What if we were forced back to the dark ages?

Spoke to my neighbour about this kind of thing some months ago. We agreed we're now both too set in our ways to go haring off chasing the sunset.

Besides, he has a collection of fine wines, I have some venison and decent beef, some home-grown potatoes - and I happen to have some residual skill in managing barbecues. I'm sure we'll find some cheese in the cupboard.

We'll be fine....

:)
 
That sounds far more like my kind of thing - do you have enough venison to share with 30,000+ forumites, or just me with a small stomach a few skills that might be useful?
 
Lady Campanula said:
I firmly believed we in the military would see the several 'trigger points' before the general public - was to get down to a port in the South-West ( Plymouth or Dartmouth ), avoiding the grid-locked main roads, and simply take one of those self-sufficient 'escape capsules' out into the Atlantic and beyond.

In all survival situations, it is vital to recognise early what's happening and act before 'the herd'.
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Strange, such a strategy never occurred to me. And at that time I was an engineer at the first place that would see Armageddon approaching - Fylingdales early warning station. Not only that I was responsible for the programs that generated and communicated the UK alarm levels to all the government and defence departments - I would have seen the threat level rising on our duplicate display at the same time as the PM and the head honchos in MoD.

Also, I had a yacht moored in Whitby harbour only a few miles away. Probably I was either too resigned by the 4 minute thing which wouldn't have been enough time to get off the site or optimistically thinking that what I was doing would be enough deterrent to stop it happening.
 
As a father with a son of that age I found the The Road captivating, fascinating and depressing. His struggle to protect his son and hints at past vulnerability are frightening. I have not seen the film but a damn good read.
 
xxyyzz said:
Funny how everyone thinks of the event causing such a catastrophe would be nuclear war, what about disease or asteroid?
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For anyone who lived through those insane years, especially the Cuban stand-off, it WAS the most probable cause and the probability was very high.

Now, I think we accept the doomsday clock has regressed from the five minutes to midnight that it used to be ratcheting up to and your other scenarios have come to the fore. AIDS has demonstrated how a pandemic can operate and Hollywood asteroid disaster films have introduced another possible paranoia.

Those of us who need to worry about something or other have plenty of material out there.
 
xxyyzz said:
Maybe it was.

Funny how everyone thinks of the event causing such a catastrophe would be nuclear war, what about disease or asteroid?
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Or oil supplies running out, or food, or civil unrest for any other reason. The only thing we know for sure is that we don't know what will happen in the future, except that oil supplies will one day stop.
 
Barnac1e said:
Those of us who need to worry about something or other have plenty of material out there.
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I'm not worried, but I have made basic preparations for a few 'what if' scenarios. I don't think about things that might happen day-to-day, but there is no harm in considering what your survival plan would be in the event of xyz happening. That's very different to worrying about it. If you've not given any thought to what you would do, then you're already one step behind if anything should happen.
 
my main problem would be running out of ventolin. i'm not seriously asthmatic on a regular basis but occasionally i have an attack that could get nasty without an inhaler. there must be quite a few people that would struggle without certain meds - adding into the equation the fact that many diseases would become rife if the water supply was affected, weakened immunity due to impaired nutrition etc.

i also wonder how many people have dentistry that needs seeing to. plus you better hope you don't need cancer treatment or similar.

i could live with mod cons but healthcare would be the biggie i reckon.
 
ColdFusion said:
I'm not worried, but I have made basic preparations for a few 'what if' scenarios. I don't think about things that might happen day-to-day, but there is no harm in considering what your survival plan would be in the event of xyz happening. That's very different to worrying about it. If you've not given any thought to what you would do, then you're already one step behind if anything should happen.
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In the worst case scenario of all social and commercial entities suddenly and totally disrupted and likely to stay so, with feral armed groups taking over then I would be at such a disadvantage that I would not survive - being in my mid-seventies that would not be too much of a catastrophe, much as I would hate it, I've had a good life.

If it was a deepening crisis with only gradual or temporary breakdown of services I would put my (limited) faith in the official administration. I live in Switzerland, not the UK.

This country has for years planned and spent astronomical sums on exactly such a scenario, except it was directed at a maximum population surviving a nuclear holocaust. Every building has deep, substantial shelters equipped with fresh water and food stocks. Just as there is a standing army of civilians ready to get their weapons from their home cabinets, so there is a large army of trained civil assistants to man the underground communications, hospitals and other services.

In my own city, Bern, there is a vast, eerily-empty, underground, fully equipped hospital with generators already humming away keeping everything in top-notch condition - very few even know of its existence.

Mountains are hollowed out and contain complete communications and defence systems. I once went up a mountain path and passed a grill set into the sheer rock, warm air and a faint humming was coming from it - my Swiss companion said that it was a secret defence establishment, he had been there on his military service which everyone has to do.

If anywhere will be able to cope then it is here; I therefore have "not given any thought to what I would do", others have done it for me far better than I could.
 
I'm in the UK, for now. I have little faith of others (Government) caring too much about my wellbeing in the event of some catastrophe. It sounds like you're in a good place should anything occur. Let's hope nothing does.
 
Hm it is a bit awful to consider that the Brave New World will comprise a disproportionate number of boring Swiss people.

Brendan's gun idea makes sense. Not sure about the crossbow though. I'd just have a gun with a silencer and loads of bullets.

Otherwise it would be very handy to be in a warmish place where they've sorted out the subsistence living already, perhaps do the washing up and hope they will show you how to spear a fish and perhaps help make nice mud huts. Any problems just shoot them with the silenced gun i got in paragraph 2. Perhaps shoot them anyway if they were looking peeky and might pass on a nasty disease. Definitely shoot anyone who turned up in a subsistencey long-term boat, i won't fall for that one.
 
Interesting thread, however, isnt' there an elephant in the room? Wouldn't people just bugger off on their boats? It would be very simple to eek out a lifestyle mooching around the scottish islands feeding on shellfish etc and having a few well-hidden allotments on uninhabited islands for supplementing an already well-fed hunter-gatherer.

Archaeology suggests that the move to farming happened through selective and systematic reduction in gatherable crops (what seeds couldn't be tapped off the plant was left, and those plants were the ones that reproduced), which rules out farming as being the simplest method of survival. Add to that that all the first settlers of new continents arrived by water - easy to move over, established food resources etc, rather shows that the yotties will be OK in the end.
 
tcm said:
....Otherwise it would be very handy to be in a warmish place where they've sorted out the subsistence living already, perhaps do the washing up and hope they will show you how to spear a fish and perhaps help make nice mud huts. Any problems just shoot them with the silenced gun i got in paragraph 2. Perhaps shoot them anyway if they were looking peeky and might pass on a nasty disease. Definitely shoot anyone who turned up in a subsistencey long-term boat, i won't fall for that one.
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There's this mental picture of TCM in bandana, dreadlocks, earings and gumboots - rusting fusil cradled in sunscorch'd arms, shouting foul imprecations at passing forumites ( with still-viable stocks of Bruichladdich in the bilges), his multimaran barely afloat in 3 inches of foetid mangrove backwater and definitely NOT AFLOAT at low tide, when hundreds of yards of stinking mangrove mud separates him from clean ocean, and leaves him to fend off - every day/night - the hundreds of meat-eating crabs that emerge, climbing up his score of 'shore-lines' and Hurricane Anchor rodes.....

....While, when the wind is in the 'wrong' direction, he can faintly hear the laughter and music of the parties on the beach where the long-keelers have gathered on the other side of the little island, and to which he is not invited until he hands in his muzzle-loader, his boy scout knife-on-lanyard, his hunting catapult, and his collection of Dayak poison-tipped fishing spears.....

....and his three-stringed fiddle.

:D
 
armchairsailor said:
Interesting thread, however, isnt' there an elephant in the room? QUOTE]



The real elephant is reluctance to recognise that this wouldn't be a bit of boy scout fun playing at self-sufficiency. Survival would have nothing to do with ability to make fires by rubbing sticks together or learning how to smelt metal. For the first 50 years survival would be by membership of one of the murderous gangs and managing to be useful enough to one of the ruthless gang leaders so that he spared your life.

We, or rather, they, could survive for that long merely by murdering most of the population and pillaging anything/anybody that remained. After that point the more cunning, intelligent and far-sighted of the warlords would start to "collect" experts and technical archives with a view to getting something more permanent going again in rudimentary form.

There probably would be people living on boats, but they would be defeated war-lords driven to piracy by stronger rivals, robbing any smaller boats they found for food and fuel, and murdering the sailors.
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cliffordpope said:
There probably would be people living on boats,
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Even that would take quite a change for many. Assume no GPS, so if you don't have the charts it's back to M1E for navigation, and forecasts would presumably be out the window too. How's your weather forecasting? Mine's awful. Assume your diesel will run out, so no lights or heat on board. Assume the gas runs out too, so no cooking facilities. All that might be OK in summer, but some the first winter and associated gales, and a boat might not be too much fun to camp out in with the family. Apart from that, it's a bloody awful place to try and hide from the nasty peeps that are after your clothes/food/whatever - particularly if it's an obvious white beacon on an otherwise pretty empty sea.
 
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