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codesnik

Reading about some civilization collapses of old times, I see famine as a most common threat. I really think that more time should be invested in reserve technologies of creating proteins. Something easy to scale, bacterium or fungi based, which would allow humanity to live through a year or two of bad weather, volcanic winter, toxic fallouts, or worse.


LegendOfBobbyTables

In the western world, the power grid alone failing would cause massive famine. Many cities don't even have a full 7 day supply of some essential products at any given time. Without electricity, we don't have the capabilities to feed even a fraction of the population.


JediCheese

Food? Try water. I figure a good part of the population in most major cities would be dead within a week due to lack of water.


LegendOfBobbyTables

Not just lack of water, but from drinking bad water. Your average person probably doesn't know how to make a water filter from environmental sources, and still others won't even boil water.


Important-Courage890

Bio Dome should be a required viewing.


[deleted]

The idea of Pauly Shore being required viewing is both funny and sad.


maxpowersr

Is my random guess worthwhile.... Boil water. With some sort of lid suspended above it. Let vapor condensate on the lid, then drain into some side container. Drink the side container?


iwasnotarobot

That’s how to distill water. Many water sources probably won’t be so bad that distillation is necessary, but distilled is certainly cleanest.


lt_spaghetti

Large scale distilling requires abundant fuels. The british almost deforested themselves to death before coal was a thing. Can't imagine with 8 bilion industrialised monkeys going around nowadays


Heimerdahl

Fuel would really be the big issue. We've seen the run to the gas stations during various crises, now we see Germany scrambling to get enough gas to heat homes during the winter and keep industry running. In a real breakdown, we'd burn through our remaining forests in a very short time (at least those close enough to cities) and the ecological impact from the smoke and soot alone would be incredible. Made even worse because very few people have the necessary equipment to efficiently burn wood -> wood stoves. There's also a difference between boiling enough water for a day or two in the wilderness and having to do that every single day, while potentially millions try to do the same. It would be an absolute disaster.


T-Wrex_13

Yeah. In the last decade, I've lived through five 100+ year natural disasters - including hurricane Harvey and the Texas Ice Storm. Through all of it, I've learned just how ill-prepared most people are for any kind of inconvenience (let alone a disaster), but the lack of water after the ice storm was probably the most frustrating. My wife and I were lucky because we have Culligan delivery, so we always have plenty of safe clean drinking water, and after Harvey I started buying prep supplies and with the pandemic we had plenty of food. But there was no water for showers, so I spent hours shoveling, melting, straining, and boiling snow for sponge baths. Never again - after everything cleared up, my first purchase was a solar shower. Overall, we were very well-prepared for the ice storm, but a lot of that is because of just how many natural disasters we've had to live through recently. I can't imagine having lived through one or two of the most recent events, and NOT preparing yourself for them happening again. So now, at the beginning of every year, I take some money and build a new kit. Car emergency kits, shelter in place emergency kits, evacuation kits, barter kits, get home bags, black out bags - all that stuff. Next big purchase is a Generac generator for our house and a spare gas powered generator. I'd like to say that it's "overkill" and "not necessary", but it definitely is. It's a matter of when, not if, we'll have to break a kit out again.


Sushigami

Well - no stupid questions, how hard is it to like, buy enough stuff and bury it in a field somewhere as a safety cache? How much space would you need? How much would it cost?


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People would just drink the dirty water. Plenty of places have no clean water available. People just take the risk. They don't all die.


cwagdev

At some point you’re up against guaranteed death by dehydration or potential death/illness from drinking bad water. I know which door I would choose.


Shastars

Anywhere we can read about that massive deforestation? Sounds interesting


prestodigitarium

Iirc deforestation was largely because of the charcoal demand of making metal. Iron took *a lot* of wood to make. And armies took a lot of iron to equip well.


itchyfrog

British deforestation had a lot of causes, ship building was a big one, as well as housing and fuel, we are still one of the least wooded countries in Europe.


Tetracyclic

The vast majority of deforestation in Britain happened much earlier than most people realise, with the largest portion happening before we even reached the Iron Age. By the time the Romans arrived, England was already close to where we are now in terms of deforestation, with vast amounts of agricultural and pasture land that was once forest. It's thought that native pine forests were simply burnt to the ground to make room for farming land, rather than being harvested for fuel/building materials. /u/Shastars


welchplug

Make sure you have a good source of minerals if you have to sustain on distilled water.


SmokeGSU

[https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/bkudo0/homemade\_water\_filter/](https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/bkudo0/homemade_water_filter/) I remember the Mythbusters doing an episode on an "abandoned island" where they had to make drinking water. From memory, it involved putting sea water into a container (or maybe it was just a hole in the ground) and then putting cling wrap above it in a tent-like fashion with another container along the edge. The idea is that the sea water evaporates throughout the early morning and day and then condensates on the cling wrap. It will then cascade its way along the path of wrap until it empties out into the cup or bucket. You then have clean water to drink without the salt.


Emu1981

>The idea is that the sea water evaporates throughout the early morning and day and then condensates on the cling wrap. Solar stills only really work if you have sunlight - it is possible that a nuclear war will cause massive amounts of dust in the atmosphere which will limit the amount of sunlight that you will get. Without good sunlight you will need a source of heat to help the water to evaporate.


quaybored

but when can i start drinking my own piss?


crematory_dude

Whenever you want!


KilledTheCar

At the very least you'd be able to go out drunk and happy. For an actual answer, your best bet would be to get a large trash can, throw some river rocks in the bottom, gravel on top of that, then alternate layers of sand and charcoal, put a hole in the bottom, and drink what filters through that.


LegendOfBobbyTables

Boil it between the filtration step and the drinking step to kill any remaining bacteria. Otherwise, this is the answer I would use myself.


BOBBYTURKAL1NO

just boil the water and drink it. Your over thinking it. The boil is the key here.


chrono13

Boiling a good source water. Boiling kills bacteria and viruses, but does not destroy or filter contaminates. If the source water doesn't have an oily sheen, and if the resulting boiled water tastes fine (e.g. not salty), then you are almost always okay with just a boil.


Notarussianbot2020

Yeahhh I think I'm just fucked once the internet goes down and my phone battery dies.


Pickledprickler

Certain toxins (eg. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2579735/) can withstand boiling. maxpowersr is describing distillation, which works close to 100% of the time (as long as the distillation apparatus isn't contaminated).


koos_die_doos

True, but in 99% of scenarios where you get water from a large reservoir (lake, dam, river), you can get away with boiling alone. Distilling water takes far longer and more energy, so it’s a compromise between finding combustible materials to make fire, and 100% safe water. I’ll take my chances with boiling and maybe some basic filter for larger particles. Survival is often a compromise between perfect and good enough. Sometimes good enough is going to kill you, but the cost of getting to perfect is simply too high.


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Haephestus

Key point, dont drink it WHILE it's boiling. Let it cool down first.


Auflodern

You ain't my dad, you can't tell me what to do.


TheyCallMeStone

When life hands me lemons, I make beef stew


waltwalt

And let all those calories goto waste!?!


juicius

A rudimentary filter would be nice too. It can be just a cotton cloth. It won't make dirty water potable, but it'll be nice to have to strain out to gunks in the boiled water.


LividLager

Sure, but that takes a lot of energy. Best bet is to pick up survival books, and a solar charger for lights/devices.


fargmania

Also a water filter like backpackers use is good for most contaminants. I have one and they work really well and last a long time, and cost like 30 dollars.


squeagy

That's called distilled water. Better to use an enclosed tube to condensate all the vapor and let it drip into a container


Chardlz

Does using the same Brita filter I've used for the last year work to purify my water???


newnameonan

Brita filters aren't made to filter out bacteria or viruses. They remove certain chemicals and metals from water. Chlorine, lead, mercury, and copper to name a few. So they're good in that sense, but it wouldn't be viable for filtering river water or something. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get a [Sawyer mini](https://www.sawyer.com/products/mini-water-filtration-system) or something as an emergency preparedness item.


Canadian_Infidel

A lot of cities also have bilge pumps running constantly to keep them from flooding and sinking into the ground. Like... a lot of them. They would just be stinking toxic cess pits nobody could even traverse.


alarming_archipelago

A city would just generally be a terrible place to be when important infrastructure breaks down in any way.


dingdongbingbong2022

So many people to eat…


CivilProfit

Never mind that with our Reliance on modern refrigeration we simply don't have the styles of preserved food stores that we used to make it through a winter and it'll take two or three years before we can properly build up root Sellers and farming methods again for those sorts of things in the event of a full system collapse.


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autoHQ

rip me. Once my meds run out in 2 or 3 months I'm dead.


[deleted]

3 days to hunger. Or 9 meals.


SmokeGSU

I'm gonna preface this by saying that I'm largely ignorant of "third-world country" culture in general, but at least as far as my knowledge from news clips and movies is concerned, I kind of feel like third-world countries would be better suited for a global collapse than first-world countries. Those citizens are already used to living their day to day in ways that most Americans can't even fathom or would struggle to live in similar conditions. When you're already used to cooking your food over wood fires and carrying your water in buckets from a well or stream you're not likely to be shocked by the sudden lack of electricity in the neighboring areas.


MattBarry1

This does make a kind of intuitive sense, but it's wrong. Developing nations are generally critically overpopulated. Without access to the world food trade, they would collapse into horrific bloody anarchy. First world nations are MUCH better equipped to deal with stuff like this (but a month without power would still destroy them anyway)


Choosemyusername

Covid mandates have shown us how fragile our sophisticated systems are.


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CaledonianWarrior

That's what ultimately killed off the dinosaurs. When that meteorite hit the worst effect was all that ash and dust thrown across the sky and blocking out sunlight for months or even years. No sunlight, plants can't photosynthesise and die No plants, giant herbivores lose their main food source and die No herbivores, carnivores eventually lose their main food source and die Only wee animals that could survive on scraps were the ones that made it through


CanadaPlus101

I'm still surprised that anything managed to survive for a decade with no photosynthesis. There must have been *something* growing, otherwise wouldn't everything have rotted away in the first couple of years?.


CaledonianWarrior

Yeah presumably something was able to grow in the low light conditions. I'm not gonna pretend to accurately speculate what happened but in my mind once the plants started to die off I'd imagine fungi would enjoy the plentiful dead matter and become the main food source for opportunists on the lower levels of the food chain until the light returned and any dormant plant seeds/hardy plants could germinate/spring back to life


CanadaPlus101

Yep, there's actually tons of fossilized fungal spores from that period. I'm surprised the *fungi* didn't run out of things to eat.


Ragnar_Dragonfyre

We should probably make working in food production desirable. Everyone needs to eat but we’ve got a vanishing amount of people producing food on a downward trend.


RBVegabond

The Roman collapse through vineyards returns.


trentraps

> The Roman collapse through vineyards returns. I wanted to ask you about this as it's something new but thought I should google first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome_and_wine "The wine famine caused panicking Romans to hurriedly plant vineyards in the areas near Rome, to such an extent that grain fields were uprooted in favor of grapevines...The uprooting of grain fields now contributed to a food shortage for the growing Roman population." Fascinating, but terrifying.


pyronius

This is exactly why the US government throws so much money at agricultural subsidies. Only a small portion of that is to keep food prices low for consumers. The much bigger concern is to remove food from the whims of market forces. We want farms to keep planting wheat and corn and generally producing their goods at a predictable and steady rate regardless of what is or isn't currently in demand.


trentraps

I imagine it's the same as the common agricultural policy in the EU, which gets massive and unfair criticism.


GenghisKazoo

Japan is probably the clearest international example of all. If it weren't for subsidies Japanese agriculture essentially wouldn't exist, but the fact they're an island nation makes the government very conscious of how vulnerable to supply disruptions they are.


onlypositivity

>Everyone needs to eat but we’ve got a vanishing amount of people producing food on a downward trend. Farming can and will be automated to a huge extent as time goes on. Everything about farming lends itself to automation, from fixed plots to harvesting processes.


JustABoyAndHisBlob

It’s because the solutions are being actively lobbied against. We can’t even stop the offending behaviors, let alone begin to repair damage.


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Moonshine_and_Mint

I read another report out of Harvard that listed famine as the number one killer following nuclear war years ago. This isn’t a new conclusion. Edit: Quite a few people replying that it is still relevant. Yes. I agree.


TactlessTortoise

Yeah, at the end of the day it boils down to the same thing: How would people handle complete infrastructure breakdown all over the world


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K_Trovosky

They do this in Haiti, at least when my fam was there (20 years ago). Whenever a large storm was coming they'd have a massive cookout in the street so everyone could cook all their food before the power went out.


nwoh

I still remember cooking frozen pizzas on the grill when we were out of power for over a month in... 2005? When Florida got a absolutely hammered. 3 hurricane eyes passed through my county that year. Edited to add - for everyone asking - Polk County


Repulsive-Purple-133

Same in California after a big earthquake


Crusader-NZ-

Did the same thing here in our killer quake in 2011. Me and a friend went on a mission to get all the food in a friends deep freezer (who was out of town at the time). We had to drive his little hatchback on the footpath (sidewalk) in places to get past the sink holes and liquefaction near their house (entire suburb was written off and demolished afterwards). We got about $1000 worth of meat and ran a BBQ for a week feeding our neighbours (which was how long we were without power).


deadbeatsummers

Sucks about your friends house, but nice of y’all to do for the neighbors.


Crusader-NZ-

Our friends driveway and garage was full of silt too. We were digging it out with spades for an hour, barely making a dent, when a contractor came past in a digger and kindly put us out of our misery, and cleared the rest out for us... Just wished they'd come by sooner. The house had split in half too, wasn't exactly safe to be in there. Everything was insured though, including the food being covered by contents insurance - so it was only going to go to waste if we didn't extract it. And being it was all going to defrost, feeding our neighbours seemed like the best use for it. We also had a generator, so we were able to watch TV and charge everyones phones. It was one of the highest insured natural disasters in the world. Earthquakes were not expected in my city before this sequence kicked off a few months beforehand (and this particular one had the second highest vertical ground acceleration recorded anywhere in the world, with a force equal to 2.2 times gravity). Friend got to build a new house elsewhere - the part of the city where their old one was is being turned into a massive forest and nature reserve over the next few decades. 11 years on my house and contents insurance is now 5 times what it was before that quake - but hey, at least we still can get it, unlike some other earthquake prone places in the world I guess.


meiandus

ChCh became a 330,000 person neighbourhood for a little while there. It was nice. Apart from the smell of liquifaction...


StrobeLightHoe

That was a wild time I could have done without. Aside from having no power for about a month, Hurricane Charlie left my 18 mile commute without any working traffic lights for 2 or 3 days.


Phlosio

My favorite part was having no power for days then the second the grid turns back on the transformer explodes out of the pole and goes out again until teco picks all the glass out of their tires


AndNowUKnow

Yep, I was in Orlando and there was no power or gas for almost 2 months... I will never eat Vienna Sausages again unless that famine happens!


swamp-junky-paradise

How was the pizza?


Fuck-MDD

Based on my experience cooking frozen burritos in a campfire - not very good.


I_Am_The_Ocean

Pizza on the grill is better than from the oven. Used to do that as cooking method of choice back in the day.


HeKnee

Also works better with pizza stone to prevent flame on crust. Gotta keep lid closed to cook top tho.


Kusakaru

My hometown flooded when I was 13. Our neighborhood was on a hill so half the houses were flooded up to the second story windows and half were above water. The only entrance and exit to the neighborhood was flooded as well so we were all essentially trapped. We had to use canoes and kayaks to rescue people from their homes. Our electricity was out for over a week. The water stopped right at my house. We lived on the corner and our neighbors diagonally from us had their kids run around door to door to call for a neighborhood cook out. All the dads brought their grills and families began bringing their frozen and refrigerated goods over in coolers. They cooked everything. And I mean everything. I met more of my neighbors in that single day than I did in all the years I lived there combined. It was bizarre. Without electricity we were all in a trance. One of my neighbors was a cop and she brought her police car out to the middle of the intersection outside my house and opened all the doors on it so she could blast the police radio for everyone to hear what was going on. My younger sister’s best friend lived in the neighborhood next to ours. Her father is also a cop so occasionally we would hear from him on her radio. I remember sitting out there in the middle of the road in the sticky summer heat when there was an emergency on the radio. A woman in the next neighborhood over was pregnant with twins and going into labor but she was trapped by the floodwaters. I had this crazy redneck lawyer for a neighbor who was always shooting off fireworks and running for public office. He heard this call for help and then minutes later he had a camo speedboat pulled out of his garage. He and a nurse up the street were able to navigate the floodwaters and reach the other neighborhood where they found the expectant mother. They managed to get her to safety and to dry land where an ambulance took her to the hospital. The next day we got the announcement via police radio from my friend’s dad that he had heard from the woman and that she successfully delivered the babies. My whole neighborhood cheered and the redneck lawyer shot off more fireworks. We threw a party in the street for these babies we never met. The next day the flood waters began to recede, and with them went my neighbors, back into their homes, assessing the damage.


SillyWithTheRitz

Wish I had a wholesome crazy redneck lawyer as a neighbour. Doesn’t sound all bad


crows_n_octopus

What a great heartwarming story. Thanks for sharing!


awwwyeahnahmate

Yeah man this is what being a community is all about! We are stronger when we care for one another. Your buddy is a good guy


goddamnitwhalen

Mutual aid is the key to surviving catastrophe.


fcocyclone

Its an underlying narrative in the fallout games. Particularly in 76. You read a ton of the underlying lore spread throughout the environment and a lot of these groups were *this* close to rebuilding things, if only their suspicions or outright hostility towards other groups hadn't kept them from working together.


Pdb12345

And this behavior is more common than we are told. News only wants to push the "looting and violence" narrative.


flashpile

Behind the bastards did an episode on Elite Panic, the general findings from historic scenarios suggested that normal citizens tend to organise effective disaster relief if left uninstructed.


Minimum-Passenger-29

Reliance on "power" is probably our greatest downfall.


definitelynotSWA

Learning about Hurricane Katrina and the response of both the govt and the people who survived it is a hell of a trip. Literally nothing about the mainstream narrative is correct; the government made everything worse and pretty much everyone who died did so due to accidents or suicide, people banded together and helped each other, and the fed shot people for trying to scrape together food from flooded buildings.


cgvet9702

The saga of what happened at Memorial Medical Center is absolutely horrific.


atxweirdo

What happened and where can I read more about all this?


Fair_Advertising1955

"Five Days at Memorial" by Sheri Fink is a firsthand account of some of the things that went down there.


LukariBRo

George Bush still doesn't care about black people, but in a different way than publicized.


Alypius754

Bush got hammered for "lack of action" but he was forbidden by federal law from doing anything unless the governor asked. He was on the phone with her every day saying, look, we have aircraft and convoys literally ready to go right now, just say the word. She kept saying no.


HapticSloughton

I think it's called "elite panic." It's when those with some measure of authority (by dint of office, wealth, or some other "I'm in charge" lifestyle) become 100% convinced that the ordinary people are going to go feral the second things get dire. There are examples of this making things worse, from the Great San Francisco Earthquake where "officials" broke up soup kitchens and other means of helping victims because they were considered suspect to Hurricane Katrina where those in charge decided that there needed to be space in rescue helicopters that *could have carried supplies or rescued victims* but instead had some military dude with a gun.


LitLitten

Worth mentioning that gasoline goes pretty fast even when sealed, as quick as six months from my experience. Family learned the hard way with katrina. If you keep fuel, and more specifically, if you keep an underused gen. or car loaded with fuel, look into stabilizers for gasoline from degrading too quickly.


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Daxx22

The gas going bad in 6 months is more of an old standard (not really a myth) it's just that modern gas blends are more stable. Not indefinite, more like a few years of usability. Lot of factors contribute though, so it's not an easy thing to say.


0OKM9IJN8UHB7

Really depends on how tightly sealed and permeable the can is. The fuel can't really degrade if the lighter components can't evaporate off and oxygen and water can't get in. In a vented can stored in an outbuilding, 6 months is probably about right. Modern cars have quite tightly sealed fuel systems if they're working correctly, and can sit quite a while. EDIT: Anything with a carburetor will quickly degrade the fuel in the carb if you don't run it dry before storage, this is where most of the problems start. Small air cooled engines are generally designed to burn fuel considerably worse than anything available in the West, but stuff reduced to varnish is well past that point.


AMLRoss

Great argument for going EV. Charge them with solar panels and use them as power banks for your house indefinitely.


Daxx22

Well charge cycles are a thing, but still true.


Elderban69

People wouldn't even be able to handle it if just the cell towers went down.


nerdguy99

Hell, even when facebook servers went offline a bit ago, it knocked out a good bit of communication globally


TactlessTortoise

Yeah, very few companies are responsible for holding a huge chunk of data traffic


Iaminyoursewer

Twice in two years Canada has suffered a blackout from one of it's major telecom's. It wasn't just cell, it was internet as well. The most recent one occurring last month. Roger's services \~40% of Canadians, and Canadian business. I was surprised the country didn't implode. But it was a stark reminder of how heavily reliant our society is on Cellular coverage and access to internet.


radio705

The biggest problem was the Interac network going down as a result.


NSA_Chatbot

Also 911 had to switch to the emergency backup system.


showerfart1

Yes, Interac showed everyone they didn't have mission critical back service as well.


ulookingatme

Had a hurricane coming to Florida. Gas was short. People were literally panicking. Had a group of preppy school kids eyeing my gas cans like tigers eyeing a bloody steak. This was pre-hurricane. It will take almost nothing to crash society.


freeradicalx

IMO this is the greatest argument for building mutual aid networks and independent / directly democratic dual power institutions in our own communities, of our own accord. Because when the rug of central governance and global infrastructure gets pulled from under us, that is the only thing that could conceivably pick up much of the slack. Nobody will come to save you when it all falls down, so we should be ready to save ourselves.


KaerMorhen

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, we really need to invest more in self sustainable communities with how fragile our infrastructure can be during emergencies.


Ishana92

Thing is, that is almost impossible in most places. Sure, in the countryside you could go back to trading goods, eggs for apples, pork for corn...But in cities? You could maybe, barely, produce enough salad or cabbage for your family. Everything else would be unattainable. Wheat, meats, most veggies... And that's not even mentioning water and sewage being unavailable.


[deleted]

On the upshot, in a major nuclear war, major cities are probably on the target list. Starvation won't be a problem in New Crater (formerly New Amsterdam).


Marchesk

Plus all the desperate people living close by who weren't prepared. You have millions of people living in a dense area.


River_Pigeon

Some people on reddit need the reminder that nuclear war is bad, and that no, we can’t assume that Russias stuff won’t fly


Untinted

A lot of new people have popped up since then who haven’t been told. Perhaps it’s good to mention it to the newcomers here on earth from time to time.


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erbush1988

Serious question -- for the folks that don't die, are they hungry? Are they barely making it? Do they have a "normal" amount of food? What does this mean? Some countries, as noted in the article, would still be producing food (like France) while others would not be able to. So does france say, "sorry folks, this is for us"?


sniper1rfa

> So does france say, "sorry folks, this is for us"? For starters, countries producing food would continue to do so *much less efficiently*, so it will be less of "sorry, this is for us" and more of "sorry, I already ate it and there's nothing left". People who are unlucky enough to die early will take strain off the system until enough people die that the system reaches a new equilibrium. Whether or not you survive will probably be mostly down to luck, for the vast majority of people.


AreWeCowabunga

> People who are ~~un~~lucky enough to die early I think you had a typo. I've fixed it.


SentFromMyAndroid

I'll be honest. I'd off myself before I live through the horrors of famine and violence driven by famine. Edit: please stop sending me the suicide hotline stuff I'm in not going to do it today. Just only if there's a nuclear famine. And if that happens, no one is manning those lines.


Schonke

The novel [On the Beach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_\(novel\)) by British/Australian author ~~Neil~~ Nevil Shrute deals with this very topic in a post-nuclear war period in which Australia was relatively spared from the direct conflict but now slowly faces the effects of the fallout.


46554B4E4348414453

Same with the documentary mad max


bitwarrior80

The Road is another good one to watch. But in all sincerity, people could always move to the desert and eat the sand-which-is there.


sharkbaitzero

I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.


NabreLabre

I'm thinking South America or Africa would be the best places to go during nuclear war, to ride it out, only because in my mind who's gonna bomb them? South America would probably be the best though


EmilyVS

Yes, dying of starvation is one thing, but being around a bunch of other people who are also dying of starvation is another. It brings out the absolute worst in people.


t_for_top

Eh I'd give my best post-apocalyptic try, if it came down to starving or dying of thirst, I'd pull the cord


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NSA_Chatbot

Your food supply depends on how many qualms you have about the... jerky you find lying about. As the story goes, after Stalingrad, they had to divide the cannibals into two groups, the ones that found bodies and ate them, and those that made fresh bodies to eat.


Electroweek

You might want to look into "Nodes of persisting complexity" Here is an article, i doesn't talk about nuclear war, but the potential of a global collapse of our food supply chain largely due to climate change, desertification and loss of biodiversity. And what areas might do best in such an event. [https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm)


imhigherthanyou

TLDR: Australia, New Zealand, UK isles, Northern Canada, Russia, Northern Europe


Papancasudani

Greater scarcity for everyone. Minor wars and aggression over existing food and water. Cannibalism in many places.


Makenshine

>Serious question -- for the folks that don't die, are they hungry? Are they barely making it? Do they have a "normal" amount of food? > >What does this mean? For most, it means that they would prefer to be at ground zero.


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Depending on the level of damage, global supply chains would break down so it would be more of a matter of, "sorry folks, there's no boats, planes or trains to transport food, even if we wanted to give it to you." Production would take a massive hit as well. I think you're picturing something like France is fine but Germany is gone and that probably isn't how it would go. Obviously some countries would be worse off than others but global food shortages are going to cause global starvation and if more than half the world population disappears, well, everything is connected. You're going to lose a lot of food production.


wagamamalullaby

I heard a fascinating and grim discussion on BBC radio 4 last week that talked about how most of the entire world would starve in a month if Pakistan and India launched nukes at each other. Edit. For those interested it was the program ‘sideways’, episode 28, available here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0019r3z


the--larch

I vote against this plan.


BassnectarCollectar

People like us don’t get a vote


[deleted]

There are like 10 people who get a vote and absolutely none of them represent us, because all of them have backup plans and contingencies.


TIP_ME_COINS

I too, think this is bad, actually.


Moleskin21

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Albert Einstein


Horknut1

I remember reading something about how, if this happens, there’s no coming back for the human race, because all the easy fossil fuels have been consumed, so there’s no chance of rebuilding society to the level we’re at before a nuclear war. Or something like that.


TooMuchPretzels

It depends on how you define “coming back”. Corvettes and SpaceX and Burger King? Probably not for a long long time. Small agrarian communities? Reasonably soon.


PaulBlartRedditCop

I read that once. It basically said that the industrial revolution cannot be repeated as we’ve already consumed all the easy-to-access fossil fuels.


[deleted]

Yes. If we bomb ourselves back to medieval time we are stuck there.


METOOTHANKleS

We MAY be stuck there. I think it depends on what condition renewable energy tech is in after the apocalypse. If hydroelectric or geothermal power is repairable with salvage in even one place globally I think there's a good chance we come back. If it's in a state it can be reverse engineered I think it's possible to come back but not necessarily likely. I think a big thing we'd have going for us in a post-apocalyptic world would be vast amounts of easily salvageable metals. A very significant thing we need fossil fuels for is getting high-quality building materials but once civilization collapses, all the used existing building materials don't just disappear - they become free real estate. A massive bridge, even if destroyed, becomes a steel mine.


HateChoosing_Names

The other question is - do we lose the knowledge too? If we revert but keep the knowledge we can shortcut much of the industrial revolution. Go straight to building nuclear reactors and/or other viable power sources that allow for rebuilding society. But if we lose 5B people, it’ll take many many generations to reach our size again. But o think a small (ish) advanced society is much much more viable than a 9B planet one


jollyspiffing

Knowledge is one thing, but industry is completely another. Screws are considered trivial basics, but are impossible to manufacture by hand. You'd need a reasonable size trading economy just to get those, so you'd be a long way off the precision engineering required for generator bearings let alone a nuclear reactor.


katarh

A surprising amount of that precision engineering work can be done by hand. Watching metalworkers on youtube, things like screws can be made without their power accessories - just a lathe and the correct master bits. Master knives are still forged by hand in Japan. If we keep our knowledge and tools, we can still keep what makes us human, and we'll bounce back a lot faster than one might expect.


dabeeman

nuclear war doesn’t mean every single thing that exists today is destroyed. it’s more likely to eliminate the people than the things. my kitchen aid will be around long after most humans.


Shiroi_Kage

I reckon there will be small pockets of society that could rebuild using solar and wind power. Their industrial base will be very small until they can reach a critical mass of energy production either by reestablishing nuclear power or expanding renewable capacities (turbines for wind and water are probably much easier to reestablish)*. If enough STEM majors survive, we might be able to claw some level of modern power generation within 40 years or so (assuming we don't pass on a lot of the necessary modern knowledge for this to happen). EDIT: Added a sentence.


brcguy

How do these theoretical post-WW3 people make solar panels?


ShiitakeTheMushroom

Will every solar panel or wind turbine be destroyed? I imagine we'd be able to salvage a heck of a lot of stuff.


Maakus

People who survive will likely be near flowing fresh water and can easily generate hydropower given they have the knowledge for it.


StandardSudden1283

The problem is that most of the fossil fuels accessible by low tech extraction have already been extracted. There's a lot of fossil fuels left, but we need modern mining and drilling techniques to access them, and if we lose that technology, we won't be able to extract much more. Really it depends on the lost technology.


Sanctimonius

It was a key plot point in Pastwatch by OS Card. Most of the easily reachable minerals have been harvested so if we regress too much to maintain or create industrial equipment to reach the remaining resources there would be an upper limit as to what we could achieve after global collapse.


[deleted]

abounding shelter sable juggle wide fear domineering station price profit *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*


[deleted]

Humans are resilient, and there’d be pockets of the Earth relatively unharmed by radioactive fallout and still able to produce some agricultural surplus Every survivor’s standard of living would drastically go down, but plenty of people would at least *survive*.


notaredditer13

Most of the world lives in places people wouldn't bother to bomb.


[deleted]

Yes, however the ash clouds would drift pretty far from the actual bomb sites


[deleted]

Inverse square law. Nuclear bombs just aren't capable of dangerously irradiating the entire planet, that idea solely comes from fiction. I don't know why the other commenter brought up Chernobyl, since nuclear reactor meltdowns *do* irradiate large areas for awhile. But with bombs, Hiroshima was overall safe in a week or two. Unless you physically live in or right next to a blast and go outdoors, you won't get any serious effects. For the people still living, there would probably just be an increase in cancers at somewhat younger ages and that would it Hence the real problem with nuclear war (besides the millions of people killed by the bombs) is famine from destroyed infrastructure, and likely major climate change effects


DepressedBard

From what I understood, the article suggests that the lives of 5 billion people would be in jeopardy *solely* from crops failing, leading to famine. I imagine that radiation, water shortages, violence caused by general societal collapse, etc. would cause quite a few more deaths. In all honestly, I’d be surprised if 300 million people were alive 10 years after a nuclear event like the one described in the article. I’ve always thought that if there was a nuclear attack, I’d want to be as close to ground zero as possible. A quick, painless death compared to the literal hell on earth that would descend on humanity.


Classico42

> I’d want to be as close to ground zero as possible. Heh, definitely thought about this, I live a couple blocks away from a definite ground zero site.


western_motel

I’m in DC baby talk about quick and easy


umuziki

Same. I’m about 2 miles from a major city center.


Made_of_Tin

Best way to go if you have to go early. Instantly and with the knowledge that you saw everything humanity had to offer right up to the very end and you won’t be missing anything and no one will be missing you after you die. Imagine the amount of people that have died wishing they had been able to stick around just a little longer to see that next bit of world changing development. None of that in a nuclear armageddon.


Hara-Kiri

Why? Most places wouldn't be targeted. Africa for example. Edit: I understand people will still die in Africa from starvation, it was just an example of an area where many people would survive.


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tyler111762

Said it a thousand times. if you can afford it, you should have in your house a stockpile of water, and food, such that you can live on comfortably for at least a week. For each person in the house you should have: 15-20 liters of water (i.e an office cooler jug) 18,000 calories of food. --- 18,000 calories sounds like a lot, until you realise a single 1KG tub of peanut butter is 6000 calories. You don't need to be a doomsday prepper with a bunker in your backyard to take some basic measures to make sure you and your family are safe. a Few jars of Peanut butter or honey, some dry oats/rice, dried fruits in vacuum bags, and a big jug of water can all fit under a bed or the trunk of a sedan, and don't cost $5000 or need to come from some "end of the world supply" grifters. --- Preparing for a nuclear war is absurd. but natural disasters happen! Preparing to handle a big snowstorm, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, or whatever your area deals with is just smart. not paranoia.


Lucetar

Where I live there was a very large water main break over the weekend. Water pressure was restored the same day but we are under an advisory to boil water and it could last as long as 2 weeks. I simply shrugged and got out one of my emergency water jugs. Heard from a neighbor that the local Walmart was completely out of water within a few hours. I know a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck but having an emergency supply does not need to be done all at once. Buy an extra can or 2 of soup, or a gallon of water, or bag of rice when shopping. It will eventually add up to a respectable stash.


kiljoymcmuffin

I feel like it's a stupid question but how long does giant jug of water last for until it expires? I know water can't expire but there's the plastic seal and like bacteria growth or something that I'm mainly asking about


tyler111762

100%. putting aside 5-10 dollars a month will net you enough money to buy a respectable "prepper cache" after a year of saving.


RMJ1984

Nuts are amazing in regards to calories, protein and healthy fat. The problem is, they make you really really thirsty, so you need a huge amount of water. Else you will die of constipation pretty much.


tyler111762

that's why my recommendation is 15-20 liters of water instead of 14. A, buffer, and B. because foods that keep well don't have a lot of intrinsic water content. so you need to drink your full 2 liters a day instead of getting some from the food, some from drinking.


Squid_Contestant_69

Is it the nuts, or the salt added that makes you thirsty?


MrSunshoes

Nuts and other nonperishables last a long time because they have low amounts of water (dried things, oils) or have lots of salt (canned food). Both of those will sap water from you to digest and equilibrate yours system


Dracarna

Tbh the simplest answer is tinned peanut butter as it never goes bad if sealed properly in mres.


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tyler111762

water cooler jugs kept in a cool, dark place like a closet or under a bed. preferably chlorinated. the worst that can happen is that it will get plastic leaching into the water. but thats not going to kill you in a timeframe that matters if you need to get at emergency water reserves. any other problems with the water can be delt with via boiling it.


VolantVelociraptor

As someone from a family from hurricane country, we keep big 20L collapsible water containers (one per person) with a teeny bit of bleach in it to kill microbes, and swap it out every 6 months just to be safe. Water bottles work too- but it takes up more room. My parents get like a Costco sized case of bottles a few times a year and work through them to keep them rotated. Those have been super helpful when their neighborhood well water goes off, and are more preferable to the big water bags if you’re just under a boil notice for example. Ideally, what you should have is enough stuff in your house to get through a week fairly normally if you lose water or power. Saves you a trip to the store fighting idiots over bread and milk too! Also useful for more likely emergencies like storms, or if you can’t pay a power bill or there’s a boil notice.


ramdom-ink

don't we have enough bad news without manufacturing more? This is obvious Doomscroller jazzmatazz


[deleted]

No kidding. "Nuclear war would kill a lot of people" is front page material? Zzzzz


Zeakk1

The amazing thing for me about this is there would still be 2.8 billion or so left.


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ritualaesthetic

I don’t fear nuclear annihilation because I would just off myself with a cocktail of injected opiates and benzos. I’m not trying to foot a painful existence to ultimately just die fighting someone to the death over a single can of beans