angelchemuel wrote:
It was like..er...a long time and longer than any of you sheeple and unbelievers! You shall rue the day you mocked this post-apocalyptic warrior-hunter shaman. Him and his tinned food! Have you even watched Mad Max?

I would survive a year....

They give me a month..

mikey mikey wrote:
You swerver you....
Yup I've watched all 3 and got the box set....have you?

Actually Jane, on a semi-serious note, I recommend you watch Safety Not Guaranteed.

It's a low budget indie film but it is great, provided that you don't know any spoilers.

Back on topic:

One of the problems I see with imagining an apocalypse and estimating ones survival chances, is that the nature of the apocalypse is not really ascertainable:

Consider a few rather horrible scenarios:

1) As the AP reported yesterday, some labs have just started messing around a strain of bubonic plague. An outbreak of that and you an epidemic that kills about two thirds of infected humans within four days. Most recent case btw was last month in Madagascar. Unless you have a ton of antibiotics in stock, your chances are slim.

2) The government get the water cannons in, the rubber bullets and the tear gas. They switch to an electronic banking, lock down all supermarket dumpsters and put everybody on zero-hours contracts in their final attempt to re-introduce the society of Victorian England. Drones are deployed to hunt down people avoiding the work house, electronic tags under the skin with GPS for all, and house servants working seven days a week while trying to avoid getting raped by the people upstairs. Oh and satellites to detect any hidouts. The technology is there now for this. The political will certainly is. What skills and prep are going to help here?

#2 there bothers me more than many other scenarios.

its a game,its a bit of fun, get real you lot!!! it has absolutely nothing to do with whether you would survive or not. I'm not basing my survival on what someone else thinks my answers should be.

@LW...we are having fun with it...and it's a good thread...there's some good tongue in cheek stuff posted...which is the way of looking at this type of stuff.

@ Mikey...I agree with Andy...#2 in your post is the most concerning one and pretty much sums up the kinds of threads one can peruse at ones leisure in the Todays News and General and other good sections are also available

well how long would anyone here survive, for real, post apocalypse?

I guess it depends on the type of the apocalypse?

Here where I live I think the survival chances would be possibly slightly better than in most places as there's not much population and lot of the agricultural infrastructure of the "old days" is still intact and in active use, many old houses have wells and gardens here and I means dozens in every residential areas built in fifties or earlier. (Closest well and garden to my apartment are both about twenty meters away. )

Although many people are so clueless about these things that they would probably resort into looting and taking things by force which could end up very badly for many.

I think the worst kind of apocalyptic event here would be an outbreak of some deadly disease... I think we're too far from any nuclear power plants and in case of war the more populated areas would probably get hit worse? Its quite difficult subject as apocalyptic world scale events are quite rare luckily.

Yes, if it results in a kind of "wild living" lifestyle, I think Finland would be a LOT better than the U.K.

I'd be okay-ish in a Wild Living kind of existence. I'm already pretty good at foraging for wild fruit, vegetables and herbs; as long as I have our Springer Spaniel, Ruby, we'd do well - she catches an awful lot of bunnies (not great food), pheasants, grouse; and would catch a lot of ducks and geese if I didn't stop her. That said I have no know-how of how to prepare and deal with such foodstuffs.... I give some of the pheasant away to neighbours because I wouldn't know how to get it read to cook or how to cook it. But I suppose in a chips-down situation, I'd learn fast enough. I'd have to!

As for the other considerations: shelter and the like... I have no idea. I cling to my caravan!

That said, when I take into account things like clothing, footwear, tools and the skills needed to keep any machinery going (or create simple machinery), I'd probably do very badly.

I think Finland is probably one of best places to survive at in a SHTF scenario... There's a LOT of untouched forests around here, towards the north a very sparse population and the forest + lakes are full of food that just waits to be taken to good use if you know how to deal with it. Fishing and hunting skills would go a long way over here. And to have a dog who knows how to catch food, that would be awesome! I think my dog is so dumb he would just play with the animals he finds... He always tries to chase rabbits around here. Those things are plenty btw if you know how to trap them or hunt them with bow. There's a lot of guns here too, more than people think, hunting rifles and shotguns are very common but I presume that if SHTF those people with guns would stick with it and not give them unless taken by force.

I know quite a lot about handcrafting things and I can fix clothes and probably could fix leather boots if I had to so I guess I would fare ok on that regard. Although I don't have much good clothing at hand, most of the good survival clothing is at the summer house. There's big bunch of old US army clothes, few pairs Finnish boots which can take any weather and work on all seasons, lot of thick wool socks and that sort of stuff. Also there's quite a lot of fishing gear. Actually, if some horror movie scenario would play out, the summer house is the place where I would want to be... Its literally in the middle of nowhere but there's plenty of old farms nearby and lakes, so finding food there would be no problem at all. Also the place can be completely heated with firewood and that will never run out there.

UK would probably be screwed as there's so many people and without "the system" in place, many things would probably run out very soon. Although, don't you guys have quite a lot of rural areas away from big cities?

Hexhammer wrote:
The rural areas tend to be just full of grass as far as i am aware with not many forests.

I think they are paid by the EU and large companies not to grow or do anything with it.

They do a nice dry stone wall though.

I would probably achieve more in the right rural area than i do in this construction of misery but whether i could survive for long period,dunno.

Forest is always a better option than grasslands.... More shelter from the elements and prying eyes and also its always a better food supply. The good side of grasslands is that its quite easy to convert it into a field of some sort to grow food, in here making a field for crops is a huge task, the soil might be unsuitable, literally tons of stones everywhere and tree roots. Swamps can be dried but that also is a huge task. These sort of things would require some sort of a community to be done efficiently. Survival alone or in small groups could happen in Finland though as its possible to hunt and gather a lot of things.

Our downside is long and cold winter which could fuck up any survival plans if people had to face it unprepared. Also I would imagine that there would be a huge wave of immigration towards north, as more than one in five people are located in south and situation there could grow very unstable in a catastrophic event.

the further one is from the big cities and large urban centres the better off they will be, those places will be hell on earth once the power goes down and the mains services stop and the stores don't get resupplied and the filling stations are empty.
many people will not survive, indeed many have said to me on forums that they don't want to survive, they wont have the skills and knowledge to be able to adapt to the new "normal".