Category: Woo-Woo

“Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.” – Jurassic Park

Ah, the future.  I, for one, welcome our new canine overlords!

I know I’ve mentioned before that when I start out some of my posts that I have a preconceived idea that just turns out to be wrong.  Well, this is one of those posts.  Honestly, I love that.  It feels almost better than vindicating my original thought – there’s a moment of clarity when I understand the universe a bit better.  And there’s no better gift than that.  Except for money.  I like money.

I read an article this week (10/16/18) about how it will require 3,000,000 to 7,000,000 years to replace biodiversity to pre-human levels.  I’ll link to just one, but this was one of those “blood in the water” stories where every fresh journalism school graduate jumped on it and there were about a 4,372 articles that all dropped about the same time with minor variations in headline.  This one (LINK) is particularly breathless and clueless – but not more than the average article on this subject.  The article indicates we’ve lost 2.5 billion years of evolution in the last 130,000 years.  Why the last 130,000 years?  They want to blame it on humanity, so when you read the article you can get your guilt going early in the morning with that first cup of coffee.  It didn’t surprise me when I found out the author works (in addition to being a freelance journalist) at a far-left environmental advocacy group.  Huh.  So, in other words, dad pays for everything?

However, almost all of this “slaughter of biodiversity” has occurred way before I was born.  And way before you were born.  But we must be made to feel guilty!  Action must be taken!  I’m fairly certain we owe reparations to the species we made extinct.  Oh . . . wait.

I believe that if you were to look a bit deeper into this story that the 2.5 billion years of evolutionary diversity “lost” was counted about 458 times.  As in – if it took 10,000 years for one bird species to develop a red feather on the top of its head, and 10,000 years for another bird species to develop a blue feather on top of its head and both species went extinct then you’d be out 20,000 years even though we still had a bird with a yellow feather on top of its head.   It actually must to be that methodology – since life on Earth 2.5 billion years ago was nothing but single celled organisms and journalism students.  And my mother.

I’m not going to lose much sleep over this.  I’m glad the sabretooth tiger is extinct.  I wish it would take all the mosquitos with it.  I’m not sad that the wolf is extinct over most of the lower 48 states – I’d prefer that rather than reintroducing the wolf, they gave little bronze plaques to the ranchers that shot them and exterminated them in the first place and then, if they have to reintroduce wolves, reintroduce them to New York City at about 1,000 per block while doing a documentary about how wonderful nature is.

Ahh, the beauty of nature.

But this article did made me ask the question – how long can Earth support life?

The Sun is growing hotter – increasing output at about 1% every 110,000,000 years, which means that it will have increased output by 10% by the time The Simpsons® is cancelled.  The reason Sun gets hotter is because of human activity that as time goes along, the Sun starts to fuse not only hydrogen, but also helium.  This helium fusion produces more output energy than the hydrogen, and also makes the Sun talk with a really funny voice.  It’s also why the Sun floats in space.  Without the helium the Sun would fall straight to the galactic floor!

According to some estimates, that probably gives us 1.75 billion years of time until the Earth is no longer habitable, and longer if we leave the window open to let the heat out.  Also?  I’d get your air conditioning looked at so you’ll know that it will run then.  Stock up on extra filters.

The other good news?  There’s no evidence that the molten part of the Earth that keeps the magnetic field going will freeze anytime in the next few billion years, so, we’ve got that going for us, too.  The magnetic field is important because it protects us from radiation streaming at the Earth, and also makes it look like we’re home so that aliens from Zontar-B don’t try to break in and steal our stuff.

So, according to the generally accepted chronology and geologic evidence:

• cells showed up four billion years ago,
• bugs 400 million years ago,
• dinosaurs 300 million years ago,
• flowers 130 million years ago, and
• my mom 50 million years ago.

Given that, we have plenty of time in 1.75 billion years for two or three more intelligent species to show up again.  And if there was a span of 100 million years or so, they’d never know that we even existed.  As I pointed out in this post (The Silurian Hypothesis, or, I’ve Got Lizards in Low Places), no part of the Earth’s surface that’s exposed is older than about 4 million years.  And there would be plenty of time for new oil for our hypothetical civilization to form, since that only takes 70 to 200 million years to cook new oil.  New people to feel guilty about using oil?  That might take longer.

And that’s what surprised me.  There is plenty of time for new civilizations created by new species to form on Earth and attempt to go to the stars.  I had (for whatever reason) thought that only humanity had that shot.  Nope.  There’s plenty of time.  I’ve even seen intrepid science fiction writers pen stories about intelligent crows in the far distant future, or calamari squid developed into sentient spaceship pilots, or even a vastly evolved set of dogs that play a lot of poker.

This picture is  . . . foreshadowing.  More on this next Friday in what may well be my most original and creative post.  I may have to take Friday off because it might take that long to get the awesome written! 

But I like people.  I am a people.  And we are the only species to have developed art, music, poetry, Twinkies® and PEZ™.   People have passed the age of no return – we have one shot at building a galactic empire.  We’ve used the easy oil, we’ve mined the easy resources.  Now?  We’re on the treadmill.  We can’t stay at this level of technological progress.  We either advance, or we regress.  It’s like the Red Queen said in Alice in Wonderland:

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”

Our technological progress has to increase just to support the billions living on Earth today.  To support more people?  To give more benefits and luxuries (like health care)?  We have to get smarter, faster still.

So how long do we have as a civilization?

This is why civilization is awesome.  Girls and beer.* 

*This post is really a continuation of the Silurian post, and it had Oktoberfest girls, so . . .

I remember reading a description of a mathematical technique that, given a few assumptions, would allow you to extrapolate the lifetime of, say, the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, or humanity.  It was in a novel.  I remembered reading it in the year 2000 or 2001.  I was going to spend ludicrous amounts of time searching it out, trying to remember a novel I read 18 years ago.  I think I would have gotten there . . . but the original source material dropped into my lap tonight!

It’s Nature, May 27, 1993 on page 315.  In it, a guy named J. Richard Gott III put together a theory, well, I’ll let Wikipedia explain it:

Gott first thought of his “Copernicus method” of lifetime estimation in 1969 when stopping at the Berlin Wall and wondering how long it would stand. Gott postulated that the Copernican principle is applicable in cases where nothing is known; unless there was something special about his visit (which he didn’t think there was) this gave a 75% chance that he was seeing the wall after the first quarter of its life. Based on its age in 1969 (8 years), Gott left the wall with 75% confidence that it wouldn’t be there in 1993 (1961 + (8/0.25)).

In fact, the wall was brought down in 1989, and 1993 was the year in which Gott applied his “Copernicus method” to the lifetime of the human race. His paper in Nature was the first to apply the Copernican principle to the survival of humanity; His original prediction gave 95% confidence that the human race would last for between 5100 and 7.8 million years.

You can find his paper here (LINK) on a German website in an obviously photocopied PDF with a hair or something on the third page.  Seems legit.  But it does have calculus, so that’s a plus.

So what does this tell me?  I will sleep better tonight.  Life will find a way.  Global warming?  It won’t stop the world.  Plastic straws?  Although they are currently the greatest threat to mankind, even more than nuclear weapons or the Kardashians, plastic straws won’t end the world.

Life will find a way.  Oh, wait.

Please tell me the Kardashians aren’t considered living things.

No!  The Kardashians lay eggs!

“I don’t need a receipt for a doughnut, man.  I give you the money, you give me the doughnut, end of transaction.  We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this.  I just cannot imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought doughnut.” – Dr. Katz

This is how I imagine dogs imagine the end of the world.

Bringing you up to speed:  our hero has been trying to get home after an EMP – bringing about what is known as The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) or The Stuff Hits The Fan (TSHTF).  The first day on the road went pretty well.  But, you know, that can’t keep up, can it?

Previous posts are:

• Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You
• Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word)
• TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!

The next day?

EMP + 1, Noon.  111 miles from home.

Sound, at sea level, travels at about 1125 feet per second.

The velocity of a bullet from an AR-15 is about 3,200 feet per second.  And from a hunting rifle, say, a .30-06?  It travels about 2,800 feet per second.

Those numbers explain why I heard a soft splat on the asphalt in front of my bike wheel, then the buzzing sound of the bullet tumbling end-over-end in a ricochet off the ground before I heard the report from the rifle that fired the bullet.

If I had enough sensitive timing equipment, I could have even given a pretty good estimate of how far away the shooter was.

The average reaction time for a human to a stimulus that they’ve been waiting for is about a 0.25 seconds.  But when you’re in a car?  Some studies say 1.5 seconds.  Others say 2.5 seconds.  All I can say is that as soon as I realized that someone was shooting at me I hit both the front and rear brakes as hard as I could.  I think I was going about 20 miles per hour.  I probably pulled too hard on the front brake – the wheel locked and I went tumbling over the top of the bike, at least partially sideways, onto my right shoulder.

I tucked and rolled as I hit the asphalt, my backpack whipping me up in the air as I rolled up on and over it.  Rolling was better than sliding, and far better than holding my arm out and having my shoulder dislocated.

I came to a stop, my bike somehow in front of me.  It must have flipped over me and slid on the road.

My front bike tire jerked and popped, and then I heard another shot.

Adrenaline filling my system, time seemed to slow down.  I could see two immediate options – first, slip into the ditch near the road and get the hell out of here.  Second?  Play dead.

The second shot into the bike made that decision easy – they weren’t shooting to warn.  They were shooting to kill.  Thankfully they were lousy shots.

And the day had been going so well.

The first day’s ride had been great and mostly uneventful.  This morning I’d woken up with the Sun, but was so very sore, especially my butt.  I folded up my tarp, Mylar blanket, and poured some water on the fire.  My Lifestraw worked, and I filled up water bottles from a (barely) flowing creek bed by taking successive mouthfuls in and spitting them into the bottle.  It wasn’t exactly hygienic, but it was also unlikely that I’d give myself Ebola, cooties, or zombie plague.  The water was cool, but tasted . . . a bit off.  I trusted that the Lifestraw’s guarantee was good, even though it was unlikely that I’d ever be able to collect it wasn’t.

For the second day, I was averaging over 20 miles per hour.  The wind was at my back.  I could see smoke rising from where I thought the big city was, and wondered how bad things were getting there.  Thankfully, I was a good 40 miles south of the big city.  But when I was getting ready to cross under the Interstate a half mile east, and then my friend, the lousy shot, changed my plans.

And I was here in this damn ditch.

Thankfully the two-lane road that I’d been on was lined with trees on either side.  I got up, ran into the hedgerow and then out of the trees and into a pasture that was blocked from view of the overpass.  I pulled a camouflage rain poncho out of my pack – it was probably better visual cover than the orange t-shirt I was wearing, and started running back east the way I’d came.  There weren’t any shots, but the thought crossed my mind that they might be sending someone out to check on me.

I didn’t intend to be there when they got to my bike.  I did recall seeing another small creek about half a mile back.  I trotted in the pasture until I got there.  I noticed my legs were itching, and looked down.  Evidently I’d jogged through a batch of stick tights, and my jeans and socks were covered in at least three different types of them:  devil’s claw, cocklebur, and burr-grass.

No time to deal with that now.  I kept going.

I followed the stream bed, attempting to keep my feet on the flat sandstone slabs in the creek bed.  As I got a half a mile away, I stopped.  I’d built up a lot of heat under the plastic poncho, and I pulled it off.  I then took the multi-tool from my pack and started pulling the stick tights out of my pants.  Eventually I gave up and took the pants and socks off so I could pull all of them out.  It took about 20 minutes, and I heard no pursuit, but that didn’t surprise me.

I imagined that whoever shot at me wasn’t going to follow very far.  They’d made their point.  I wondered what had caused them to behave that way?  My only guess was that they were pretty close to the city, and that someone had decided to do a joy ride in an older car that still worked after the EMP, and had brought the city fathers together in a posse to protect the approaches to the town.

I got finished with sticker duty, and it was now about 2pm.  I kept following the riverbank south, until I hit a railroad – which was headed due east.  Right where I wanted to be going.  If followed the railroad tracks, walking briskly, until I saw the Interstate.  The Interstate crossed over the railroad, and then the railroad crossed over the last big river between here and home.  I decided not to linger on the highly visible railway – I decided to keep jog as fast as possible under the Interstate and over the river.

Nothing.  Today.  Tomorrow?  I imagine a bright boy at the city that was defending the Interstate would see this as a vulnerability that they’d have to solve and place a fire team to cover the bridge.

As it was, I made it past the bridge, and kept walking on sparsely populated farm roads well into the night.  I avoided the two medium-sized towns, and then about 2AM, decided make a small fire about two miles from the nearest farmhouse in a small grove of trees and sleep.

I was exhausted.  I was, I guessed, 75 miles from home.  I missed the bike very much – I’d be four or five hours from home, at most.  Now?  A day?  Two days of walking?

That seemed like forever, especially on a day where I’d been shot at the first time in my life.  What would happen next?  I slept, and the rough ground wasn’t an issue.  I was exhausted.

### (Until Next Monday)

I’ve never been shot at.  But one thing that I’ve been told is, “don’t point a gun at someone unless you’re ready to shoot at them.”  I think this would be the rule in a catastrophic collapse, and also in the event that we have the long, slow collapse or civil insurrection I’m actually expecting.  Eventually, we’ll get there if things go south.

But why did we get in the story to the point where people, namely your protagonist, were getting shot at so quickly?

My thoughts are that being close to a big city when things collapse is like having a Martian death-ray pointed at your head.  People in big cities are barely under control when the economy is booming, the benefits are flowing, and the cops are out in force.  The cops won’t be at work long during a collapse scenario – they’ll be protecting their family, not yours – that’s backed up by recent experience during hurricanes like hurricane Katrina.

John Wesley, Rawles wrote about this and uses the metaphor of “The Golden Horde.”  Yes, I know there’s an odd comma in there, and no, it’s not a typo.  It’s the way Mr. Rawles chooses to do his name – ask him, not me.  Anyway, his quote on the subject from his blog (LINK) is:

As the comfort level in the cities rapidly drops to nil, there will be a massive involuntary outpouring from the big cities and suburbs into the hinterboonies. This is the phenomenon that my late father, Donald Robert Rawles–a career particle physics research administrator at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories–half-jokingly called “The Golden Horde.” He was of course referring to the Mongol Horde of the 13th Century, but in a modern context. (The Mongol rulers were chosen from the ‘Golden Family’ of Temujin. Hence the term “The Golden Horde.”) I can remember as a child, my father pointing to the hills at the west end of the Livermore Valley, where we then lived. He opined: “If The Bomb ever drops, we’ll see a Golden Horde come swarming over those hills [from Oakland and beyond] of the like that the world has never seen. And they’ll be very unpleasant, believe you me!”

And I think that Mr. Rawles is right.  And the operative distance where the Golden Horde will show up?  About a half a gas tank.  That’s, on average, how much will be in a tank.  So, if you’re more than 150 miles from a major city, that’s a start.  I cannot stress enough that this is the biggest threat that anyone can conceive of during a collapse.

Most people aren’t 150 miles from a city.  And the people 40 miles due south of the big city, in this case several hundred thousand people?  They’ll get hit early, and hard.  In this fictional state, they’re also armed.  You won’t be coming down the Interstate to get them.  The tractors will pull cars to block the exits, and nothing will get off the Interstate alive.  Country boys aren’t necessarily great at long shots of 500 yards plus, but they will learn very quickly.  And they won’t waste ammo on warning shots.  The dead body in the road will be the warning.  Or they could just post a sign that says “no PEZ® this exit” – that might work as well.

So why did they shoot at fictional me?  They probably got a dose of the Golden Horde early.  And a dose of people coming to your town with no good intent would make you distrust almost everyone you didn’t personally know.  The closer you are, the more intense the outbound pressure will be.  And normal people living in the cities will do almost anything once they realize the old rules are gone and the new ones won’t be coming back.  I think it will take longer in the suburbs where the nuclear family with the 2.1 kids feel that they have too much to lose and will be certain that the old times will be coming back.

When they lose it, and start hiking or driving out?  Ouch.

But more about that next Monday, probably.  Or the Monday after that.  But definitely probably next Monday.

I have a knapsack in every car that I drive over 20 miles from home.  In each of these knapsacks I have a Lifestraw®.  I have no idea if they work well, other than the Internet, which says that they’re pretty good.  But the nice thing is that they’re $20, which allows me to have three of them for $60, and that’s less than a single water filtration pump.  Of which I also have three four.  Water is important.  It’s not as good as beer, wine, or whiskey, but it’s still important.

Which brings up another point – if your life is on the line, redundancy is key.  “Two is one and one is none,” is the phrase most commonly used among preppers.  And it makes sense.  You’re entering an environment where every preconception you had about life has been shattered.  Constitutional rights?  Probably not a big selling point for the Warlord Trevor from Brentwood.  Having several ways to get water makes sense.

I actually have one of those camouflage ponchos mentioned above in each of my packs.  I bought them for about $16, and they were pretty thick stuff.  My theory if you’re using the emergency bag is you’re either wanting to be seen (most likely) or not wanting to be seen (EMP level stuff).  The ponchos are good.  They have multiple purposes.  And when you put them on, you’re invisible!

Okay, you’re not invisible.  But when you properly use camouflage, you’re horribly hard to see.  I can attest to being shocked during a paintball game when a camouflaged friend stepped out of a tree and I had NO idea he was there.  And he was 20 feet from me.  And I was looking for him.  Camouflage, properly used, is like magic.  And they are really good at keeping you dry.

Which is good, but invisible would be better if people were shooting at you.

Heck, invisible would be awesome most days.  Then I could sneak into the snack room at work and not feel guilty about eating a whole donut, rather than cutting one in half.  Who am I kidding?  I don’t feel guilty about taking the last cup of coffee.  Why would I feel guilty about taking the last doughnut?  It’s JUNGLE RULES!

“Look, any longer out on that road and I’m one of them, you know?  A terminal crazy, only I got a bronze badge to say I’m one of the good guys.” – Mad Max

Before Hurricane Ike:  Looks like lemon cookies, Weight Watchers® and vegetables will be there after the apocalypse.  Also?  The wine section was empty.  No booze left in the entire store. 

This is part II of a story that begins at the start of a catastrophic collapse – you can find the first part here (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You).  It begins at 4AM, at the start of a blizzard on the East Coast.  Thankfully, your protagonist isn’t on the East Coast – but he is 252 miles from home, and most of the important electrical devices that he’s used to having are now (and forever more) inoperable.  Back to the hotel room:

I was now wide awake.  Soon my hotel room would be getting cool – thankfully not cold, it was 40°F outside and not colder.  But one thing I knew – it was going to get strange, and soon.

I got dressed and started to pack.  I assessed my belongings, and the things in the room.

Computers, phones, digital watch?  Useless.  I put them on the desk.  That would be as good a place to put useless things.  It’s odd, because before I went to sleep, those items were vital for me in the information they contained and the way I used them for work.  Now they were nothing but dead weight.

Thankfully, I had packed for winter – winter coat, gloves, and boots.  I also had my workout clothes and gym shoes.  I decided to keep them – I tossed them in my backpack.  I kept some paper and a pen and pencil.  Why?  Not sure.  The novel I was reading?  I hated to leave it, halfway finished.  But it was dead weight.

I looked at the room – there were two bottles of complementary water – I could use those.  I left the room, with a single knapsack, half full.  I was headed to Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart wasn’t exactly chaos – I had apparently gotten up fairly quickly – a few of the more enterprising employees had broken into the candles and matches and there were lights up and down the main aisles.  This was a 24-hour Wal-Mart, which meant that you could buy your Ol’ Roy dog food at 3AM as the stockers replenished the shelves for the next day.

I walked down the aisle towards the toy section, and took a right.  There they were – left over from Christmas.  Bikes.  Rows of them, all in a line – from small pink bikes with pink and glitter tassels up to off road bikes with big, fat tires.

I grabbed one of those – it was on the top shelf and pulled it on down.  I looked for a pull-behind cart, but I guessed that February wasn’t a strong month for pulling babies behind a bike in the Midwest, so I didn’t see one.  I looked at the bike accessories and found a repair kit, a bike bag that strapped to the handlebars, a dozen spare tires, and some of the goop that you can pop into a tire so that it re-seals after a thorn pops through the tube.  Oh, and a small bike pump.  Not much good to have a new tire but can’t inflate it.

I then dropped over into menswear – I grabbed a wool cap and scarf, some winder gloves, and thick wool socks, and then walked to the checkout line.  A single night manager was there.

“Sorry, man,” he said.  “I can’t do any transactions at all right now.”  He waved around the store.  Power’s out.

I laughed.  “Sure, I can see that!  But I have to get this stuff – it’s my boy’s birthday this morning,” I lied,” and my ex will use this against me in court if I forget to get him a present again.”

“Sorry, man, register is dead.  No can do.”  As I got closer I could see he was a younger man, early 20’s.  Probably pretty committed to Wal-Mart.

“Hey, I understand . . . I’ll go and put the stuff back.”  I started to head the other direction back into the darkened aisles of merchandise.

I turned back to face him.  “You know, there is another way.”  I pushed the bike and tossed the rest of the merchandise on the motionless belt.

“All of this stuff has UPC labels on it.  I can just cut them off, and pay you in cash now.  Then, when the registers come back on you can ring it up.”

His expression didn’t seem to be confident that this was a good plan.

“Tell you what – the bike was about $150.”

“$147.89,” he responded.

“Yup.  And all of the rest of this stuff is less than $200, total, right?”

He nodded.

“Cool.  That’s $350.  Here’s $500.  I’ll get you the UPCs from this, and then you can keep the change after you ring it up, and your inventory matches.  We good here?”

We were good.  Thankfully I generally traveled with a few hundred in cash, mainly for emergencies.  I had $100 left as I pushed the bike out of the side door – the one that wasn’t electric.

I walked the bike to my car, which was parked outside of the hotel.  I pressed the “door open” button on the key fob.  Nothing.  Which is what I expected.  I put my actual, physical key into the lock (which I hadn’t done for years with this car) and opened the door.

Just to be sure I tried to start the car – nothing, not a light, not a click.  Nothing.  I tried the headlights – oddly enough they worked, but none of the interior lights came on.  I turned off the headlights.  The trunk was entirely electric, so I had to pull the rear seatbacks down to get into the trunk.  I was plenty dark, but what I was looking for was just one bag.

For several years I’ve kept kits in every car that we own.  Simple stuff.  A compact blanket.  Waterproof matches and a lighter.  A small saw.  Fuel cubes meant for lighting a charcoal grill.  A water-purifying straw.  A tarp, and some concentrated food bricks.  A hatchet.  100 feet of parachute cord.  Two pocket knives.  Some carabiners.  Duct tape.  Stuff for when a day turned bad.

I found it the pack – it was tan and pushed against the seat back, so it was easy to get to.  I hated abandoning the cool socket set and other tools in the trunk, but since they were heavy and I had no way to pull them?  I’d leave them for whoever found them.  I put the bike repair kit, tubes, and pump into the bike bag.

I clipped the backpack from the hotel room to the kit bag, swapped my socks for the brand new wool socks from Wal-Mart, put on the knit hat, scarf and gloves, and started pedaling.

In February, the wind blew mainly from the north.  I was heading south.  I got on my bike, and turned south, skipping the Interstate as I headed through town.  Fifteen minutes later I had cleared the edges of the town, and was headed through open farmland as the Sun began to rise.  I was on my way.

### (for now)

TEOTWAWKI is short for “The End Of The World As We Know It.”  Sure, it’s a song from R.E.M., but it’s also shorthand for groups and individuals for the sudden collapse scenario where the world changes in an instant.  Many of the old rules, if not all of them, disappear very quickly.  And, if we didn’t have electricity, we’d never have to listen to R.E.M. again.  So, it’s got that going for it.

This version of TEOTWAWKI is set quite deliberately in wintertime, at the start of a blizzard on the East Coast.

Why?

Photo via wikimedia, CC3.0 By SA, Bill Rankin

20% (roughly) of the population lives there.  Government is seated there.  The financial and trading center of the United States is there.  If that region lost power in winter, in the middle of a blizzard?  At least 50% of the population would die that week, and I would expect the total casualties would be 90% or more within two weeks in that region.  The combination of the cold and chaos and the extreme population density would make most dystopian science fiction novels look positively cheery.  One thing that East Coasters don’t think much about is where the food they eat and the gasoline they use comes from.  Hint:  it’s not New York.

The average person has a couple of days of food in the house.  The average supermarket has three days of inventory.  Beyond that?  Factories, warehouses and logistics are required to keep a continual supply of food on the way to prevent starvation.  Our technically advanced and efficient civilization that allows us our apparent wealth, paradoxically makes us susceptible to nearly instant poverty.  The areas that are the least used to modern conveniences and least reliant on power will be the most resilient.

What about the cars, would they really not work?  That’s hard to say.  Although there has been some testing done (it is summarized in the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat of Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack) that would seem to indicate that many cars (80%??) might be unaffected, there is much that is still classified – and I don’t think the classified information says “not a problem.”  I will note that Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, the guy who led the EMP study in Congress now lives off the electric grid in a self-sustaining remote farm.

But, let’s say that 90% of the cars still work.  I chose the opposite for this story, but let’s say that 90% still work.  The cars would be good . . . exactly for as long as they had gasoline in them.  Without electricity, getting gasoline would be pretty difficult.  There’s a general consensus that most cars built before 1984 would work okay, as their electronics were minimal in comparison to today.  And computers and chips would be in trouble.  One declassified document I found in my research noted that computers were at the top of the list of devices that could be destroyed by an electromagnetic pulse.  And cars today are increasingly computer-dependent, but they’re also made of metal and don’t feature long conductors, so, that might help them be more resilient.

Why a bicycle?  Well, that’s the one thing that I could be pretty sure to find at 4AM in any town with a Wal-Mart.  And having cash is nice.  One time I tried to pay with credit card but mine had been cancelled (ID theft).  Having cash was very nice.  Carry some.

But with a bicycle you can cover a LOT of ground in a day – 100 to 150 miles for someone out of shape wouldn’t be out of the question.  If someone rode regularly?  They could easily do double that, especially with the wind at your back.  I did read one book called 77 Days in September – you can get it on Amazon – where the guy walked all the way home from Houston to Montana after an EMP.

I’m pretty sure by day three he would have figured out how to get a bicycle.  You could bike his route in 12 days or so, but I guess that would have killed the snappy title.  It’s not a bad book, but, you know, bikes won’t be hurt by an EMP.  Even many motorcycles might make it through fine, or be made to work with minimal retrofitting.  Maybe that was the point Mad Max was making?

The final point for today’s post:  There is a huge advantage in moving quickly when the rules change.  On multiple occasions in my life I’ve managed to get motel rooms, rental cars, or out of a really bad situation because I realized that things were off the rails and, rather than rage about it, act before the herd did.

In emergencies, being right 15 minutes before everyone else is an amazing advantage, which is why preppers prep.

Looks like this series will take up another Monday or two, at least until our hero can get home.

But what will he find along the way?  What will he find when he gets there?