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Apocalypse Bunker Fails as Wealthy Residents Turn on Each Other (futurism.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

More than a generation, yes. 100 years? Probably not.

So much unknown. Competition with other survivors with guns, knives, the ability to poison your well when you aren't looking or burn your house down while you sleep... assuming NONE of those kinds of things EVER happen, then, yes, the happy cooperative commune that never murders each other over scarce resources could keep a basic tractor running for 30+ years. Throw in all those other challenges... just traveling to a supply depot to get a new spark plug could be risking your life.

Even the happy cooperative commune is going to need centuries of relative peace in order to reboot the supply chain to the point of making new spark plugs compatible with the old engine blocks - or new engine blocks when the old ones are too worn to rebuild.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    So much unknown. Competition with other survivors with guns, knives, the ability to poison your well when you aren’t looking or burn your house down while you sleep…

    Or, everyone rallies in the first few years and the few survivors that are around work together and share resources, at least long enough that everyone gets theirs.

    Movies and video games are more entertaining when there's over-the-top conflict, and I think that shapes our predictions. We have seen, however, that in times of crisis communities and people rally together for the greater good. Even strangers help strangers. That doesn't usually last long, but it does happen. And I have no reason to believe that wouldn't be true if a world-killing meteor struck the earth in China. On my side of the planet, I do believe there would be a honeymoon phase before mad Max times.

    I'd be naive to assume that it would be without conflict for generations. I'm not saying that at all.

    Even the happy cooperative commune is going to need centuries of relative peace in order to reboot the supply chain to the point of making new spark plugs compatible with the old engine blocks - or new engine blocks when the old ones are too worn to rebuild.

    Yes. It would take a while to figure out how to reboot factories and supply chains (if that even is the goal after the extinction event -- when there's 10,000 left alive scattered throughout the world, why would we need factories and supply chains?). But also, there are more than enough spark plugs and engine blocks packed in oil at tractor supplies and John Deere service departments to make it happen for generations. Traveling may or may not be dangerous -- neither you nor I know.

    My other claim is that we'd learn to use horses/cows to pull the tractor implements before the tractors are kaput for good. I stand by that claim.

    The biggest danger would be illness and injury.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Or, everyone rallies in the first few years and the few survivors that are around work together and share resources, at least long enough that everyone gets theirs.

    Yeah, the problem is: we're both right. Some will go one way, some another - and when the two types intermingle, the results would appear to be inevitably regrettable.

    Movies and video games are more entertaining when there’s over-the-top conflict, and I think that shapes our predictions.

    Having lived in big cities where "bad neighborhoods" means one house out of a thousand might harbor some bad kids who go out and do bad things, I'll say: the vast majority of people in most of society are basically good, some of them truly great, but it doesn't take very many bad actors to bring down a whole 100,000 population area into fear and chaos and over-the-top responses to threats.

    You want examples of over-the-top responses in real life? They're rare, but cops doing outrageously terrible things isn't just in fiction... a lot of real life is more cold, callous and brutal than a lot of fiction.

    we’d learn to use horses/cows to pull the tractor implements before the tractors are kaput for good.

    In a lot of ways, horses and cows are much more work and expense (inputs of valuable materials) to keep operating than a tractor, it's why the horse drawn carriages died out so quickly - not because they're slow or smelly, but because cranking up an engine that sits in a garage and waits patiently for you for days, or months, at near zero storage cost is infinitely more efficient than protecting your livestock from disease and weather and poachers and wild predators...

    And, yes, in those places where people can maintain working animals, they will go to that expense to plow the earth by mule or ox or horse power instead of planting by human labor, but it is a big step up from desperation on the run to keeping beasts of burden in working order.

    The biggest danger would be illness and injury.

    That is a big one, particularly while the cities are filled with unburied rotting corpses.

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