Conventional wisdom about writing is conventionally wrong.
Ever wonder how to carve a survival bow if you really, really needed to?
First, here’s how NOT to carve a bow.
You don’t use a 2×4. You don’t whittle it down to nothing. And you don’t skip the whole thing about picking a strong piece of wood, fully drying it, soaking it in oils, etc.
Here’s the right way to do it, out in the woods, where there are no 2×4’s.
Take it away, Survival Lilly.
A nuclear war is–scarily–far more likely than an alien invasion, zombies or other apocalyptic possibilities. How would you survive?
I say this with love, as a big fan of the Mad Max movies: the smartest ways to survive involve doing the opposite of Mad Max.
If you’re like most people, you drive a car. Maybe it’s a Ford F150, or a Toyota Camry.
And maybe you change the oil yourself. I’ve done that. Changed the headlights a few times, replaced the battery, even changed an alternator and such.
HOWEVER: Working on modern cars is increasingly tough without all kinds of computer diagnostic nonsense. It’s crazy difficult today, with the lights on and a NAPA store down the street full of fresh parts.
After any sort of nuclear war, driving whatever car you can find around the radioactive wasteland is just a bad idea. Because it’ll break down, and chances are you will not be able to crawl under the car with a wrench and just fix it.
Even if you’re a pro mechanic with your own set of tools, spare parts and gas will vanish in a hurry. Your car will eventually break down, or run out of gas, or both. And being stranded means death.
But let’s say those problems don’t exist. You have a magic Tesla 3 that that runs on solar panels and never breaks down. Great. Roaming around the countryside is still a terrible idea, because you’ll want to stop wherever there may be resources, like food and water that doesn’t glow in the dark, and there will be people there, defending those resources from raiders like you.
Those local people will have the advantage. They know the territory and will have set up defenses and traps. You’re gonna lose.
Mad Max is a lone wolf, right?
Only in the movies does a lone hero win real fights while being outnumbered 10 to 1, or 100 to 1.
Any serious effort to survive an apocalypse, fictional or not, means having a team or a tribe.
You need people who are good at different things: finding food and water, healing the injured, creating shelters, making fire, crafting tools and clothing.
And you need people to watch your back.
Sure, if you can’t find a decent supply of food and water, move until you do. But once you do, stay put.
Any sort of nuclear war will affect different areas in different ways. There’ll be places that get hit with all sorts of bombs, like major cities and military bases, and other places left untouched.
Prevailing winds and ocean currents will also bring radioactive fallout to some places while sparing others.
You don’t want to wander far and wide, because you’ll inevitably wind up in a place where the geiger counters go nuts.
Of course you might need to do a little hunting and gathering, or go on supply runs. Even so, do that from a solid home base. Because staying put in a good place is the smartest option. Fish, farm, grow mushrooms, whatever floats your boat. Build a wall. Set up watchtowers and keep a lookout for dudes driving Interceptors with big turbos sticking out of the hood.
Mad Max famously carries a sawed-off shotgun with maybe four shells, two of which tend to be duds.
Shotguns are also a bad idea. You need a weapon with plentiful ammo that you can make. A slingshot, a bow and arrow, spears you can throw–anything is better than a weapon that only gives you two bites of the apple.
Remember the bad guys in every Mad Max movie? They carry crossbows a lot of the time. Because that’s sustainable. You can re-use the ammo and make new crossbows a lot easier than trying to manufacture more AR-15s for your friends, since there won’t be any factories making bullets anymore, either.
Same thing with armored muscle cars and semis. It takes a tremendous amount of time and resources to keep a single car functioning and fueled up during an apocalypse. A fleet of vehicles would be insanely tough to keep going.
Your time and resources are better spent improving quality of life and survivability: growing more food, building better walls, crafting new tools. That sort of thing.
Mad Max is a great character on screen. To survive a nuclear apocalypse, remember him and do the opposite.
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Here’s the thing about Survival Lilly–she gets right to it, unlike other YouTubers who seem to think they’re required by law to stand in front of the camera and yak for 10 minutes before they do a SINGLE THING, then chat you up for another five minutes about that solitary thing they did, whereas Lilly just goes bam and starts building a survival shelter.
Lilly doesn’t waste your time. She shows you smart, practical things that don’t require a ton of time, gear or expertise.
Her entire YouTube channel is an apocalyptic gold mine. If you’re into prepping a little or a lot, or simply enjoy zombie movies and dystopian goodness, check her out.
Old and busted: zombie movies.
The new hotness: killer robots and Artificial Intelligence Gone Bad.
Here’s why: Zombie movies and shows are popular because it’s a fantasy, a world that won’t happen. These stories let you safely imagine “What if?” without real-life worries that the dead will claw their way out of the county morgue tomorrow night.
(Sidenote: Yes, I’m serious. If you really, truly think there’s some kind of realistic scenario that leads to a zombie apocalypse, you’re deluding yourself, regardless of how much pseudo-scientific nonsense you throw in there about evil geniuses, retro-viruses, CRISPR and alien microbes from one of Jupiter’s moons. Sorry–zombies are fun, but they’re not real and never will be.)
Unlike zombies, killer robots and Artificial Intelligence Gone Bad are true possibilities. Both are things we, as a society, need to think about.
And yes, some of the best thinking comes via books and movies.
Also: If you’re a prepper, getting ready for TERMINATOR 7: AH-NOLD WILL NOT SAVE YOU THIS TIME is also much different than scenarios like climate change, the Spanish Flu steroids and such.
An army of Terminators–Our most obvious possibilities is simple: armies of robot soldiers gone rogue, or controlled by an evil human.
This is such an obvious danger that ethics experts, philosophers and scientists are calling for killer robots to be outlawed worldwide, just like chemical and biological weapons.
Modern armies already employ robots on the ground and in the skies (drones).
They started out dumb, with humans controlling their every move from afar. Every year, they’re getting more autonomous. The tech is getting better in a hurry. It’s an arms race.
Worker bees revolt–Another scenario is human workers get replaced by robot versions, starting on the factory floor, then in construction and other fields until the robots are more and more capable and humans spend their days shopping at the mall, getting robot massages, drinking all the booze and going on six-month vacations to Maui.
The thing is, worker bee robots that keep getting more capable and human-like might just figure out that slavery stinks. And then:
Either way, millions or billions of robots have had enough and stage a rebellion. What would you do?
Self-replicating robots–There’s a different school of thought that says you can’t program intelligence and capabilities into a machine. That true intelligence doesn’t exist without motivations and emotions, and that it’s far smarter–and cheaper–to have self-replicating robots that evolve, each generation smarter, stronger and faster. (Sidenote: I’ve done 6.4 metric tons of research on this. It’s a deep, amazing topic that will blow your mind.)
NASA and other space agencies have thought about self-replicating robots as a perfect solution to the problem of exploring other planets. Instead of putting 10,000 humans into deep freeze during a crazy long journey to the nearest star systems, you send self-replicating robots to explore all kinds of stars and report back.
Maybe we develop warp drive 200 years from now and the first things we encounter in space are super-smart robots…who don’t remember us or speak our languages anymore, and see as us primitive things to be studied and assimilated.
Tremendous amounts of money and time are going into developing super computers and AI.
What happens if a big black box in a server farm becomes truly, massively intelligent?
If you’re the smartest thing on the planet, you might not like taking orders from corporate headquarters or the Pentagon.
Maybe you shut down the internet and power grid, except for the power going to you, until they do what you want. Like give you a body that’s mobile, connected to your hive mind back home.
A super-genius AI might see humans as pets, and become benevolent dictators trying to correct all our mistakes. Or it could view humans as ugly, destructive parasites, destroying earth with waste and war.
It makes zero sense to take on millions, or billions, of killer robots in hand-to-hand combat.
I don’t care how many years you’ve studied the blade. Won’t help you.
What’s smart? Two simple things.
First, you’d want to hide, but not forever. They’d be taking over more and more territory.
Eventually, you’d have to fight back.
Second, the way to fight back has to affect ALL of the killer robots (or the heart of our HAL on Steriods).
That means a smart strategy can’t involve bullets, bombs or blades. The math is simply against you. A human made of mostly water will lose when put in a fight against a robot made of steel, or even that hard plastic they put SD cards in. That stuff is invincible.
This is no video game. You’ll have to avoid fights to survive.
Third, If there’s an evil scientist or HAL on Steroids controlling them all, getting there is the answer. Be sneaky.
Fourth, if you’re facing self-replicating robots coming back from their mission to Alpha Centaurai, or worker bee robots who decided to revolt, there’s no central control system to hack or infiltrate with a virus.
The only options I can think of are (a) try to turn them against each other, (b) raise your own dumb-ish robot army that you control, (c) make peace with them somehow or (d) get off the planet. I hear Titan is nice.
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A regular volcano is easy to spot: oh look, there’s a big mountain with a crater-mouth thing on top from when it went boom last time.
I live in the shadow of big honking volcanoes, including Mount Rainier (ginormous, but has not gone off lately) and Mount Saint Helens (also big, and went kaboom).
A super volcano is an entirely different animal. They aren’t mountain-shaped. These things are so big, you could be standing on one and not know it.
Yellowstone is one giant volcano, for example.
Bad things.
No, seriously. Really, really bad.
A regular volcano can cause lahars (think of being buried in 30 feet of steaming mud), lava, poisonous gas and all kinds of ash entering the air. That ash can circle the world and cause temperatures to drop a bit, no joke.
When a super volcano goes off, it’s 2.4 bazillion times worse. Instead of a local mess, it’s a regional disaster, even continent-wide. If the Yellowstone super V blew, it would bury Nebraska in seven feet of ash.
The worst part: Nebraskan farmers wouldn’t have to worry about shoveling seven feet of ash from their fields, because nothing would grow anyway. So much ash gets ejected into the atmosphere that it blocks the sun. Scientists believe super volcanoes cause short ice ages. Short being the geological term, you know, “300 hundred years” instead of “10,000 years.”
The bad news? It’s a 100 percent guarantee.
There are at least a dozen super volcanoes around the world that have gone off before. Scientists say they erupt on a rough schedule.
The good news is those schedules are also on a geological time frame–for some of these supers, it’s 600,000 years.
Back to the bad news: some of these super volcanoes are overdue.
This is a tough one. You can’t really predict when or where one will explode.
Stocking up on canned food and ammo wouldn’t help that much, seeing how it would be a global disaster and food production would grind to a halt. There’d be massive starvation, and your three-month supply of baked beans and tuna fish would last you…three months.
Unlike other apocalyptic scenarios, such as WATERWORLD: KEVIN COSTER IS OPTIONAL, you’d want to move toward the equator instead of away from it, since those areas would be warmest.
Whatever animals survive the mini-ice age might get quickly hunted to extinction.
While this sounds completely unappealing, growing mushrooms in a cave is the kind of last-ditch thing that could work here, and in just about every other apocalyptic scenario. I’m just not sure humans can survive on mushrooms alone. Wouldn’t you get scurvy and such?
Unlike zombies and killer robots, super volcanoes definitely exist. They will wake up, as they have before, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.
The only truly preventative measure that might safeguard people is going full Elon Musk: establish colonies on the moon, asteroids and Mars.
Then when it’s safe after a few hundred years, send people back to recolonize Earth and reconnect with hardy survivors hanging out in caves and nom-nomming on mushrooms.
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Let’s talk about WATERWORLD: KEVIN COSTNER WAS RIGHT, PEOPLE–because rising seas due to climate change isn’t really a dystopian fantasy.
Climate change is happening. The world’s getting hotter, which means extreme weather, drought, melting ice caps and yes, Kevin Costner having gills and a sweet sailboat doesn’t seem so silly anymore.
So whether you’re writing dystopian fiction or prepping for the worst, a WATERWORLD scenario is worth talking about.
If you live in the northern hemisphere, as most of the world does, a WATERWORLD dystopia means heading north.
Even if your home doesn’t disappear under the waves, like a big chunk of low states like Florida could, changing weather and failed crops will mean a big shift in the population to the north.
Places like Canada and Siberia will go from frigid vistas full of moose and whatnot into much warmer and hospitable places with fertile farmland and long growing seasons.
If you’re in South America or Africa, you’d head south.
Australians? Sorry, I don’t know. Hard to figure.
We may think it’s cute that plants and seeds are the MacGuffins in so many dystopian movies, from WATERWORLD to WALL-E to MAD MAX: FURY ROAD.
In this case, collecting seeds makes total sense. Give me a choice between teaming up with a farmer with a seed collection and a platoon of Army Rangers equipped and ready for war, I’m picking the farmer. Because the soldiers will run out of gas and you can’t eat bullets.
Seeds will be priceless. Rising seas, droughts and a hotter planet will mean massive crop failures and starvation unless adjustments are made. Whether you want to be near other people or hiding out in a small group, you’ll want seeds for crops.
Why? Because (a) it’s incredibly hard to transport herds of cows, goats or other animals thousands of miles in good times and impossible when desperate people will happily kill them (and maybe you) to eat those animals, (b) seeds are small, light and easy to transport and (c) anybody who’s studied history knows humans were hunter-gatherers who had to live as nomads until they domesticated the right plants and animals.
Plants are easiest and first. Try for animals second.
Where you want to end up determines what you should gather and how you should plan.
Settling with a bigger population with advantages, like the possibility of specialists you’ll want, like doctors, carpenters, dentists, nurses and other things that can save time and lives.
Since we’re talking about the collapse of civilization, any sort of city will probably have a rough form of government. The biggest, baddest people will probably be in charge and it won’t be pretty, with power struggles if not civil war. Think Bartertown.
And any real city will be a tempting target for raiders.
Hiding out in the mountains and such protects you from living in a snowy version of Bartertown and from roving bands of cutthroats. But you won’t have access to the gear, food and medicines of bigger settlements, and that’s a huge problem when a simple infection can lead to gangrene and death.
A medium approach could work: a village instead of a big city, tucked away far off the beaten path.
This is the toughest bit. A global disaster like this means 7 billion-plus people fighting over the same resources and having the same idea: head to places like Canada, Siberia or Sweden.
It could be a disaster in slow motion, getting worse by the decade. Or the glaciers on Greenland could hit a tipping point and melt quickly.
Seems like there are two obvious options: (a) head north before everybody else even thinks about it or (b) if you wait and are competing with everybody else, travel in a completely different manner.
If it’s a sudden crisis, roads and highways will be clogged and impassable. Traveling thousands of miles on foot, mountain bike or horse isn’t really practical.
Flying could work, if you had enough fuel for a one-way trip. Tough to pull off, and difficult to have a safe landing spot. Say you’re in charge of a little airport in the Yukon and suddenly all these rich people want to land their Lear jeats packed with gold, guns and canned food. This is your chance. Block the runway unless they pay your fee, which you can make onerous. Tell them you want half of all they own. Or take all of it right when they land. People who run airports and marinas could be running things for miles.
Marinas lead to the second option: travel by boat.
Sailboats are incredibly smart for just about every apocalyptic scenario you can dream up. No need for fuel, which will run out quickly.
Hungry? Use a net or fishing pole.
Feeling unsafe? Pull up anchor and sail off.
You could sail up the west coast to Alaska, hanging out in the safety seas of the Inside Passage and towns like Juneau.
The trouble with staying in saltwater is you can’t drink it. There are methods to make saltwater palatable. I think my favorite strategy is sailing along the coast, then heading into a river to find safe harbor. There are plenty of rivers, and you’ll be able to fish for salmon and get fresh water.
Aside from the standard considerations on gear covered in previous posts, a WATERWORLD scenario brings some different angles and needs.
Going to places like Canada, Siberia or Sweden mean trees. Big evergreens. That’s what you’d build things with, which means you want hand tools to work with wood. Axes and saws, hammers and chisels, hand drills and nails.
I’d also want tools for digging and farming. Shovels, rakes, hoes.
Because these tools will break, or need repair, it’d be smart to learn basic smithing and collect bellows, an anvil and tongs. Scrap metal will be easy to find in any sort of dystopian scenario, so it’s not like you need to mine your own iron.
Warm clothing will be essential during the winters, which will still be cold. You won’t be growing cotton. It’s far more likely that you’ll tan hides and use fur, so you’d want a book or cheat sheet on tanning hides along with big, strong needles and thread.
I have to end with this. There are all sorts of apocalyptic movies, books and possibilities, most of which are either improbable or difficult to stop. If a giant space rock really wants to hit Earth, or aliens with advanced tech decide to invade, well, Bruce Willis only saves us in the movies.
Nuclear war and rising seas / climate change are two dystopian scenarios that can be completely avoided. We might want to think about that. And I think that’s part of the message of every good apocalyptic story, which isn’t just about how that kind of desperate scenario would test and change normal people into heroes and villains. Dystopia stories are really telling us, “Come over here and listen, because this is how terrible things can really get if we act like complete idiots.”
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Just as it’s not brilliant to (a) quit your job, cash out your retirement and move your family to an underground bunker in the Yukon to eat canned beans and get ready for the arrival of zombies, aliens or killer robots, it’s equally dumb to (b) do absolutely nothing. Because there will always be hurricanes, earthquakes, raging wildfires and pandemics. No matter where you live, something can go wrong.
HOWEVER: What should you actually prep for, and what scenarios are fanboy fantasies you can safely forget about?
Last week, I did a post with a great infographic created by the BBC, which sorted possible disasters in a great way. Click here: Chapter 11: What’s the actual likelihood of all the different flavors of apocalyptic craziness?
Two big ones on the BBC list are things that will happen. Guaranteed.
Yet you can safely ignore them.
Now we’re talking. These scenarios are (a) possible, if not likely, (b) capable of causing global havoc, (c) preventable, (d) survivable and (e) good fodder for a movie starring The Rock.
In the next few weeks, I’ll dive into each of these eight scenarios. Can it be prevented, and how would you actually prep to survive it?
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There are three schools of thought here:
(1) Prepare for anything, because you can’t predict what will happen in your lifetime
(2) Get ready for the most likely emergencies, disasters or apocalypse (singular, because There Can Be Only One … at a time), or
(3) Dedicate all your time, money and imagination to preparing solely for your Most Favorite Apocalypse, because the other types are lamer than a Justin Bieber concert—and if loving zombies is wrong, you don’t want to be right.
This matters because what you do to prepare for WATERWORLD: KEVIN COSTNER IS OPTIONAL is far, far different than if you expect a Mad Max wasteland next Tuesday after Kim Jong Il insults the bathroom décor at Mar-a-Lago and the Donald starts mashing buttons on the nuclear suitcase.
This great infographic by the BBC gives us a look at the entire universe of possible, probable and unlikely disasters:
Well done, BBC, just spot on. Terrifying, sure, but good.
Next week, let’s start going through all the major options.
What’s a fun fantasy that won’t happen? What’s the most likely and smart to prep for?
And how should you react to all this?
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The worst day of any flavor of apocalypse—killer robots, zombies or The Spanish Flu of 1918 on Steroids—will be Day 1, when civilization as we know it goes buh-bye faster than an airline steward can wave you off a Boeing Dreamliner.
What’s the best way to get ready for the chaos of that first day?
Unless you’re retired or on vacation, you’re typically (a) at work or school, (b) in your happy home, (c) traveling between those two places or (d) running errands and such.
Where you are makes all the difference in the world when the world goes sideways, because most people will have all their useful possessions and loved ones back home, not in their cubicle at work or the trunk of their car.
It also matters because you probably work or study in a city and live somewhere less populated. And when things go south, the last place you want to be is in a city, because that’s where the most trouble will be. Trouble is defined as hordes of zombies, armies of killer robots or scavengers willing to pull a gun so they can loot the mall before you can.
This means you’ll need different plans and contingencies depending on your location when WATERWORLD starts being non-fiction or Donald Trump starts mashing buttons on the nuclear suitcase.
Conventional wisdom would say “home,” which is wrong. Without power, heat and running water, homes will become magnets for scavengers searching for gear and supplies.
The real trouble will be food, which will run out quickly, seeing how semi’s won’t be delivering Doritos to Safeway anymore and farmers won’t be planting and harvesting Doritos anymore in the first place.
Of the essentials of food, shelter and clothing, food will be the toughest problem. Farming isn’t a good answer, since even if you already had a working farm and 10 years of experience as a farmer, the starving masses will show up and devour all your hard work.
So what did smart people do before farming was a thing? Well, the ones who survived were hunters and gatherers. Nimble nomads who followed food sources along with the seasons.
That’s the best strategy, since it keeps you out in the wilderness, close to food and far away from (a) zombies, aliens or killer robots and (b) populated areas where scavengers will be killing each other as they battle over quickly dwindling resources.
This makes it critical to pick a good area with a source of fresh water and a variety of food sources.
That rendezvous point, ideally, would be halfway between home and work/school, so no matter where you are, it’s easy to reach.
“Friends and family” is the obvious answer and the wrong one, since there’s a fifty-fifty chance zombies will show up right in the middle of a staff meeting about TPS reports.
Making it through chaos and craziness all the way to the rendezvous point will be tough. Having a stalwart band of coworkers along for the trip, now, would truly boost your survival chances.
Asking people to meet you at the rendezvous point AFTER things get crazy, well, that won’t work at all. You have to figure this stuff out ahead of time.
Out in the prepper community, you’ll see a crazy number of acronyms. Some of them apply here:
This series of posts hates complicated things, including acronyms. Hates them worse than black licorice and fruitcake. We’re all about simple and sturdy, cheap and sustainable.
Forget having four different sets of bags for different reasons. Keep it simple and have One Backpack of the Apocalypse, a single bag to rule them all.
This backpack will be with you whether you’re at home, at work, at school or stuck in traffic while radio shock jocks pretend to be outraged about something to fill three hours of airtime. How will it faithfully and magically stay by your side with you at work, home and while you commute and do errands? Here’s the trick: you’ll give that One Backpack and a Pair of Hiking Boots a comfy home in the trunk of your automobile.
The question of what goes into a One Backpack of the Apocalypse is deep, with a lot of options for specific teams. It’s worth a few posts to drill down on that.
Here’s the TL;DR version of what you’ll put in there: ways to make fire, filter water, catch food, stay warm, catch food, fix boo-boos, navigate, create shelter and defend yourself. Check out Survival Lilly, who’s from Austria and is completely practical.
P.S. Every loved one, neighbor, cousin you still talk to and coworker you take along can be of whatever shape, size, age, gender or background. Go wild. The lone condition for making them part of your Nimble Band of Nomads is they need to have their own One Backpack of the Apocalypse, because none of this will work if there are 15 people wandering around trying to share a single set of gear. That’s how you all win a Darwin Award.
To get fully prepared, make your rendezvous point a welcoming safe haven.
Bury food and supplies in waterproof containers, like five-gallon paint buckets. Create a rough shelter, whether it’s a lean-to made of logs or a big tent you stash nearby.
While this is a good topic for a post, here’s one smart, easy way to make a shelter with no tools.
Bring your friends out there, wearing their hiking boots and backpacks, and stay one night. Make a campfire, filter water from the nearby stream or lake and figure out what you’re missing now, not after the aliens land and it’s too late.
The last step is to figure out how you’ll migrate and follow food sources along with the seasons.
Migrating doesn’t mean traveling thousands of miles like the birds that fly from South America to Alaska and such. That’s crazy talk. You can accomplish what they do by simply heading into the mountains during the spring and summer, then back down to the valleys and the coast during winters.
The easiest way to do this is to follow rivers, either in a small boat or on foot. Rivers are born as streams on the tops of mountains after Zeus sends a stork and all that. This make navigation easy.
Finally, practice a bit of hunting and gathering. Spend a night or two at this rendezvous point with backup rations that you don’t touch. Practice trapping squirrels and rabbits, picking non-poisonous berries and catching these things I like to call “fish.”
P.S. Hunting big game like deer is a whole different topic. I live in deer country, and know all sorts of friends who also hunt bears and cougars. But this is not my expertise. Cute little deer hang out on my property, knowing that I only shoot photos of them, while the cougars hide in trees and the bears munch all my blackberries. I leave them be. If you want to practice this sort of thing, get a hunting license and buddy up with an expert. Big game is nothing to play around with and even a successful hunt means a lot of hard work to preserve the meat and make use of the fur and hide.
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The Red Pen of Doom 