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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

There's a company which sells something like this, as "Prepper Disk".[1]

In the 1950s, US Civil Defense had a set of microfilms on how to rebuild society. These were packaged with a sunlight reader and stored in larger fallout shelters. Someone should find one of those.

[1] https://www.prepperdisk.com/

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I like that it's an SD-card based RPi: something known to fail under completely normal usage

For the margins a $280 MSRP allows you'd think they'd at least try a little bit: maybe hook people up with the RPi Compute Module which has eMMC onboard

> I like that it's an SD-card based RPi: something known to fail under completely normal usage

FWIW, my pi-hole server has been running 24/7 on a Pi Zero with the same micro-SD card for some 4-odd years.

FWIW my pi-hole server ran for 2 years and broke 3 SD-cards, and it didn't even have the courtesy to fail fast, it started kinda-failing and DNS requests started taking forever (the pihole had to time out twice before the fallback DNS was called).

Moved to an Actual Computer with a M.2 SSD and zero issues since.

That's likely with constant power and low writes. If either of those flip for long enough, bye bye flash.

> There's a company which sells something like this, as "Prepper Disk".

They mentioned it in their video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_wt-2P-WBk&t=350

joke’s on the survivors who have to go find sunlight in nuclear winter

Solar panels and the parts to build a hydro generator, then. A hydro generator would also be good incentive to plan around a reliable water source, without which all bets are off anyway.

Oh do you mean a water source replenished by the hydrologic cycle, powered by (checks notes) the __?

While we're on that, for how long will water sources remain in liquid phase?

Some part of my brain filtered out nuclear winter, which cannot reasonably be prepped for by individuals or small groups. However, that is just one, relatively unlikely, thing to prep for. Most other disasters are shorter-lived, and have a great deal of overlap in effective mitigation strategies. Prepping, in my mind, is not only practically useful for various classes of emergencies, but is good mental exercise for understanding supply chains and what's actually needed in the sort, medium, and long term. It can also be good for sharpening skills that benefit others and build community, which in many ways is more rewarding than knowing that you'll be the sole survivor. Prepping doesn't, and shouldn't, look like Burt from Tremors (as amusing as that may be).

I'm being a bit glib anyway; call it gallows humor to help me process currents events. Even worldwide, long-lasting nuclear winter must passes & settle eventually, and such sunlight-enabled microfiche files could be useful to subsequent generations if not earlier.

Fellow survivor on a bicycle which powers a lightbulb by which you can read the microfiche. Voila.

For anyone who never watched the original Soylent Green movie, it's worth a rewatch because it actually shows a future where people are having to make do without a power grid in cities, by doing things like riding a stationary bike hooked up to a generator to power their TV or radio long enough to get some news.

Anyone who thinks they can prepare for nuclear winter is delusional.

I mean, there's got to be a spectrum of nuclear winters, just like there's a spectrum of volcanic and impact winters. Assuming a full scale nuclear war, there's still questions of how much of the arsenals actually detonate(as opposed to failures to launch, getting destroyed by other nukes first, etc), how much the fires burn, the time of year impacting fires and dust and the state of the biosphere, and how much the aerosols are limited to the northern vs southern hemisphere.

Think about all the ways you could die from nuclear war + winter. There's some worth avoiding(slow painful death from radiation, moderate burns, trapped in collapsed buildings, etc), and others that you might be willing to delay/prevent in a hope of things getting better(starvation, cancer, civil unrest, etc). There are ways you can reasonably prepare to increases your chances, if you're lucky in the critical moment of nukes dropping, to survive long enough to attempt forming communities and farming again.

I suppose you could have a gasoline powered battery and then charge electronics with that, no?

Stationary exercise bike, large hobby BLDC motor (or random PMAC motor from some AC appliance) plus some diodes (fullbridgerectifier meme goes here) to rectify the generated voltage. :)

I had thought of building those exact Civil Defense devices a few years ago. Maybe it’s a viable product?

I’m searching for the source material here but must not be using the right keywords, any hints?

I've looked a few times over the years but can't find it online. National Archives probably has it somewhere, but not indexed where Google can find it.

Is it present in "The Ark"? It's 290GB of stuff and might have it, or the component parts.

they're really packing in the whole kitchen sink into video games these days...

https://old.reddit.com/r/ARK/comments/p4xlpr/ark_is_over_200...

I sent a query into NARA. Maybe they know something. It's probably in some forgotten Civil Defense archive.

I got an answer back from NARA:

Specifically, you seek records related to practical instructions on how to rebuild society after a nuclear war.

We searched our holdings in Record Group 397, Records of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency. We identified the series External Publications, 1955-1976 which may include records related to your query. A full citation is provided here for your reference:

    Record Group 397
    Records of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency
    External Publications, 1955-1976
    Entry A1 56
    Boxes 1 thru 37@ 650/42/30/2

We will be happy to make the records and their finding aids available to you or your representative in the Textual Research Room (Room 2000) here at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. Please visit our website for information about visiting the National Archives in College Park, MD, including how to schedule a research visit.

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