I have a van set up for longish mountain biking trips set up for being off-grid. It was never a resilience plan, but when the pandemic hit and supermarkets were hotspots of unrest, I felt a bit more comfortable knowing I could get the hell out of dodge if it went downhill.
The thing I don't quite get about bunkers is that they are stationary targets. If 100 refugees storm a place, I don't care what kind of security you have, you're still a sitting target. Eventually the numbers overwhelm you.
This is a point worth exploring. There is a part of the world, the Eurasian steppe, where folks still practice nomadic herding precisely because the geography discourages trying to defend stationary encampments. Today, cities dot the North American plains, another region traditionally inhabited by nomads; this is because of strong social institutions. If those social institutions fail, then the nomadic way of life will become preferable again.
I wonder whether these bunker-builders would get more bang for their buck if they were to build inside a city instead of outside. Investments in infrastructure around them could improve security at a structural level. (A distant relative thread notes that bunkers could not possibly have full hospital service.) A castle does not have just a keep, but an entire town inside its walls, or else it could not support its keep.
Or have a replica bunker next to it but it's rigged to blow a dirty nuke and trigger an apocalypse-upon-apocalypse in case the zombie horde comes knocking
This article reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s short story “Masque of the Red Death” in Radicalized (2019), which haunts me still and cured me of any bunker curious tendencies.
Thanks, im sure there is some research, but coops i've driven past seam to still use normal day/night cycles with like skylights... anything with entirely artificial light?
The dark is required, so many are all but blacked out. But I'm not sure on 100% artificial. I do know it's completely over reasearched.
Coops are now one of the most crazy over-specified engineering things you'll ever see. They test and maximize cost efficiency of things like: how often to wipe dust off the light bulbs, given 50 different variables, and then contractually write it out.
Even if a bunker for rich couples included a fully equipped intensive care unit with an operating bloc and a team of doctors and surgeons on call.
In a post apocalyptic world, there is no medical school. Once your health staff is dead or too old to continue, you're on your own.
In a post apocalyptic world, there are no high tech factories to manufacture medical equipment. From complex machines to basic surgical masks and gloves, bandaids, morphin, syringes, vaccines, gloves, none of those are manufactured anymore in a post apocalyptic world. The factories have been destroyed. The skilled workers who knew how to operate the machines are dead or who knows where.
Okay, so let's say that your bunker for rich couples with a mini hospital also includes a factory to manufacture medical equipment.
Gloves and masks are made of plastic. Petroleum products. So let's say your bunker for rich couples with a mini hospital and full staff complement and a medical factory now also has an oil extraction operation and a refinery on site. You need petroleum engineers. These engineers have families and will expect to be well taken care of. Replacing the engineers with robots? You're gonna need a robot factory, built by humans. And so on.
See where I'm going? If you take this reasoning to its logic end you arrive at a full society.
No one can survive well in the long term without a modern society and all of its amenities, including government, public services, and taxes. Exactly all that would cease to exist in a doomsday scenario. Unless you are prepared to accept a standard of living worthy of the Middle Ages.
Yes, in a post-apocalyptic society you probably won't be able to get your medical gloves. But you will be better off that the middle ages, because you'll know about sterilizing your instruments and so on, you'll have medical textbooks and trained doctors who will know that leeches are not in fact useful for treating headaches, ear infections or hemorrhoids.
You won't be able to fab computer chips, but if you have a good stockpile of cheap arduino stuff you'll be able to make machines and automate aspects of your life.
You won't be able to create petrol to power your vehicle but you (or some handy McGyver type) probably can modify existing cars to run on firewood (like almost every motorised vehicle in continental Europe was during WWII).
Our existing knowledge alone would make the survivor's post-apocalyptic lives far, far better than the middle ages.
Prepping and bunkers are not about surviving forever with a luxurious standard of living, but about surviving for 2-5 years until some semblance of society re-forms. It’s actually an optimistic bet: that we don’t devolve permanently into warlords and subsistence survival, but instead whatever apocalypse that comes is temporary and recoverable. I don’t know any preppers or survivalists who think their bunkers will sustain them forever.
I used to consider myself merely mildly curious about prepping, but 2020 has convinced me we are much closer than we think to every man for himself, to the point where I am almost seriously looking for private, defendable land tucked away in the mountains with fresh water, juuuust in case. Not for a permanent The Road scenario, but to weather a temporary storm.
I guess the problem of hiding out waiting for society to reform is that you get no say in it. And being in the out group is dangerous when things devolve. ‘Cause historically it’s not really into rugged individualists out for themselves but along cultural and familial lines. Bunker style prepping, particularly in a place you’re not a part of seems more about denying the reality of the predictions these people make than anything else.
> No one can survive well in the long term without a modern society and all of its amenities, including government, public services, and taxes.
No one can survive in the long term, full stop. Modern civilization makes it significantly safer, more comfortable and longer, but rest assured, there are plenty of humans on planet Earth who survive just fine without governments, public services and taxes.
> there are plenty of humans on planet Earth who survive just fine without governments, public services and taxes.
I disagree. Let me look up a checklist of failed states.
Yemen. Libya. Somalia. Syria. DR Congo.
Hmmmm. Exactly the worst countries to live in.
Now let me look up checklists of countries with the highest levels of human development index, life expectancy at birth, and income per capita.
Norway. Sweden. Denmark. Canada. The United States. South Korea. Singapore.
All countries with well established governments and public services infrastructure, and a social safety net (this is somewhat less true for the US).
Most humans living in places without governments and well organized societies live either in the middle of literal warzones, desert wastelands, or are indigenous tribes living far from civilization.
Bunker survival can be nice and pretty for a few years at most, but the idea that modern technology has abolished man's dependence on his community is a fantasy.
I think the much bigger concern would be getting there. In such a scenario where you need a 3 year food supply, I doubt the highways to get to where these things inevitably are will be usable.
The counter for this would be to relocate there earlier in the unfolding of a crisis, before most people have caught on, but then you'd have to go more often (lower relocation trigger threshold), and also stay there until it's over, which would mean you'd have spent ~all of 2020 in one.
A friend sold his camp near Lake Champlain to some dude from NYC, sight unseen, for about $100k over asking in April. It was unwinterized, and the buyer dropped a fortune into making it a 4 season home.
This actually happened to a bunch of the rich people who, by the time they realized COVID would be a good time to relocate to their New Zealand apocalypse bunker, couldn't get flights out of the US or into NZ to get there.
I wonder how many are re-evaluating their location choice.
Probably. I mean, having 12 months of food and other necessities sounds pointless and then COVID happens and it looks sorta clever. The so-called "Reign of Terror" in France lasted about 12 months, that would be a really great time to have had a bunker stocked for 3 years.
We don't know what will go wrong. Being over-prepared and easily weathering difficulties is a much better plan than being underprepared.
The question is always, unless your bunker is set for like 50 years of isolation, what are they planning to do 2 years later when nothing's improved?
Strongholds and regionalization are pretty much the worst responses to any crisis, seeing as how the entirety of this era of modern civilization traces it's origins to the rise of global trade that began in the renaissance.
"He waved me over to the nuclear, biological, and chemical air filtration unit for the condo and explained that they had three military-grade filters each providing 2,000-cubic feet per minute of filtration..."
That'll work. Until Vic and Blood come along with a sack full of rags, plastic sacks, a tarp to plug up the air intakes ... then wait to hear the Screamers.
They enjoy thinking about set-piece scenarios against enemies who give up and fight the way they want them too.
They're really bad at considering the actual logistical and tactical issues i.e. have they adequately cleared trees and cover from the bunker entrances, are the air intakes able to be shielded from gun fire which might pierce the filter assemblies, do they have adequate overlapping covering positions for them, how do you replace an air intake filter clogged with soot from someone burning a bonfire upwind for a few days, do you have adequate surveillance to cover nightfall?
I mean a fairly obvious problem is that starting a big fire near the bunker is more or less going to both clog the air filters and completely blind and destroy most surface surveillance gear...which let's you get in close and then duct-tape the air intakes up.
> They enjoy thinking ... They're really bad at considering
Have you ever had one of these people talk your ear off?
Hidden, remote ventilation intakes, surveillance, hidden escape hatches to flank their opponents, and overlapping cover are the sort of thing they spend their waking hours planning, dreaming, building, and earning money to afford.
Saying they're bad at considering logistics and tactics is like saying Lord of The Rings nerds are bad at considering the lore. Come on.
The day the shit really hits the fan, the guys who build these bunkers are going to steal them from the billionaires who bought them. Joey might have his own but he'll tell his cousins that they can go beat the shit out of Jeff Bezos and take over his whole bunker.
Who's likelier to have been in the military and actually seized a position from an adversary? Joey's cousins or Jeff Bezos'? All the pen testing in the world isn't going to help Bill and Melinda and their security team hold their bunker against a larger group of Navy Seals looking for a safe place to ride out the whatever. Or, for that matter, Bill and Melinda's security people looking at the 1 year food supply, looking at Bill and Melinda, and making it a 2 year food supply.
The fact is, in a shit hits the fan scenario, money has no value, and thus the world's billionaires become just random dweebs.
Billionaires who didn't get that way by inheriting huge sums and suboptimally managing them tend to have gotten where they are through a variety of skills, usually including extremely good skills at selling people in much more advantaged positions the idea to give up what would naively seem to be the near-term optimal course to take a risk on something that might pay off themselves down the road but which was clearly in the not-yet-billionaire’s interest. And they’ve often kept quite current with those negotiating skills.
Agree, but in the true disaster scenario where you're in bunkers, there's nothing but the near-term. There is no down the road, you do what you need to do so that you're alive tomorrow morning.
I agree with you, I just think it'll be a scene of paying one half of the population to kill the other.
There will be plenty of softer targets meal team six will be going after first, with plenty of fighting to keep them distracted.
I'm picturing Bill running the old embrace, extend, and extinguish model until they all just kill each other or die of hunger/radiation/lead poisoning.
