeze in Europe that possibly had political motivations, so some renewable fuel source would be useful.
Its an interesting theoretical question what is the absolutely lowest digital tech level required for one to preserve functional access to e.g. text-only wikipedia and what kind of resources are required to maintain that level indefinetely.
Part of it depends on that threat scenario you are prepping for. For example "disintegration of global supply chain" absent some more generalized sort of disaster resulting in the collapse of advanced society (eg, rise of the zombies, meteor strike, etc.) is one thing, where the more generalized disaster "SHTF" scenarios might call for different tactics.
For example... if you're worried about a more general "collapse of society" model, then it seems clear that simply having access to electricity at all would be a key thing to consider. So one might want to focus on batteries, solar cells, wire/cable, power electronics, etc., that would be required to get some juice available at all.
But something like a further decline of today's (largely pandemic created?) supply chain disruptions, where society is mostly intact, the power grid is up, etc. is a different question. What's the goal, commercial production of products for profit? The ability to repair commonly used household devices if they break? The ability to create innovative new devices from scratch?
The "repair parts stash" scenario seems to me as maybe the most likely one to be useful. So it seems like you'd want plenty of commonly used passives in wide range of values, a ton of "jelly bean" IC's, transistors, etc., probably transformers, fuses, etc. Microprocessors get tricky because there are so many out there. One might also want to tailor a stash based on doing tear-downs of the exact devices they own and pre-identify what parts would be needed.
Wow... I dunno. The more I think about this, the more it seems like a huge rabbit-hole to go down. In a good way, of course. It's just that there are so many parts that could be useful, it starts to get hard to figure out how to filter the list down.
With copper wire & iron you can have a telegraph.
With vacuum tube transceivers you get wireless.
You just have to stockpile a lot more tubes than radios.
Just in case you want to go big, telegraphs would require a huge pile of copper compared to what you could do with a single truckload of radios & tubes.
If it does turn out to take a really long time for certain doom to finally arrive, rest assured it's proven this technology can reliably be built to last a century, and still operate even if it gets hammered by nuclear EMP. From a safe enough distance of course.
If nothing else stockpile the tubes, everything else could be much more easily recovered from scratch.
- Solar panels, batteries, inverters. - Water purification
The rest of the parts you need can likely be salvaged from old junk.
Soldering equipment + as many schematics of the PCB based stuff I own with enough spare parts to drown in. Kilograms of copper wire.
If there's no weight and space limit on this question, I'd get a car lift too. I really doubt that anyone would be in dire need of my sick ability to manually inject a DLL into the memory of a process if they were eating each other.
There are two types of tech you might want to preserve: Things that will store information (survival guides, plant identification, maps) and things that will help with daily life (GPS watch, electric drill, night vision goggles, etc.)
Focusing on storing information in a survival situation is smart. People would likely band together into groups, and if you can call up survival guides at a moment's notice, you'll be valuable.
I'd buy 10 each(!) of: 1. The exact same model of cheap laptop on ebay with chargers (you'll need the chargers!) 2. AC inverter that can power an AC device from a 12v source (such as a car battery)
You'll also need solar panels and if you can find a battery pack that can be charged by the solar panels, you'll want that too.
Storing all of this in a self-storage unit is likely enough to survive an EMP. Don't believe the hype, EMPs will be blocked by a lot of normal buildings.
survival guide and venom antidotes
rock classification and identification guides
chemistry and physics advanced books
civil engineering books
seeds
metal equipments, knifes, wires, pans, ...
rechargable batteries
solar panels
satellite phone
radios receiver and transmitters
more wires...
dried fruits and cured meat
antibiotics and desanitizing chemicals
- a few solar powered calculators
- several walkie talkies and a way to power them
- wind up flashlights
- repair equipment (soldering iron, wire cutters, wire, etc)
Would a lead box shield those from an EMP? If so, then put those in a lead box in a basement or something
>asteroid impact or nuclear war. >invasion of Taiwan >Fabpocalypse
Thanks for reminding me.
I think with threat levels increasing people are going to have to tailor their prepping according to more than one type of expected apocalypse.
This is a neat concept - bootstrapping civilization is a matter of knowledge. Learning and documenting processes that can achieve food, shelter, clothing, and the like is an exercise that can actually help people in developing parts of the world, and can inform things like Moon or Mars colonies, or provide inspiration for sustainable development.
An offline, e-ink Wikipedia could be useful from a shtf perspective, but it'd also be cool to have around, just as a Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy type thing.
personally I would stockpile power electronics / transformers / copper wire and magnets, and be the guy who can generate and then convert power from anything to anything
There are still a few hamfests happening, buy out everyone who wants to sell off their junkbox of parts.
Can make soldering iron, flashlights, and heater with it. Everything else can fall in place.
Might not hurt to have a solar-powered calculator.
https://news.mit.edu/2020/solar-extracts-drinkable-water-101...
EMP's create huge discharges in coils, that's how they "fry" electronics and cars and motors and the more sensitive chips attached to said coils.
1. The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid. The small mammal we evolved from lived beneath the surface and we rose to prominence as mammals in part because of that strategy choice.
The species which did not choose to do this didn't do so well.
2. As humanity progresses to become a multi-planet species we will need to live in diverse environments some of which will not have an atmosphere. This technology helps to shield against impacts.
It will be useful to get good at this if we don't want holes in our space habitats caused by high speed debris to become a very common way for colonies to die.
3. It's actually better for us in a lot of ways. The ideal temperature in office productivity studies of seventy two degrees happens to be the natural temperature in cave systems. The suns rays cause errors in both our code and also our computers code, but the shielding provided by the earth protects from this.
We would be in a healthier environment.
4. It makes better use of our space. We currently underutilize the ground. Density is associated with network effects and healthy cities that are produce well. One of the things that is common in these places is subway systems. It's telling that are most effective places happen to also be the places where we've been starting this expansion into the ground. Another is underground utilities like water and sewage.
History is already showing us our cities are better when we move in this direction.
5. This could increase land value for much the same reason that building high rises increases land value. So development of it has some economic incentives which might make it practically possible. This is especially true when Wright's law drops the cost of underground buildings to a currently unfathomably low cost.
6. Where would you rather be if an asteroid large enough to cook the surface of the Earth hit the Earth? Underground insulated from that cooking? Or being cooked?
We don't want to be cooked.
7. Evolution has already selected for this strategy at the insect scale in one of the few species which is comparable to us in terms of having civilization: ants. The strategy manages to be successful even in climates wherein rain is exceedingly common and heavy.
The largest civilization on Earth which practices agriculture already does it. It's a clever idea. We should copy their good idea and make it our own.
Meta: Once you've done this, take the other replies, and put that stuff inside the city.
Here are some examples of what I mean by existing underground infrastructure not feeling like the matrix:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBMmK1c44sE - https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-boring-co-lvcc-loop-capa... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Convention_Center_o...
If you've ever been to a region where a hundred different freeways intersect and there are a bunch of high rise buildings nearby just imagine all of that moved down into the Earth vertically so as to maximize protection and converted to an aesthetically optimized version of our current underground infrastructure.