General Chat

It is May and weather ok ish

Try making a small fire in the garden starting with no implements other than a sharp knife. Collection of natural materials from nearby allowed. Very few people can do this even in the countryside. We had this as a challenge when I was in the Scouts.

I think you would find making a structure which could provide shelter from cold, rain and winds even harder. Remember no power, B&Q shut ...

Water ? Food ? Sure Bear Grylls and like minded people could manage, Navy Seals et al but ordinary people ? No way. Most people cannot even fix basic faults with their car or house or computer or repair minor damage to clothes. Without supermarkets they would not be able to tell which plants were safe to eat. How many people know how to catch, kill and butcher an animal? How to grow barley and wheat and make bread? The list of essential skills which are all but forgotten is endless.

Assuming yr local survivalist was still alive the first thing would be back to tribal living with chiefs. The chiefs would fight with nearby chiefs and so on. Women's rights would vanish nice or not.

It took mankind around 1 mn years to sort these problems. Before that h.s. was very much an endangered species.

What does Eldrick think would happen to his lovely nuclear power stations without power and personnel? Or places such as Windscale ?

Maybe not on the same level, but if you have what others want and your only defence is being nice I hate to say it but we all know what will almost certainly happen.

Manchester was a 'soft target' of shear lunacy yesterday.

I'd like to think that were the case but will being nice be taken as being a soft target so to speak?

I only have school girl science ( and not much of that :-) ) but I know how to grow things,and could certainly build some type of shelter, and a fire etc...but my main asset as a survivor would be that I am generally nice to people, you would probably survive longer living next to me than next to some :-)

Yes, the all too frequent NF fires are all down to the usual reasons inc arson. The New Forest bogs are not peat seams which can and do catch fire. They are a tip top SSI.

I was at uni during the three day week. The long interruptions of power made ordinary life impossible. In 1987 great storm we were without power for two weeks. Luckily I had an Aga still running on coke but life was still v difficult. I shelled out for a small generator which helped.

There has been next to no progress in the UK to improving the resilience of our data networks and power grid. At least one major data centre is at serious risk of flooding as are many grid power hubs.

Few individuals or small biz have a viable backup or UPS even though the cost is low and the cost of data loss high.

Pretty sure most of the fires in the New Forest were not peat based fires but just good old dry grass and trees and stupid tourist dropping glass or fag ends.

In 1989 yes a solar flare knocked out Quebec power but an ice storm managed it just as well since then too.

The thread though wasn't about this......I agree many of us would find it hard to survive in any major situation...think back to the last power outage you "suffered" how did you manage for what may have been a few hours of inconvenience?

If anything is schoolboy science it is usa style survivalist dreaming.
When did you get your degrees ?

I think you are missing the point of the thread, plus I personally am not really interested in your schoolboy science, most of which is wrong but I wont get drawn into correcting you.

The New Forest is just part of a much wider area of heath and woodland which extends far into Dorset and Wiltshire. I cannot remember a year when there has not been a serious forest/heathland fire in this area.

I have seen peat fires for myself though not in the UK. No need to google!

The age of the planet is about 4.5bn years. Primitive animals only evolved 500mn years ago. Humans 2mn years at best. The beginnings of modern civilisation 10 000 years. The sun has about 2bn years before it overheats. Man and interstellar is the only way anything can be saved. There is no time for a reboot.

Over the last hundred years or so history has shown that there is a lot of resilience to large scale disaster such as volcanos (nobody has mentioned Yellowstone yet,) , earthquakes, tsunami, atomic bomb, virulent disease, drought, flooding, asteroids (Kamchatka ). A total power outage in Quebec in winter caused b solar flare caused misery but was fixed.

Disaster scenarios make good tv / movies and a decent wage for Bear Grylls and his friends but are improbable.

Judging by the complete horlicks that the govts of SEAsia inc Oz are making of their environment I would not put them very far up the survival scale.

:)

When you look at Maslows hierarchy of needs, food, water, warmth and rest are all that is needed to actually survive, to stay alive. I think that a lot of people would manage that. What would happen after a short time when the other 'needs' started to kick in is anyone's guess. Some sort of organisation would be required if people were clumped together and the realisation that there was no entitlement to anything would hit hard.

I think that people who live in the current 'third world' areas would be the most likely to survive and ultimately flourish. I'm not sure if the western world could cope with the deprivation and lack of infrastructure. IT would certainly be Darwin in action - only the fittest would survive.

Which raises another thought - would it necessarily be a bad thing for the species in general? In many ways, it would be like rebooting the human race. Tragic for individuals but maybe good for the hive?

Really? Fires in the New Forest?
The 'ferocious' fire would be in 1976 - during the long drought.
The drought caused fires in other places -mainly due to the dryness of the whole country. They happen.
Note: There have been fires since the 1970's.

Yes, Rolo, I KNOW peat bogs can burn - therefore fuel.
Peat BOGS are however, less likely to burn than peat seams, as the name suggests, they're in watery places.
*sigh* Just so you don't start quoting a text book at me:
Peat seams can catch fire and travel underground, rather like a coal seam fire - Peat bogs much less likely to.

I thought this was a thread on survival, not a 'who can google the most' thesis on asteroids. :-(

Depending on the time of year there have been ferocious fires in the New Forest. In the 70s my sister nearly lost her house but got away with burnt paint.

Peat bogs can burn and when they do they are extremely difficult to extinguish.

NASA has put in place two or three satellites designed to improve warning of a Carrington event. As Eldrick says there is no protection for unhardened systems. This by far the most likely sudden world wide disaster scenario. Next up the oceans have lost 2% of oxygen in 50 years due to global warming. If the trend is not halted a threshhold will be crossed with mass suffocation of animals. The only fix is to drastically reduce the use of carbon enrergy sources inc log fires.

There are, surprisingly, peat bogs in the New Forest - I'd head there!! :-D
First rule of survival - fire!

You don't have to wait for an asteroid, North Korea will wipe us all out soon enough. :-(

And on that pleasant note I will say good night.

I think MDF gives off a lot of poisonous fumes, Maggie - no good for cooking or BBQ's :(

You could get to peat outside the impact and devastation zone, but the latitudes you find it at would soon be frozen over.

a repeat of the Carrington event would be cataclysmic as well. We are entering the solar minimum period so we've got a breather for about 5 years, but the next maximum will bring a chance. it will happen again sooner or later and there's no way of predicting it more than 3 days in advance.

A possible event a whole lot more likely than sn asteroid hit is a major mega storm of solar flares from the sun. It could easily knock out satnav and the many systems which depend on it, much of the none hardened internet, data storage and power distribution systems.

This actually happened in 1859 and melted telegraphic systems. A repeat today and there would be utter chaos.

I was going to say, a moot point would be whether there was fuel - but I suppose the destroyed buildings could provide that - though there's not much wood in a concrete building, and I presume furniture etc would be ash.
Not sure how MDF burns :-(

Would the peat in peaty areas be burnt, or would the dampness save it?

I think that's a good point about information storage. No power = no information, once batteries run out and fuel for generators is used up.

It's scary in many ways to think how reliant we are now on things we take for granted. Even 100 years ago we only had a fraction of the daily devices and utilities we just accept as normal today.