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When do you get in the apocalypse bunker?
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I can barely tolerate being alive with every modern convenience, I don't think I'd want to have to deal with societal collapse and radiation sickness. Fortunately I'll be done in after a couple months without modern medicine anyways so it's a moot point.
No, surviving the nuclear strike isn't going to save you. It is just going to mean that you die a gruesome, painful and drawn out death.
This old QED special on fall out shelters is relevant:
They go through various shelters. There is one that withstand a multi-megaton blast and an entire two story house collapsing on it. Its made of solid steel beams and heavy bricks. Too bad that due to the nuke blast, everything is on fire and the two inhabitants are now being roasted alive by the fire surrounding the shelter as it eats away their oxygen.
If there is a multi-megaton nuke war scenario, I am walking towards ground zero for that quick and easy vaporizing death.
Catastrophe!
*short marauding warband period*
Oh civilization is back!
So you can be that guy from that Twilight Zone episode who finally has time to read all those books. /s
Doesn't show the part where 99% of the Population dies though.
My parental instincts would get the better of me and I'd probably try to single handedly rebuild civilization before presumably finding out that smithing with charcoal from irradiated trees is extra bad for you or something. I always joked in college that I took fencing and archery electives as a backup for if civilization fell
have you met 99% of the population tho
Absolutely baffling
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
The real hazards would be something like a large number of fanatics of any type surviving and deciding everybody needs to be put under their ideas. Could be a pocket of classic US Nazi racists, could be religious fundamentalists in any number of places, could be old-fashioned nationalists out of the likes of Russia, but a large enough group of them are what would be the real problem. Those would be the assholes wanting to form an empire or conquer people in the name of somebody or other, and hate really does unify people. The upside is most groups like that don't attract the brightest people so it mean a lot lower chances of those groups retaining higher-level knowledge, specifically stuff like the engineering for making weapons and whatnot.
Aside from that, most of the structures opposing better lives for people would be gone. No more nationally-organized churches all trying to shit on "those people" ("those people" being whichever group the churches hate this decade). No more lobbyists pushing politicians to fuck over everybody for a dollar because all that shit is gone. No more bosses ten levels up squeezing every worker for money, because your boss probably has to live down the road from you. The deeply-ingrained institutions that promote racism and sexism are gone. And without all those shitty old beliefs and groups, none of this shit where everybody is expected to be married at like 18 or younger and then literally have children until they die. No more mega-companies trying to sell you something every second of every day.
Not to mention that the worldwide ecosystem would get who knows how many centuries to recover before the human population gets back up there. If the world population was reduced to only 500 million, that puts it back to the 1600s. Without insane religious shit pushing everybody to multiply like rabbits, it could take a long time to reach a billion again. And why push for multiple billions of people again anyway? What if every person on the planet could have a nice place to live without needing mega-farms or destroying fish populations? Not having bizarre nationalist or religious goals with a death-grip on everybody would make a huge difference.
An apocalypse would still be bad, but not everything that came after would have to be that way. A lot of things could be a lot better within a few generations. A lot of it would depend on how much of the hate-driven shit gets washed out of the ass-crack of humanity, though.
I think you seriously misunderstand where these systems come from. Every local community would quickly work out who it considered Other and persecute appropriately. Local politics would be dominated by the usual suspects, whether it's whoever has all the guns, or the most social connections, or religious authority. If anything the natural forces that drove societal gender roles would suddenly become directly relevant again and things would regress considerably on that front.
TLDR Liberal society is as much a product of technological and cultural advancement as all the consumer goods and if civilization goes its taking it with it.
Except that, depending on location, the survivors would be survivors from liberal philosophy and society. They would know there's a whole world out there and that people groups are not a matter of us versus them based on skin tones or language or any of that shit. There have been many societies across the world that existed largely in peace with plenty of neighbors, the aggressive and hostile treatment of "not us" as standard is something that was heavily heavily pushed on the world by Western imperialism, nationalism, and religion (and of course capitalism, within the last century or so). The current major conflicts on the world stage are driven by those exact things. But look outside the Eurasian continents prior to the last thousand years or so and most of the rest of the world was pretty content to grow food and mostly leave each other alone. And all that tech that let Western nations destroy all those peaceful regions? A lot harder to run over the top of people when everybody has that tech now.
The notion of the human default as independent murderous thieves given the slightest opportunity and who only organize out of absolute necessity is bullshit. People have to be taught and trained that killing other people is okay, feeling bad about hurting or killing other people is our default. People want to be able to live in peace around other people. Short of an inexplicable explosion in structures that force the kind of mindset and training that says it's fine to kill people "not from around here", why would survivors of an apocalypse ever revert to the (dramatic, but stupid) warband bullshit long-term? There's no reason for it.
And yeah, you'd have local power politics because that's entirely normal in any social structure. But when the world can't even support the idea of billionaires, there's a limit to the power any given person can wield when their neighbor can just show up at their front door and bash their head in for corruption that hurts the community. And without centralized religious or national structures like monarchies or the likes of the Catholic church, that severely limits the extent of power that any corrupt person can wield over a community.
Yeah, we've been raised on Hollywood ideas that any post-apocalyptic scenario would be an endless hell for humanity but frankly, there's nothing historical to support that. The world itself would recover no problem and the development of human society might pause, maybe even roll back a bit in some places, but civilization would survive and get back to continually trying to make a better world for people. The worst consequence (beyond an enormous loss of life) would be losing maybe a couple centuries of development. Or maybe the apocalypse itself would teach people that the way we're going now is the dead-end and that the apocalypse is the chance to avoid that future.
No industrialized society means no reliable birth control. No birth control means lots of women (and other female-bodied people) immediately lose control of their reproductive choices. Historically, that means Bad Times for them.
Bullshit. The only reason we don't have the same list of wars for the Americas that we do Europe is the lack of surviving written history. And from what we do know, the Aztecs were all in on the imperialism long before the Spanish showed up. China also developed the idea of empire all on it's own.
Nah under pressure people will see to themselves, their family, and their immediate tribal identity first in roughly that order. As long as there's enough food they may generally not go out of their way to start shit with others, but as soon as there isn't people will be fighting over the scraps.
I would say that larger more complex societies actually curtail the power of such people. In reality it's going to be the asshole sociopath showing up at your door to bash your head in not the other way around.
Eh, kinda. There's a causal link between hunger and violence, but it's neither as consistent nor as strong as this suggests; to make things even more complicated, violence is also sometimes associated with increasing food supply in a region.
If anything, the strongest causal connection is the other way around: violence causes hunger. Destroying crops and equipment, undermining cooperation, killing off skilled agricultural labor, disrupting supply chains - all of these can turbofuck the food supply.
A better way to frame it is that inequality is a driver of violence. Whether there's enough food to go around or not isn't the primary way that food supply influences violence, it's whether that food or hunger is distributed equally. To quote researchers Travis Lybbert and Heather Morgan, "Neither the threat of future food insecurity nor insecurity in general is alone sufficient to trigger rioting, unrest, and instability. Of the other mediating factors, one appears to be a necessary condition: the conviction that these insecurity threats stem from a fundamental injustice—a sense of being cheated, deceived, betrayed, misled, or otherwise exploited." (Quote comes from a 2013 paper titled, "Lessons from the Arab Spring: Food Security and Stability in the Middle East and North Africa".)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Before factories most peasants, both make and female, worked the fields. But enough good to survive otherwise.
I want to qualify my "agree" reaction by saying that the most important part of this paragraph is "within a few generations". The actual getting to that point would suuuuuuuuck.
Its interesting (and horrifying, naturally) to think about, because in modern society our "tribes" are less tied to geographical boundaries than in the past. I'm white, agnostic and liberal and my neighbors are an Indian Hindu and Pacific Islander family and none of us are originally from here. Culturally we have bugger all in common, but we're civil enough to each other than in a survival scenario I have little doubt that we could make a go of forming a proper community if necessary. I would posit that in a "societal reset" scenario the groups that are going to be most successful are going to be the most accepting ones; the racists who only let white people into their post-apocalyptic raider club are going to get overwhelmed by the post-apocalyptic raider club that accepts literally anybody. Because unlike in the past you don't have all the white people living over here, and all the black people over here and the asians over there... we're all mixed up together. And while yes, human nature makes us inclined to gravitate towards the people who are most like us, again, in a survival scenario if you do that you're greatly limiting your odds of survival.
But back to bunkers, specifically, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned one of the short stories from World War Z (the original book) about exactly this kind of "bunker". In this case its more of a compound with armed security to protect a bunch of C-list reality TV stars from the ongoing Zombie apocalypse. Who are streaming their daily lives out to the world like its just another reality TV show because of course they are. The story is from the perspective of one of their security guards, and hell why don't I just post the whole thing since its apparently available online for free:
https://worldwarz.fandom.com/wiki/T._Sean_Collins'_1st_Interview
This is exactly how I would expect any kind of "billionaire bunker" scenario to go. Because once the apocalypse is ongoing and society has collapsed, what possible reason do the people actually holding the guns have to listen to the rich guys who don't?
How well do you know any of them? Because I haven't ever spoken to any of my neighbors. Meanwhile said other band all go to the same church, know each other's names and families, and already have a social hierarchy established to tell them who's in charge. And an ideological cause and group identity to drive them. Those don't have to be ethnically based, but I'm not convinced the left really had an effective replacement.
Yes this was more 'middle class' work regulated by guilds, like masonry, carpentry and so on. But it isn't something I have read deeply or broadly on.
Yes and that is why I am not sticking around.
I mean you do realize that whoever is left is going to be stuck having to bury their bodies right?
Otherwise you get disease and vermin that will kill you just as much as whatever originally killed the 99%
Not even bulldozers and back-hoes will be enough.
Oh yeah, the moment I read the Peripheral and had it explained to me, knew that was how it is going to go.
Just look at the economic disruption the Houtis are doing in the Red Sea. connect that with a harsher then average drought in the sub-Sahara/Central-America. Add a Venezuela deciding that saber-rattling towards Guyana. Combine that with Ukraine and the Gaza war. None of them are big problems in themselves. Together they can cause shit-storms.
Plus Texas Electrical Grid not being able to stand up to the summer heat again...
China deciding to do a few missile test towards Taiwan...
small Border skirmish between China/India/Pakistan...
Terrorists doing terrorist things because they are assholes like that...
Then add a cropfailure just because anywhere in the world...
Historically “a few generations” has been on the order or 4 or 5 centuries.
After the Bronze Age collapse (around 1200-1000 BC) you don’t see the area returning to a similar level of development until at least around 500 or 600 BC. After the fall of the Roman empire in the west (which again was more of a slow rolling implosion than a fall per se, call it 200-500 AD) it’s 900-1000AD before you can really say things are becoming comparable (arguably even later). Fall of the Han? you can place that at 150-300 AD and things really didn’t get rolling again per se until the reunifications by Sui and Tang, call it 600 or so AD roughly.
These were all severe but incomplete collapses and didn’t have things like radioactive areas or cleanup or fossil fuel shortages to deal with…
I wouldn’t really just assume that in the aftermath of some nuclear war or severe climate change related decline we would just be up and running with cars and computers and airplanes being mass produced again in 100-200 years.
Now, if the reason you don’t have people around is because of a nuclear war the radioactive contamination may be pissing in the ocean by that point, but still…
I think spoilage is a big issue people don’t think about. Not just food but drugs, fuel, maintenance supplies, all kinds of shit.
Iirc don’t most liquid petroleum based fuels go bad within 5 or 10 years unless you take steps to store them in a future proof way?
Somewhat informed speculation, but what would happen environmentally to all the nuclear power plants is going to depend a lot on the nature of the apocalypse. Assuming there is enough warning that everything can go through shutdown procedures and properly take the plants offline but no further follow-up it's not a great situation, there will be some leaks, but the problems should mostly be contained to a relatively local area and 'fine' as long as you aren't poking around near containment domes or waste storage ponds.
There might be some that go up with massive plumes of radiation that turn thousands of square miles into dead zones, but those should be the exception. I'd be more worried about refineries and chemical plants in the short to mid term, with spills, fires, and Bhopal type leaks without monitoring and maintenance.
Again though, in a 'collapse of civilization' scenario a lot of those issues will be localized to some degree and there will still be plenty of places that are 'fine'. There will be enough other concerns that even a tenfold increase in birth defects and cancer rates will be mostly background noise.
On the plus side, even with the loss of a lot of manufacturing capacity, all knowledge won't be lost. Germ theory isn't going to be forgotten probably. With basic knowledge and crude equipment, manufacture of alcohol / iodine, and drugs like sulfa, aspirin, and even some basic antibiotics - maybe not as refined as modern pharma, but effective enough - can be manufactured at the local or home level. Techniques like pasteurization will probably stick around. So that's a plus.
In any event though degrees of collapse are going to be somewhat localized. Loss of the global economy will be painful, but people will work together and communities will manage - you'll probably see a lot more salvaging and recycling of tech that can't be reproduced, but you'll probably pretty rapidly see communities spring back to a sustained early modern era standard of living fairly quickly.
It would probably have to be a war or something like a sudden asteroid impact to affect things on the time scales that would prevent manual shut downs. If you are talking about something like a slow decline from climate change over 100 years you probably aren’t going to get those kinds of effects.
If you look at something like post-Roman Europe or the post-Bronze age mediterranean, yeah there were areas that underwent very little deurbanization and locally remained economically fairly complex. The other side though is that due to political decentralization and economic simplification (less movement, trade, etc) these areas had little effect on speeding the recovery of areas that did get the worst of it.
Gas lasts for months not years
But it isn't hard to extend its life. Just keeping the container airtight works well as the gas inside my filled-twice-since-2020 car will attest.
The Three Mile Island accident (which wasn't fantastic but certainly not fatal) was partially the result of the ECCS being erroneously disabled. Fukushima had a similar issue (ECCS was shut down without backup power for cooling using normal systems). But even Fukushima had negligible public radiation exposure despite the perception as a radiation disaster. There are no attributable radiation-related illnesses and the highest doses were received by plant workers; the lowest dose linked with cancer is 100 mSv/year and 30 workers were over that level and no one outside thr plant.
Chernobyl also isn't helping long-term health or anything but even with the worst radiation disaster in world history from an actual meltdown with a shitty design, 0.1% of the 110,000 workers involved in cleanup have developed leukemia which is around 100 compared to the 50 workers who died of acute-radiation syndrome from being blasted by radiation during the accident. (There are statisics around implying an increase in thyroid cancer, but even places away from Chernobyl have dramatically increased rates after 1986, which is attributable to improvements in diagnostics and not radiation exposure.) So even extreme radiation is a hardship/complication and not a death sentence.
If everyone is fleeing for their lives or everyone suddenly disappears, melting nuclear reactors are not likely going to be among the primary hazards. So for your apocalypse bunker planning, fear of rampant nuclear meltdowns should probably not be your main decision-making factor.
Stored properly, ethanol free (or stabilized) gas can last several years without deteriorating.
It will probably still be 'fine' to run after 5 or even approaching 10 years, but as it gets older it's more likely to run like shit (and maybe not run at all in smaller engines or inefficiently in induction / high compression engines) and going to gum things up. You might have issues with fuel pumps / filters / injectors if the gas has just been sitting in the tank and fuel system the whole time. But something like an old carbureted tractor or truck should run adequately on properly stored five or ten year old gas.
Also with regard to nuclear war, unless someone starts salting warheads the amount of (and threat of) radiation should be pretty localized. Modern thermonuclear weapons are fairly clean compared to the city-killers of the 50s and 60's, the number (and magnitude) of warheads is massively reduced (and is mostly going to be focused on counter-force targets) and fallout dissipates pretty quickly. If you're not in a target area or directly downwind the nuclear war part of a nuclear war is fairly survivable.
An airtight container and stabilizer will get you years on gas and diesel but not many years.
“Leftovers” in a container that gets refilled occasionally IIRC spoils more slowly as well. Like if you take a half filled can with a year old gas and top it off it’s probably ok (not advising anyone do this, its just why people with rarely used equipment or gas/diesel cans sitting in a garage don’t have trouble more often.)
But the point being 5 or 10 years down the road any liquid fuel is probably useless unless someone is actively manufacturing it. Which you may be able to do on a small scale with ethanol or biodiesel IF you have equipment that can run on it without being damaged. But for most passenger vehicles and the like they are probably going to be useless.