This 7-yo girl is living large in England. Family has a nice villa, couple of slaves and servants, throws lavish parties, all that. OK, they’re getting a little broke. The bathhouse burned and they can’t afford to fix it, can’t even find artisans to do the work, stuff like that. Her father is a tax collector and suddenly farmers are refusing to pay up. “Why are we paying for Rome’s protection? When was the last time we even saw a soldier? Meanwhile, the Saxons are fucking shit up not far from here.” And it goes downhill from there, fast.
The girl ends up at Hadrian’s Wall after a few years, and it’s a mess. Slovenly soldiers getting drunk on duty, no one cares about anything, Saxons and Picts raiding everywhere. And it goes downhill again, fast. Next thing you know, no amount of money will buy a clay pot. Metal, of any kind? Forget it, no one will give up any. Roman coin means nothing, because you can’t eat it or wear it.
When she’s 17, her and a few others get a pathetic little farm going. They’re surviving, barely. Hell, they can’t even figure out how to repair a thatch roof. A local strongman snatches them up to add to his tiny little hilltop, which is pathetic in itself compared to what the Romans had going on 30-years previously. At least they start making iron, but that’s only because the warlord lucked out and grabbed the one guy who knows the process. But hey! It’s got an OK-ish wall!
At one point the young woman finds a nice perfume bottle in the ruins. All I could think was, damn, there’s no way anyone, anywhere around her could produce even the crudest glass item.
Guess you get the idea. I know the world is more resilient now, but COVID showed how thin the sauce really is. Supply chains are 2-weeks away from near total collapse. Almost every one of us makes a living, and has an education, that’s totally irrelevant to survival.
I’m in far better shape than most as I’ve got 2.5 acres of swamp, not far from a river. I’m no stranger to the local ecosystems, but I’ve thought about trying to live out there, and it’s not doable without modern tech, not for me anyway. Example, I have plenty of guns for defense and hunting, but ammo isn’t infinite. I can make my own black powder, and have black powder guns. I make my own charcoal and I guess I could get potassium nitrate from urine, but where do I get pure sulpher? I can reload shotgun shells, but I can’t imagine how to make a primer. I can pour my own lead bullets and maybe shot, but how am I to power the smelter? Not with my two solar cells I’m not. (Get me the Fresnel lens from an old-school projection TV and I can melt rock!)
Even the simplest items are out of reach. Clay pots seem easy enough, but I have no idea where to find clay locally. I certainly can’t tell good from bad clay, don’t know the temps and times required to fire it, none of the basics. The pressing need for food and hauling fresh water wouldn’t allow time to experiment.
I make my own soap, but I don’t know how to get lye from wood ash. Even given that, it would take tons of trial and error with animal fats.
Aside from food, shelter and water, cloth is easily the most essential item. “Always carry a towel.”, is excellent advice. The one thing I often wish I had more of camping in the cold or wet is more cloth, of any kind. Even in the heat, we need cloth. Guess if I had a few sheep that would be nice, but I don’t have a clue as to building a loom or how exactly one works. Warp and weft or something? Hell, I don’t even know what it means to “card” wool. For that matter, I’d have no clue how to cure the animals hides I would hunt. Something involving urine again, that’s all I know.
Speaking of hunting, as rednecks think we could do well enough on that count. Don’t know who else has noticed, but our fauna is falling apart, starting with insects. I get into some wild places and it’s shocking how little wildlife there is. Just saw my first two copperheads, less than a week apart! That’s after 5-years of tromping the woods, rivers and swamps. If I wiped out every squirrel on the block, that would feed my wife and I for 2-3 weeks, tops. And everyone else would be doing the same thing. We would literally be down to eating stray dogs and cats, fast.
And back to defense, if you have anything and anyone knows it, you’re going to have to fight. I can’t stay awake 24/7 and neither can my wife. Scary to think, as in our fictional character’s case, no matter what you obtain, someone stronger will eventually come take it. Ally with neighbors? Of course! But there’s always a bigger fish, and being a big fish in a small pond is going to attract attention. “Their morals, their code; it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see-I’ll show you. When the chips are down these, uh, civilized people? They’ll eat each other.”
If I break my glasses and the contacts run out, I’m straight handicapped. I’ve never found used eye wear that was remotely “close enough”, better off without.
The Roman Empire had it good for a thousand years, never imagined it could end. And they were cavemen relative to our modern tech. Almost everything we know would become obsolete, overnight. But, not joking, we could live off our own trash pretty well. At least we’d have plastic containers and pull-tab fish hooks. (Seriously, I repurpose loads of crap I find in the woods and on the roadsides. You should see my tackle box! And I don’t even fish.)
What if the US dollar collapses? Global warming? (<- probably the most realistic threat) Nuclear war? A “better” version of COVID or the Spanish Flu? Diseases wiping out our factory farms? Guess what I’m getting at is that despite living in the richest era of human history, we’re all the more fragile. I’m not seriously worried about my few remaining years, but I’m seeing that the preppers might have the right idea.
Whew! Had to get some thoughts out! What are yours?
The novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent Damned good so far! And it’s a trilogy!
If it makes you feel better, if society collapses to the point that there are no more clothes, ammo, or canned food, you’ll have long since been dead.
Despite what people think, we humans are fragile and pampered and a modern person is going to just end up dead if society collapses to that extent.
I knew a serious prepper dude (by which I mean he hoarded heirloom seeds and composting toilets and not silver and MREs) who, while preparing to survive, pretty much figured if it totally falls apart he and his family would end up dead, and that evening scores was probably a more useful use of his time than fighting for every last minute.
I used to think he was insane (and hell, he probably is) but the older I get the more I can understand his view on getting even, and then anything left is a bonus.
But some always survive! We humans are the AR-15s of the animal world. Not the best at anything, not even good for some tasks, but we’re well adapted, multipurpose machines.
To even imagine surviving a year, I’d have to go far more serious than I’m willing to go. 500 pounds of rice, beans and corn would go a long way for both of us. Until the bears and deer find it. Or 2-legged critters find it. Despite being in a swamp, gathering and purifying water would be hell and take a huge chunk of my day. Can’t even count on rain. What to do when my tarps are shredded? How about when we get a 2-month dry spell?
LOL, as of now, I don’t even have a path to the river, and that’s only 800M away. When it gets cooler, I’m breaking out the chest waders and mucking through the swampy bits, see how it goes. But imagine hauling water for a 1.6KM round trip. Every day. Lord.
Still, I’ve always wanted to go to camp and stay a whole week on my own, not leave no matter what. Be interesting to see how that would work out. Probably end up working all day just to gather firewood for heat, boiling water, cooking, light, etc.
Even with all the dead wood around, it’s a challenge. The dead stuff evaporates in the fire and the green hardly burns. Take 6-months or so to end up with cured firewood, and the trees I have are not the best for that.
And then foraging for plants and shrooms, which I’m nearly clueless about, be lucky to nail a squirrel or catch a decent fish. Back to camp to cook. Sleep, rinse, repeat. No time to learn new skills.
Also, I’d end up wiping my ass with dried moss. Paper products don’t last, even in a dry tent. LOL, see the 2020 Toilet Paper Riots.
Again, I’d be far better off than most. Don’t think we could make it 3-months, even if we had stockpiles of dry foodstuffs and no one came along to fuck with us. And that’s not going to happen.
Been learning to make charcoal at scale, only done it in paint cans. That will be a fun experiment.
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LOL, I sense a gun nut fight coming up. (Only shot an AK once.)
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That’s the point. We, most of us, would just die. For me it’s a question of the degree of suffering involved. Forget beans and rice for a year. Just give me a vial of fentanyl or something else that can kill me with minimal suffering. That’s as far as I need to go for prepping.
You need to ask yourself if that’s the world you want to live in if it’s a rapid collapse.
Sure, you’ll have a better chance of survival if you prep, but unless you have a trustworthy community of skilled individuals that can band together for defense and food production you’re basically in a situation where you’re waiting to die. Whether it be illness, injury, infection, malnutrition, aggression from other humans…whatever, odds are you will not survive very long.
In a catastrophic collapse all the things that used to keep society running are gone. We have a global network that moves everything from energy to food to medication to machinery where it needs to go. We have people, specialists, whose life’s work it is to make all of these things. That specialization also means they don’t work the fields, plant crops, pull a plough, or raise draft animals.
If TSHTF we lose the specialists first.
The global supply chain stops. The flow of materials and energy stops, any exceptions are rare, if any, and that will be likely be temporary as there will be limited ability to find and use raw materials (coal, iron, smelting, machining, electricity)for low tech (like a piston for an engine) and impossible for high tech ( computer chip manufacture for the engine controller or other electrical/plastic parts).
If it’s bad enough, fast enough, we basically wind up in a scrapper/stone age/subsistence farming because we have no way to mine for the materials that make modern society what it is. We probably ate all the draft animals, so fieldwork is done by hand. You will need specialists who understand crop planting, harvesting, storage, animal husbandry, homebuilding with natural materials, etc. Probably need to go hang out with the Amish. But even then, things like medicine and vaccines are gone. There will constantly be people who will try to take what they want by violence.
The only real hope is for a slow slide into collapse where civilization has time to adjust and pull back its borders and maintain whatever remains. That doesn’t mean that billions won’t die on the way there, and it’s pure luck if civilization can withstand the assault of the dying masses.
So again…the odds of surviving a real collapse are very low, it just depends on how quick the collapse is to determine how long your odds of survival are. Couple that with the loss of every modern convenience, scarcity or loss of medicine, electricity, etc and you’re looking at a tough existence. The only hope is a “village” full of the very people that can do hard physical work and the knowledge to survive in the new low-tech world. The likelihood of that chance for anyone in the overwhelming majority of the modern world is near zero.
actually humans are the absolute best at persistence hunting, and it’s not even close. no other animals can keep up with humans’ natural ability to just keep jogging
I’m actually really curious which rifles are better at some categories that the AR-15 is not best at
Longer range, more or less “power” (velocity and bullet weight), ammo weight and availability, weapon weight, stuff like that.
For any given task, there’s a better weapon. .22LR rifles are what most people talk about in survival situations. The AR-15 is the Toyota Corolla of guns, reliable, easy, good enough for most chores.
Feel free to continue with more examples!
If I can my M&P 15-22 working this week, that might be my choice for a survival gun. It’s like a 3/4-sized AR-15, same controls and form factor. Cheap ammo, light as a feather, all that.
Stopping power? Cartridge size? Capacity?
.22LR, 25 in the magazine. So no, not much stopping power, but I’m one of those “shot placement counts” guys. In any case, 25 rounds adds up to a lot of angry hornets.
At the time, the largest Grizzly ever taken was by an Inuit woman with a single shot .22 bolt-action. The Virginia Tech shooter, worst school massacre in US history, killed most of his victims with a .22 semi-automatic pistol.
Ammo is readily available, even if scrounging, nothing to throw 500 rounds in a backpack. Accurate enough to hit a squirrel at 50-yards without tweaking your scope, if you even need one at that range (I do!). On top of all that, the report is nothing like anything else, hard to pinpoint a “quiet” shot like that. Oh, and zero recoil, followup shots are already on target.
Kind of sounds ideal for assassination.