The Smartest Things We Can Do In The West?

Post Reply New Topic

I've had thoughts off and on about the stability of societies or, as guys like Graham Hancock occasionally put it, the survival of advanced cultures if really nasty geological or astronomical things happen (eg. asteroid impacts, commets, supervolcanoes, mass coronal ejections, etc..). Our systems, albeit efficient in some ways, seem incredibly vulnerable. People talk all the time these days about where we'd be if we had another Carrington Event or if someone who wanted to really disrupt order in the US launched a high-altitude EMP.

It seems like, if we like what we have and really want to make sure it can survive almost anything, we'd really want to find ways to deleverage some of the frailty we have. I get that most of what we do and how we do things is in large part due to finance, taxation, and what people are willing to pay for (sadly - you see a lot of infrastructure decay because what people already have is typically out of sight, out of mind unless a disaster occurs). That's where I think the smart thing to do would be to really focus on technology or means to really increase the $$ value of things such as local root cellars, each city and town having it's own reserves of renewable energy, etc. etc.. It might not be critical for each household to have such redundancies of both energy and food reserves but it would probably be very wise for each city and town to have at least something aside from just assurances from FEMA that the US government has their backs; ie. if the disaster is big enough I can't help but doubt that there's enough people in FEMA to take care of large swaths of the continent at the same time - they'd be closer to sweeping up the fragments when it came down to it.

Does anyone have any thoughts they'd add on this problem from the practical side or is this perhaps one of those topics that just too far-out for WP PPR and too close to survivalism?