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When do you get in the apocalypse bunker?
electricitylikesme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Recently the news has been awash in Mark Zuckerberg building an apocalypse bunker in Hawaii.
This thread though is not about weird billionaire things.
This thread is about apocalypse bunkers in general, or bail out plans, "flee to the hills" or the farm or whatever. This thread is about the general notion of planning for societal collapse, in which I want to advance this idea:
There is no moment when you would ever get in the bunker.
Or otherwise engage your "absolute catastrophe plan". It is presumed that there is an obvious bright line trigger for "getting in the bunker" - and my contention is that such a trigger never exists, because "the bunker" is not only a failure scenario, but it's also an "end of influence" scenario - it represents letting go of ones perceived ability to affect the course of events, and in fact the abandonment of your future plans. The bunker is the event horizon of planning.
An explanatory example I've seen of the general failure of the idea of the bunker is this: "well, after the downfall of Rome..." - which is to say, the downfall of Rome tooks hundreds of years. People lived, had families, and died, through the whole process and while there would have been societal upheaval, there was never any point where "the bunker" would've made sense because it would be your entire life. You can be displaced, fight in wars, be genocided - all sorts of things, but none of them succeed on the basis of an isolationist bunker strategy because of the above problem: you either can't actually stay there, or it makes no sense to get into the bunker because you'd be better served using your other resources in other ways.
So my conviction is thus this: "the bunker" makes no sense on a personal scale at any level of wealth. There are vanishingly few clear trigger lines when you should bail out of society, and an isolationist strategy is essentially the worst one: people manage to barely leave civil societies for other civil societies, it's even less likely they would ever decide actually going into the bunker made any kind of sense.
To be clear: this is not a thread about billionaire proclivities. This is a thread about apocalypse bunkers and the thesis that there is in fact no time when you would ever actually assess to use such a thing.
This thread though is not about weird billionaire things.
This thread is about apocalypse bunkers in general, or bail out plans, "flee to the hills" or the farm or whatever. This thread is about the general notion of planning for societal collapse, in which I want to advance this idea:
There is no moment when you would ever get in the bunker.
Or otherwise engage your "absolute catastrophe plan". It is presumed that there is an obvious bright line trigger for "getting in the bunker" - and my contention is that such a trigger never exists, because "the bunker" is not only a failure scenario, but it's also an "end of influence" scenario - it represents letting go of ones perceived ability to affect the course of events, and in fact the abandonment of your future plans. The bunker is the event horizon of planning.
An explanatory example I've seen of the general failure of the idea of the bunker is this: "well, after the downfall of Rome..." - which is to say, the downfall of Rome tooks hundreds of years. People lived, had families, and died, through the whole process and while there would have been societal upheaval, there was never any point where "the bunker" would've made sense because it would be your entire life. You can be displaced, fight in wars, be genocided - all sorts of things, but none of them succeed on the basis of an isolationist bunker strategy because of the above problem: you either can't actually stay there, or it makes no sense to get into the bunker because you'd be better served using your other resources in other ways.
So my conviction is thus this: "the bunker" makes no sense on a personal scale at any level of wealth. There are vanishingly few clear trigger lines when you should bail out of society, and an isolationist strategy is essentially the worst one: people manage to barely leave civil societies for other civil societies, it's even less likely they would ever decide actually going into the bunker made any kind of sense.
To be clear: this is not a thread about billionaire proclivities. This is a thread about apocalypse bunkers and the thesis that there is in fact no time when you would ever actually assess to use such a thing.
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Maybe a supervolcano not directly impacting the US or a tactical nuclear conflict between two of the minor nuclear powers, but in those you're still better off on a continent that will be able to support itself without falling into the stone age.
I doubt our capacity to do so currently though.
But imagine the amount of drugs you could put into the bunker...
Also, the downfall of Rome wasn't the apocalypse. The continent of Europe was still perfectly habitable after the Empire disintegrated. Europeans (and their diseases) showing up in the Americas and Australia were probably more apocalyptic. For that matter, so was the Plague.
An apocalypse bunker only makes sense in the event where the surface of our planet has become uninhabitable. Because of nuclear war, runaway climate change, meteor strike, whatever. But then you're stuck down in the dark drinking recycled water and eating vegetables that have never seen sunlight.
I guess... going down into bunker only makes sense when everything is so fucked that deciding to just keep on living... kinda doesn't.
Otherwise, yeah, you're either never leaving your regular residence or you're getting glassed trying to reach your bunker before the nukes hit.
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
See Covid island nations locking down and not letting people in, even when they had money and property there, and they just ignored international laws in some cases. Eventually they were let back in, but in a disaster type situation that would be likely.
Now localized disasters. That is something to prepare against. I think everybody should have 3 weeks of non perishable food and bottled water available. Just in case. Hurricane Katrina, Harvey level events are going to happen more Frequently with climate change.
A bunker for someone who isnt able to avail themself of a private jet, helicopter, private security might make sense.
But when youre able to move anywhere, procure anything, hire staff, it makes even less sense.
The average person probably has lots of scenarios where a nearby prepared property they can access is an out in an apocalypse and they cannot avail themselves of instant relocation. A billionaire doesnt have that. Zuckerberg, unless money is over, can go anywhere and secure a life.
So whats the scenario here? Does our theoretical bunker user need it because in an apocalypse (giant eruption, nuclear fallout, sudden food shortage + riots) they cant leave quickly and might need to wait out a few weeks or months or do they have private helicopters and jets and freedom of mobility that the bunker represents a This is All Thats Left scenario?
So if you had a bunker, you didn't get vaporized, and you were able to shelter in time, you'd probably have to hang out down there for a couple weeks. But there wouldn't really be any need to be there longer than that. Unless of course the earth is plunged into nuclear winter...
But I've come to the realization that a disaster is going to be impacting things longer than that three month supply, I'm probably doing to die so I can't worry about things beyond that.
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They get an offer from an AI startup that has developed AI software to answer the question of when...
Planning to ride out the end of civilization in a bunker is kind of dumb because if it comes to that you either gonna die because of some little thing you forgot or you get to spend the rest of your life wandering your bunker. But when we see stuff like last year when parts of Texas lost power for weeks at a time then having enough stuff to get you by for 4-6 weeks makes a lot of sense.
For any real 'end of civilization' scenario of taken to playing a game I got from the We Hate Movies podcast where you work out how long it'd take you to off yourself in said movie scenario. Like Fury Road they were quick to say "I'll be having none of this. I'd much rather be the bottom skull on the pile than live with no food, no water, and wasteland maniacs running around."
This is my level of prepper due to the privilege of being able to live out in the country. I'm working towards having a full months supply of food and water for natural disasters that could happen in the PNW, a big earthquake being primary.
In general, most years we lose power for 3-6 days in the winter due to a big snow storm coming through, or a couple days in the summer due to wildfire danger, so we've prepped for that. Small generator, battery packs to recharge our devices. Things like that. I've also prepped "Bugout" bags that my wife and I keep at work since we work like 25 miles from home. It has enough supplies to get us back if we had to walk. I have a tote of evacuation supplies in a friends attic in town in case we would have to evacuate due to wildfire or other disaster that would make the property unsafe to be at. Nothing crazy, but it's nice to know we have options available.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
What if the apocalypse bunker/evil lair is underwater?
Water is hydrogen and oxygen. I have my ways.
Knowing how to sail is kind of a must and it isn't nearly as easy as it looks.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Its sail and rigging maintenance that really kills you. Sailing isnt so bad.
I dunno how to fix a fiberglass boat using foraged materials though
So if your bunker is somehow immune to whatever it is that causes societal collapse, couldn't that just be applied on a bigger scale? If you've truly got the solution to whatever problems will destroy society, and the ability to build a functional society all on your own, it seems like you've got the knowledge to just fix things yourself. Of course, I'm not ruling out that some of these preppers think they have that, but that no one would listen to them. I also think excluding most of society is the point because for many of them, the "societal collapse" that they are trying to escape is, like, having to remember more than two types of pronouns.
That's assuming that global warming won't get me first. Been fucking -30 celsius for a week now (lowest measured almost -40c), and as the Gulf stream keeps getting weaker because of the North pole ice slowing it down, things will keep getting colder and colder and colder.
Welcome to the future, it sucks here.
ST: Voyager taught me that's a lot harder for people to figure out than you'd think.
Now, if someone has a home with a basement or garage with some major storage space and the finances (oh yeah, this would cost nearly 4 grand Canadian), and they have a 5 year shelf life. While water filters aren't a big deal, access to water (if interrupted by a main break, extreme cold situation, or actual infrastructure failure) is negligible.
Okay, yes, military grade MREs aren't the only things, and realistically we could probably go with 2/3 that quantity or less, as they're 1200+ calories apiece, so 2 would fulfill day to day needs, 3 is probably more 'professional solder surviving combat or work building trenches/on the move/etc', but that's still a shitton of food and water. A couple boxes of protein bars and a case of water is an excellent idea, with space/money/risk tolerance allowing folks to adjust from there.
My understanding is that the guideline for disaster survival is to have supplies on hand for at least 3 days, as an average before one might start receiving relief in the midst of a catastrophe. A week or more seems like a really great goal for those who can swing it, with folks in remote enough areas updating from there depending on the potential risks they're concerned with (being snowed in could last substantially more than a few days in remote enough communities, for example).
This kind of reminds me of chatter I've heard over the decades about what kind of finances one should have in reserve. For ages the guideline was to have 3 months of bills/rent/mortgage/etc saved up in case of an emergency, then it became 6 months, then 12, and I'm like... sure, if you can swing it, but given the articles about how the average American is not financially prepared to handle a $400 emergency cost, let alone 3 months, let alone a year or more. Yes, again, I recognize it can be an ideal to strive for, but the juxtaposition makes the escalation just seem unreasonable.
That said, I am tempted to snag one of those MRE cases. One box tucked away to cover for roughly a week for two adults, even if we have to share with the dog, makes sense. Add in going through whatever is in the fridge/freezer (assuming loss of power, necessitating going through perishables first) and other odds and ends that can be eaten without being cooked, maybe that could stretch to two weeks or beyond. Add in a case or two of water and we'd be pretty well set.
But my household does have the advantage of living in the midst of the largest population center in Canada. If a catastrophe hit here (and we survived it) and help isn't at least starting to come in within the next 2 weeks, I'm not sure how many closets we could sacrifice to preparation and make it without outside supply.
I suppose that disparity is the range between "natural/manmade catastrophe that we do eventually bounce back from" versus "end of society as we know it", and while prepping for the former works, prepping for the latter would be a massive upheaval in how we lived. Putting those thousands into savings and working towards buying a small piece of property out in cottage country would probably be a more reasonable/effective goal to work towards within a ~2 or 3 day walk, in the case of an absolute worst case scenario.
I remember enjoying previous threads on the topic here on the forums (many, many years ago), and one thing that stuck with me was that for many folks, an even better goal would be to learn simple survival skills. How to trap, skin, and butcher small game, how to fish, how to preserve simple foodstuffs, what vegetation is edible versus what is dangerous, etc.
There is no truly lossless system. Not even the solar system, it's just that the Sun had enough fuel to keep going for many times the length of all human history to date so we don't really perceive it. Any generation ship would probably not have fuel for much more than the expected time to it's destination. There would certainly be other motivations for such a journey over just expanding space habitats here.
For a bunker, it doesn't need to be particularly self sustaining at all. For the nuclear scenario the point would really be just to last long enough for fallout material to decay to the point where outside radiation levels where no longer immediately lethal. Theoretically this could be done with just enough imperishable food stores. For the societal collapse scenario it's basically the same, you just need to wait things out until enough people have died that population gets back into equilibrium with the new resource limits and things calm down. And then theoretically you already have your neo-castle ready to get a jump start on becoming king in the new neo-feudal order.
Sort of like how if we could live on mars but not terriform it, the only reason to do so would be to put a seed and DNA bank up there in case the earth gets hit by an asteroid.
Unlike MRE's however, rice and beans require access to water and the ability to cook things, which, if you are living in/near a city may get limited REAL fast. This is and has been my largest single concern with regards to any kind of major event and the urbanization of the world.
Like, I can't exactly drill a well and install solar panels in my apartment. But billionaires have the funds and houses to actually prepare for this stuff, and build it into their regular homes.
And your fate will be decided by if Emperor Dickface and King Chodewarrior like each other.
The bunker is so that they can hide from us when we mutate and come to eat them.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
That's my plan. There's gotta be a lot of us to count!