I thought there were a few more days buffer at each point he discussed, but it's mostly in line with my expectations.
We need to spend quite a bit more on redundancy than we have been doing.
How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
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Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#12Anyone interested in this should check out the book, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm by Lewis Dartnell.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#13scary. presume FEMA would significantly mitigate things in a Texas-wide outage ... but something much wider ... yikes
The US has 3 separate grids… which isn’t actually a lot. I don’t really trust FEMA if something took out, say, all 3 (Texas being one). If you can’t pay your FEMA workers while their families are panicking, you are toast. Total collapse follows quickly.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#14Parts of Ukraine are there now.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#15I'd be curious if it would be better to be in the city or the country. My hunch is that the city requires more "inputs" to stay survivable (fewer food/water stockpiles available), dependant on inputs. However cities would also be the focus for recovery efforts and disaster relief. On the flip side, the country has a greater store of natural resources per-capita (water, likely food, heat sources), however would be dep…
Specialization means the country is lacking too. Farmers may have a garden but they count on regular trips to the grocery store. OTOH farms almost universally have fuel tanks and generators and so can get by without the grid for weeks.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#16I'd be curious if it would be better to be in the city or the country. My hunch is that the city requires more "inputs" to stay survivable (fewer food/water stockpiles available), dependant on inputs. However cities would also be the focus for recovery efforts and disaster relief. On the flip side, the country has a greater store of natural resources per-capita (water, likely food, heat sources), however would be dep…
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Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#17A lot of old Cold War preparatory war game scenarios start with EMPs blanketing the continental US. It only takes a few (like 1) nuclear weapon detonations in thin atmosphere (a few dozen km up) where the primary heat transfer mechanism is radiative (vs. convective, conductive) to cause enough EMP to take out pretty much the entire continental US grid.
The military is fully hardened against EMP. Civilian infrastructure, not so much.
"The EMP robustness of the civilian infrastructure of the United States can be summarized far less equivocally: it is entirely non-existent. Our civilian telephony, electricity, broadband communications and electronics plants are all naked to our nuclear-armed enemies. They were neither designed, nor engineered, nor constructed nor are they operated so as to survive nuclear explosion effects, even at very great distances – for the 'invisible hand' of the marketplace provides no incentives for EMP robustness, nor penalties for failing to so prepare. Large electric power and telephony systems are known to fail under the effects of solar storms, which impose far smaller electromagnetic stresses than are known to arise from high-altitude nuclear explosions of even modest scales. Consequently, even a modest, single-explosion EMP attack on the U.S. might well devastate us as a modern, post-industrial nation."
https://spp.fas.org/starwars/congress/1999_h/99-10-07wood.ht...
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#18I'd be curious if it would be better to be in the city or the country. My hunch is that the city requires more "inputs" to stay survivable (fewer food/water stockpiles available), dependant on inputs. However cities would also be the focus for recovery efforts and disaster relief. On the flip side, the country has a greater store of natural resources per-capita (water, likely food, heat sources), however would be dep…
In the country it's also easier to be raided by people who know or suspect you have food and water. One house with nothing around it for miles vs an apartment in a huge building, is basically hiding in a crowd.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#19I'd be curious if it would be better to be in the city or the country. My hunch is that the city requires more "inputs" to stay survivable (fewer food/water stockpiles available), dependant on inputs. However cities would also be the focus for recovery efforts and disaster relief. On the flip side, the country has a greater store of natural resources per-capita (water, likely food, heat sources), however would be dep…
I think it would depend on how "total" the collapse would be.
For there to be support, something still has to be working to coordinate it. And if nothing is working, it would be interesting to evaluate how long that would take to come back up. Meanwhile, I'd think the country would be better.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#20I'd be curious if it would be better to be in the city or the country. My hunch is that the city requires more "inputs" to stay survivable (fewer food/water stockpiles available), dependant on inputs. However cities would also be the focus for recovery efforts and disaster relief. On the flip side, the country has a greater store of natural resources per-capita (water, likely food, heat sources), however would be dep…
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