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Comment by ricksunny | Hacker News Reader

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. :)

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