Life inside a nuclear missile silo | Hacker News Reader

Life inside a nuclear missile silo

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58 pointsClifReeder13 comments

> the idea that soon oil will run out, bringing about the end of society as we know it

That's not what peak oil means. The oil will never "run out". In a hundred years we will still be pumping oil out of Saudi Arabia.

A person can be surrounded by a whole world of air and still suffocate if their lungs are inflamed and full of fluid. A person is doomed if the effort of drawing a breath consumes more oxygen than derived from that breath.

Likewise it doesn't matter how many barrels of oil are in the ground or under the sea if producing a barrel of oil takes more energy than can be derived from that oil. It doesn't matter how many acres are covered in tar sands if the facilities to convert those sands to oil aren't built.

That said, the people in this article are crazy.

I wouldn't be so sure.

I think one day we'll see oil wells with vast temporary solar arrays deployed next to them pumping oil for the millions of gas and diesel-burning engines that are still in the wild.

We'll be spending 10 barrels worth of energy to get a barrel of oil because there's so much infrastructure investment in oil.

There is a lot of interesting analysis regarding possible responses to declining oil production. If you respond to a 3% decline in production by building infrastructure to produce energy by other means, you only deepen the energy deficit because that infrastructure takes energy to build.

Check out this article: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8526

You might right though. Sperm whale oil is still used to lubricate satellites.

If you look at how much energy has been harnessed by farms over time you will see a far more gradual increase. In 2008, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules (474×1018 J=132,000 TWh). Oil remained the largest energy source (33%) despite the fact that its share has been decreasing over time. Coal posted a growing role in the world's energy consumption: in 2009, it accounted for 27% of the total. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency Typical crop plants: 1–2% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth Permanent pastures: 26% Permanent crops 4.71% The estimated amount of irrigated land in 1993 was 2,481,250 km2

So something like 1% efficiency * 2,481,250 km2 * 1,000,000 m^2/km * 1kwh / m^2 * 1000w / kw * 8 hours a day * 365 days a year * 3600j = 2.60829 × 10 ^ 21J or 724,525TWH granted plants use much of that but farms are still producing something like 70% of the worlds energy and then spending a large fraction of that on farm animals.

Looks cool, but not buying into the whole every family needs a "compound" theory.

The part in the video about the idea of the earth getting closer to the galactic centre is hilarious. I don't think the speaker has any concept of the relative speed at which we're heading to the galactic centre, collision with Andromeda will happen first, and even that should likely be a non-event. By the time the Sun reaches the galatic core it will have long since burned out.

Indeed. It's funny hearing definitive statements about global warming ("I don't think carbon has anything to do with it") followed by an inadvertent but total admission of scientific illiteracy.

There is a fascinating documentary/long-form article in VICE about another Nike missile silo in Kansas that was backed by a VC and fronted as Y2K fallout shelter/precision spring manufacturing facility for NASA but was in fact producing kilos of MDMA and analogue chemicals.[1]

One of the guys behind the operation, Leonard Pickard, was formally convicted of producing 200,000 doses of LSD in an industrial facility in Mountain View.[2]

Interestingly, the facility in Kansas was turned into an even more luxurious living abode than the hypothetical ones presented here. Think Scarface.

[1] http://www.vice.com/hamiltons-pharmacopeia/getting-high-on-k... (Scroll down)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard

There's a fortress mentality amoung many of the wealthy I know. Beyond gated communities and personal self defense it has extending to overly secure homes outside of major cities or secondary homes in other countries. Many of them think of it as "insurance" just in case the economic poop hits the fan and there's a more agressive backlash than OWS.

Economist Robin Hanson has a lot of interesting stuff to say about the economics of existential risk, and how we might use refuges as payouts in prediction markets which forecast the end of the world.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/07/refuge-markets.html

My major concern with using a former nuclear missile silo would be that it's hard to know whether Russia's intelligence service knows that it's been deactivated. The odds of of a nuclear exchange with Russia are low, but I'd prefer to know that my fallout shelter might not be targeted for a direct hit with an ICBM.

An interesting and vaguely related article on the psychology of what happens to believers when nothing happens:

http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/17/apocalypse-now-why-bel...

I cannot imagine to live in a house without (direct) sunlight.

The bunkers are cool structures.

The people in the video are crazy.

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