The Non-Dudebro's Guide to the Apocalypse

true! hmm. people can survive in like, the desert, but that only works because there are relatively few people/animals to a large amount of space/resources. which wouldn't be the case in the event of a global water shortage.

 

Spoiler: Derail warning!

Yeah, no need to dam them all! There are just so many of them compared to a lot of other areas. I forget which river it is, the Elwha? that had dams removed and things started improving so quickly. Super cool, I'd've loved to have been able to do some metagenomics there and track the microbial community changes over time and before/after dam removal. Would have been pretty interesting, I imagine.

... Fuck, I want to get back to the PNW and work there.

 

Stupid question, could we really not figure out how to make the ocean drinkable? I dont really know that much about water science

 

Spoiler: another, entirely seperate but post apocalyptic derail

i keep thinking kintsugi motorcity au.
whoops.

 

You just need to take the salt out. But you need lots of energy for that, oil-exporting countries in the middle east do that a lot.

 

Desalination is possible but energy-intensive on a large scale. Locally, I think you can do the old evaporate-and-collect method to remove salts and such? But it doesn't produce that much potable water (e.g., probably wouldn't be feasible to produce enough water for a whole community/all their animals + plants).

 

Spoiler: More post-apocalyptic derailing

But what if Kintsugi post-apocalyptic road trip AU?

 

Mm, true what you said about the petrol. Maybe some kind of global EMP affecting electricity in cities and stuff? idk, man I'm just throwing ideas out there. I was too young for the A-bomb and the cuban missile crisis (my parents weren't, but WW2 hangs over mum's head more than anything else. And dad was just a few years too young to be drafted for 'nam, so... I'm a child of peacetime, I guess, except for all the awful middle eastern crap but then I think that's a permenant fixture of human warfare.)

Oh geez. I'll stay at home, thanks. It's damp enough here in yorkshire that even if there was a drought we could manage just from the reservoirs for a good long while, so long as we boiled it. (DEFINITELY drinking beer and cider to lengthen it out too.) Even if it magically got so hot as to turn the UK into a dustbowl, I'll just dig myself a nice cool hole and wait it out XDD

 

You should def come to the PNW. I mean we do have that giant fuck off underground volcano under Yosemite due to go it the next several thousand years that will probably wipe us off the face of the earth in a terrific crater, but that just means we'll go fast while everyone else suffers through volcanic winter :D

 

As long as there's still trees and green things. Apocalypses in dust bowls make me sad and heart-sick. (Like, is this ALL THAT'S LEFT? Did we really wreck it so bad? If so, brb, I'll go west and see you suckers in the next life.)

I need wilderness in my end of the world, or else it's just the end XD

 

re: energy for distillation, would solar panels work?

 

Regular sun heat also works!

 

beautiful
and actually not THAT far out of the reach of this thread, we gotta find each other!

no. plenty of tree. is gud.

 

I recently went to Cyprus and it was so hot on the rocks by the sea that in the afternoon you could pick salt crystals out from where the shallower pools had been XD

 

Just gotta finish this dang doctorate program first....

 

Sadly, I think desertification would be the mostly likely scenario if we are talking an actual doomsday that could take place. Life on this planet has existed for millions of years, and humans have only occupied a tiny blip of that, our cities an even smaller blip. But we are a tenacious species that proliferates through adaptation, not just of our own to a situation, but by forcing the plants and animals around us to adapt to us. Wilderness will still exist, and exist in more abundance most likely, due to the decline of urban sprawl. We'd become nomadic again, and our population centers would scatter, shift, and rebuild.

I've lived in the desert and it's just as beautiful and wild as the deep green forests of my home state, just in a different way.

 

(Lives near a river)
(Would probably travel southways towards the mountains)

 

Yeah but if we play at apocalypses can it not be the desert one. I'm sick of Horse With No Name scenarios XDD

 

Eh, I guess I'm more into realistic problem solving aspect of an apocalypse rather than lone gunman high adventure fantasy ones. I got Minecraft if I want to play around with that.

 

I think mostly, my biggest contention with most dude bro apocalypse scenario solutions is... creating hostile reactionary bunkers of dug in people defending a commodity resource is short sighted and the opposite of a solution. So too is going out raiding and pillaging. If we are facing anything other than a total world wide shift in some capacity of something vital to literally everything's existence, societies will reorder and rebuild; probably very quickly. We will be without some current conveniences, but society itself will not fall apart and breaking into a pharmacy with crossbows becomes a jerk move. If it is the kind of scenario where we face an epic catastrophe that interrupts society as we know it, long term survival will not be contingent on a scattered few people that hoarded guns and canned beans. They may be better fortified in the short term, but they will miss out on what comes after which is rebuilding, and rebuilding requires a social, supportive community with resource sharing, not hoarding.

tl;dr, it could never be as bad as you think it will be, and even if it is, we're not going to see Mad Max Fallout Survivor situations arise out of it. Keep the cross bows for hunting, not people :P