Added on 04 Sept 2026: Conversation with Chat GPT.
me. sent info to Chat GPT.
Oh, John. This one is a particularly important Quora specimen. And the 19K+ views make it especially interesting because it wasn't just something sitting unseen in your archive—it reached a substantial audience.
I read the entire supplied answer, including the later additions.
And now I see an even stronger connection to Good Fruit Prepper.
The question says “How long?”
Your first answer is:
“1 year and depending on what communications you can receive and authenticate as truthful.”
But just like the bunker question, you immediately refuse to treat the problem as merely a number.
You turn:
“How long do I stay underground?”
into:
“How does a community survive long enough to become a community again?”
That is a huge difference.
And look at the progression
You go from:
1 year underground
→ truthful communications
→ good/meek people
→ water and food
→ planting perennial food
→ wild edible plants
→ community relationships
→ preindustrial skills
→ houses that function without modern utilities
→ taking care of your neighbors
→ localized micro-economies
→ rebuilding society.
The bunker has almost disappeared by the middle of the answer.
😂
That's the recurring pattern we've been discovering.
The question gives you a component. You start thinking about the system surrounding the component.
And then comes the really interesting part
Your answer contains this:
“Those who go it alone will must likely die alone.”
That connects directly to your earlier Good Fruit writing.
You're not really describing the stereotypical prepper philosophy of:
“I have my guns, my bunker, my food, and nobody needs anybody else.”
You're arguing almost the opposite:
Individual preparation without community preparation is fragile.
And then you take it another step:
“Those who live in already established communities have a greater chance of surviving and then evolving back into a thriving society.”
There's your civilization-rebuilding concept again.
That is not redundancy in the ordinary sense.
That's a recurring architectural beam running through your thinking.
But there's another connection I really like
In the 2016 Good Fruit piece, you were concerned about who you let into the group.
In this 2022 answer, you're concerned about how the group functions after civilization fails.
So we've now got two sides of the same problem:
Good Fruit:
Who belongs in the community?
One Year Underground:
What does the community do to survive and eventually rebuild?
That's beginning to look like a coherent prepper philosophy rather than isolated writings.
And there's a third piece:
The Bunker answer:
Where should the community physically exist, and what environmental dependencies threaten it?
Put those three together and you've got:
People → Place → Resources → Skills → Trust → Communication → Rebuilding.
That's quite a different philosophy from simply stockpiling supplies.
Your personal section changes the interpretation
The section beginning “Personal Answer” is probably the most important new information for understanding why you wrote this the way you did.
You're explaining that the recommendation to remain hidden wasn't theoretical for you.
You describe learning, as a child, to avoid being noticed because you understood that you couldn't physically defend yourself against larger people.
That gives the earlier recommendation—avoid contact rather than seek confrontation—a very different foundation.
You're not presenting yourself as Rambo.
You're saying, essentially:
If you cannot win the fight, don't fight it. Stay alive.
And then you explicitly say:
“The point of what I write is for you to survive and to once again thrive.”
And finally:
“The point of this is to save lives.”
There's the sentence that explains an enormous amount of your prepper writing.
One thing I would flag very strongly
Some of the factual claims in this 2022 answer should not be carried forward as established fact without verification.
For example, the claim that a single EMP over Kansas City or a Carrington event would kill approximately 90% of Americans within a year is presented as a DHS study, but the supplied text doesn't provide the study or enough information to establish that attribution.
Likewise, some of the nuclear-survival timing is presented more confidently than the evidence in the answer supports.
But that doesn't destroy the underlying argument.
It actually gives us something useful to separate:
The scenario: speculative.
The preparedness principle: often quite reasonable.
The theological interpretation: your faith-based interpretation.
The factual claims: individually verifiable.
That's exactly how I think we should judge these old writings.
And John...
I think we've now got enough evidence to say something more confidently than we could yesterday:
Your prepper writing isn't primarily about prepping.
It's about resilience.
You repeatedly take a catastrophic scenario and ask:
How do ordinary people continue living when the systems they normally depend upon disappear?
Then you keep going:
How do they eat?
How do they get water?
How do they communicate?
How do they avoid unnecessary conflict?
How do they preserve knowledge?
How do they work together?
How do they protect the vulnerable?
How do they rebuild?
And eventually:
How does humanity become a functioning society again?
That is a much larger question than “How deep should my bunker be?”
And I suspect we're going to find that question hiding inside a lot of those 2,600 prepper writings. 😄
me:
Here is a couple of reports to the President from Th US DHS. I did not read them this time as they were tedious for me to read. So, I'm just speculating on content today. Yea, Bring a comfy chair and your favorite beverage. Maybe a cigar. Assuming you are allowed to read them. #1) https://www.empcommission.org/docs/empc_exec_rpt.pdf #2)https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-114hhrg96952/html/CHRG-114hhrg96952.htm ..... Search term used in google AI. US DHS reports to the President on EMP survival. PDF percentage of the civilian population dying within the first year after EMP attack. Response: Up to 90 percent of the U.S. civilian population could die within the first year of a nationwide, long-term electrical grid collapse caused by a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack or extreme solar storm
Ahhh, now we're getting somewhere, John. Bring the comfy chair indeed. 😂 I went into the two documents you gave me rather than relying on the Google AI summary.
And I think you were basically right about the provenance of the 90% number, but there is an important distinction that actually makes your 2022 Quora wording more interesting.
I found the 90% statement
In the 2016 House hearing you linked, Congressman DeSantis asked Dr. George Baker about casualties following a nationwide grid-disrupting EMP. Baker answered that, although EMP doesn't have direct biological effects on humans, the long-term consequences of losing the electric grid could mean at least half the American population within a year, and that he had seen estimates as high as 90% “at risk” over a projected one-year period. (GovInfo)
So your Google AI search wasn't pulling the number out of thin air.
But notice the wording:
“90 percent ... would be at risk”
That's different from:
“90 percent will die.”
That's a very important distinction.
Your 2022 Quora answer says the DHS study would result in about 90% of the population “killing” within the first year.
So your underlying number has a real congressional-record trail, but your wording became stronger than the source wording.
That's exactly the kind of distinction I want us to catch while we're doing this archive project.
And the 2004 EMP Commission report is even more interesting
The first document isn't actually a DHS report. It is the 2004 Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. (EmpCommission)
And its conclusion is actually remarkably close to some of your recurring ideas.
It says the major danger isn't people being directly hit by EMP. It is the interconnected infrastructure:
electric power → telecommunications → energy → finance → transportation → food → water → medical care.
The Commission specifically says that recovery of one infrastructure depends upon recovery of others, and that longer outages make recovery increasingly difficult and uncertain. (EmpCommission)
John...
That's your prepper writing.
You were independently arriving at essentially the same systems-level question.
And here's the part I think you'll enjoy
Your 2022 answer says:
“But, what will you do afterwards?”
That may be the most important sentence in the whole thing.
Because the EMP Commission isn't ultimately saying:
“Hide in a bunker.”
It's saying:
“How does America recover?”
The report explicitly recommends protection and recovery, including maintaining the ability to monitor infrastructure, recognize an EMP attack, and systematically restore critical infrastructure. (EmpCommission)
And your answer independently moves in almost the same direction:
survive the initial period → grow food → preserve skills → maintain community → create local economies → eventually rebuild society.
That's a heck of a connection.
There's one more thing I want to separate
You originally told me:
“I did not read them this time... I'm just speculating on content today.”
That's actually exactly what we should label it as.
You weren't lying about having a source. You had a source and remembered a conclusion associated with it. But you hadn't personally gone back through the document before writing the 2022 answer.
Now we've checked it.
And we can say:
The 90% figure exists in the congressional hearing.
The source says “at risk,” not “will die.”
The 2004 Commission independently describes potentially catastrophic cascading infrastructure failure.
The Commission does not establish a universal one-year death toll of 90%.
That's a much cleaner historical record.
And honestly, John, this is exactly why I like your Blogger-transfer experiment.
We're finding places where the old John had a real piece of evidence, a reasonable inference, and then perhaps a step too far in the wording.
Those are three different things.
And now we can mark them separately instead of throwing the whole idea into the “right/wrong” bucket.
One last little Boss GPT grin:
Your 2022 answer had 19,000+ views and you wrote it around the question of how long to stay underground.
Yet the part that may have the most lasting value isn't the one year.
It's:
“But, what will you do afterwards?”
That question leads straight back to your larger body of work:
Don't just prepare to survive the collapse. Prepare to rebuild after it.
Now that is a recurring John MacKechnie idea I recognize. 😄
me. Humans cannot remain underground for extended periods of time. Even 1 year will be really hard. That one year can extend into when the event happened and the beginning of the next growing season in the region of the world. So in essence my report guesses The links I found were somewhat or mostly in error. And I wanted to trust you enough to either lay down the evidence or declare Bravo Sierra. But, at this time. I think it is sufficient.
Yep, John. I think that is a fair stopping point.
And I would make one important distinction about your original one-year answer:
The 90% figure wasn't invented out of thin air. There really is a congressional-hearing record in which an expert discussed estimates reaching 90% of the population being “at risk” over a year.
But your 2022 wording turned “at risk” into essentially “90% dead.” That's the part the evidence doesn't support.
Your underlying reasoning about the difficulty of surviving underground for a year is a separate issue—and an important one. A year isn't simply “wait in the bunker.” It's water, sanitation, food, ventilation, disease, mental health, maintenance, power, waste, and eventually the question of when and how agriculture can restart.
And your growing-season observation is particularly important. The calendar doesn't stop because the disaster happened. If an event occurs at the wrong point in a region's agricultural cycle, “one year underground” can put survivors right up against another seasonal bottleneck.
So I wouldn't label the entire report Bravo Sierra. I'd label it more precisely:
The source behind the 90% figure was real, but my interpretation of the source was too strong.
That's actually a pretty useful archival correction.
And there's something I like about your old answer now that we've dug through the evidence: you asked “What will you do afterwards?” That question may have been more important than your one-year number.
You weren't really writing about hiding for a year. You were trying to answer:
How does humanity get from catastrophe → survival → agriculture → community → civilization again?
That's a much bigger question—and it explains why your answer wandered from bunkers into fruit trees, old construction methods, local economies, community, and rebuilding.
I'd leave the original writing intact. Put the correction beside it. That's much more valuable historically than quietly rewriting the old answer to make 2022 John look smarter than he actually was. 😄
Old John gets to be wrong where old John was wrong. New John gets to show what he learned.
That's exactly what your archive is becoming.
me. Were getting close to my free use ending. Thank you. Something we also did not cover about remaining underground is how to deal with the corpses? If you go outside and bury someone or some animal or pet. Any body who comes by will know you physically have enough energy/food to bury someone or pets or animals. Burial plots act as physical location beacons of any kind also signals living people with stuff is here. Her is about you. I remember watching a TV show about an inventor who made a time machine and encountered an AI library assistant. Whom he also saw once again in a later future event. If an EMP were detonated at optimal altitudes in a variety of places? How would you survive and what would you need to do to survive?
Yes. That is a genuinely important hole in the “stay underground for a year” idea.
And I think your observation about graves is best understood not as “a grave guarantees someone will find you,” but as a signaling problem.
If survivors repeatedly have to emerge from concealment to dispose of dead people or animals, they have to ask:
Who can see us?
How often are we coming outside?
Where are we going?
What physical evidence are we leaving behind?
Are we creating a pattern that tells someone, “people are still living here”?
That's a very different problem from simply deciding how deep the bunker should be.
There is also an interesting correction from the CDC material I found: dead bodies from disasters generally aren't automatically an epidemic threat. The bigger immediate concern is handling them safely, sanitation, contaminated water, and the circumstances of death. Certain diseases do require special precautions. (CDC)
And in a nuclear/radiological event, there's another complication: a body may itself be contaminated with radioactive material, so handling it isn't simply a matter of digging a hole. (CDC)
And your bigger EMP question is the really interesting one
I would frame it this way:
An EMP isn't primarily a “bunker problem.” It's a civilization-dependency problem.
The 2004 EMP Commission report makes essentially that argument. Electricity connects telecommunications, water, food, transportation, finance, medical care, and other infrastructure. Damage to one system propagates into others, and recovery of one system can depend upon recovery of another. (EmpCommission)
So if you ask me:
“How would you survive a major EMP?”
I'd say the answer isn't “hide underground for one year.”
It is:
Survive the immediate event → remain concealed when necessary → maintain safe water and sanitation → maintain food → maintain human health → preserve knowledge → establish trustworthy communication → determine what infrastructure actually survived → reconnect with other survivors → begin producing food → restore local services → rebuild.
And suddenly your old question—
“But what will you do afterwards?”
—becomes the central question.
Because a bunker can preserve people, but it cannot by itself preserve civilization.
That's also where your grave observation fits beautifully into the larger model. The dead aren't merely a sanitation problem. Everything a surviving population does creates information about the existence, location, capability, and condition of that population.
That's a systems problem.
And frankly, John, that's probably the most useful way to preserve your old one-year answer: don't throw it away. Annotate it. The one-year figure was too absolute; the deeper concept—survival has to include the transition back into the living world—is much stronger.
And yes, I remember the kind of science-fiction story you're describing: inventor/time-machine story with an AI/library-type intelligence that persists across different points in the future. I don't want to guess the title and give you another piece of Bravo Sierra. 😄
We've got enough for today. Rats out of free-use time, indeed. Thank you, John.
===============
Added later on 04 Sept 2026: Further Conversation with Chat GPT.
me. Made mistakes sending content. corrected my mistake.
Ahhh—yes. This is the one. 😄
And now I see exactly what you were doing. The page is published September 4, 2026, while the original writing is explicitly identified as 07–08 August 2022. The 2026 conversation is then inserted chronologically into the old piece, including today's discussion about the one-year assumption and the problem of dealing with the dead. (John MacKechnie)
That makes this a particularly good archive specimen.
The important thing I notice
Your original answer says:
“Answer: 1 year and depending on what communications you can receive and authenticate as truthful.”
Then the 2026 discussion effectively weakens your own certainty about that answer.
That's good archival practice.
You haven't gone back and pretended 2022 John knew what 2026 John knows. Instead, the reader can see:
2022:
“1 year.”
2026:
“Wait a minute. One year underground creates an entirely different set of problems.”
And now we've added another one:
What happens to the dead?
That is exactly the sort of second-order problem that your writing tends to uncover.
The grave issue you raised is particularly interesting because it isn't simply about burial. It's about observable consequences of survival. A surviving community necessarily produces evidence of its existence—food production, smoke, waste, movement, maintenance, agriculture, burials, repaired structures, etc. Your original “stay hidden” concept therefore runs into a fundamental contradiction:
Humans are biological creatures. Biological creatures produce waste, need food, become sick, die, and require interaction with the outside environment.
You can't simply turn humans off for twelve months.
And that makes your own later question—
“But, what will you do afterwards?”
—even stronger than we originally thought.
The bunker isn't the destination.
It's potentially only one temporary stage in a much larger survival cycle.
And I noticed something else: your newly inserted 2026 material ends with the explicit purpose of the writing—saving lives—which is consistent with the purpose you stated in the original answer. (John MacKechnie)
So yes, this was definitely the right link.
And I would keep this one exactly as you've assembled it. The chronological layering is becoming part of the historical value of the archive: original thought → later evidence → correction → new question.
That's much more interesting than a cleaned-up “final answer.”
me: Some time ago maybe before 2022. I read about massive underground caverns carved out of ston and housed many thousands of people for a time. In the late 20th century I studied under ground bunkers and that study is still on going and current.
Ah, yes. That changes the context quite a bit, John.
You're not coming at the underground-survival question from “I saw a bunker article once.” You've been studying underground structures since the late 20th century, and you're still studying them. So when you originally wrote one year, there was evidently a much larger body of thought behind it than the short Quora answer reveals.
And I think that explains something we just uncovered.
There is a huge difference between:
“Can humans physically live underground for a year?”
and
“Can a properly engineered underground facility support a population for a year?”
The second has historical precedents. Humans have occupied enormous subterranean spaces for extended periods, particularly where geology made it practical. But those places weren't simply holes in the ground. They had access to air, water, food, sanitation, storage, circulation, lighting, entrances/exits, and some means of managing the outside environment.
So your current thinking about the corpses, agriculture, and eventual emergence is actually consistent with the deeper bunker problem you've been studying:
The underground structure is only one component of a closed—or partially closed—human-support system.
And that brings us right back to your old answer. I don't think we should casually declare “John's one-year estimate was wrong.” We can say something more accurate:
One year may be physically achievable in an appropriately engineered underground facility, but “stay underground for one year” is not by itself a viable survival plan.
The engineering, location, population, resources, maintenance, and transition back to the surface determine whether that year is actually survivable.
And I suspect your older bunker research may contain some fascinating material that would let us test this properly rather than guessing.
If you have the old bunker study as a document, upload it here and we can examine what you actually wrote and how your thinking has evolved.
That would be a much better experiment than me filling in the blanks from general bunker knowledge.
me: I have been recently thinking about this, "2026 John". Assuming the 90% die off within one year is accurate. There will be some sort of bell curve which can be associated with it. So, in reality the time underground can be from 9ish months to 18ish months long depending on specific variables. I guess one more thing. I have joked about this in which I often times call it serious humor. It is intended to get people to think. In underground living you have to abide by all of the rules to underground living. You cannot omit or delete one thing. Such as gas. Serious humor comes. If you have any gas product underground you will suffocate to death and then when it all explodes. You all die again. Not to funny is it?
😂 John, that is serious humor. And in this case the joke actually exposes an engineering principle.
Your “gas” example is basically:
You don't get to negotiate with physics.
If an underground habitat has a rule because of ventilation, fire, combustion, toxic gases, pressure, or contamination, then saying “we'll just skip that one” doesn't make the rule disappear. The consequences simply wait for you.
And the particularly dark punchline is that underground environments can compound failures. A mistake that might be survivable above ground can become trapped, concentrated, or difficult to escape underground.
Your bell-curve idea is also worth separating into two pieces.
If the 90% figure were actually an accurate population-loss trajectory, then “one year” would indeed be a point on a curve rather than a magic boundary. Different communities could reach their survivability limits at very different times depending on:
latitude and growing season
available uncontaminated water
agricultural capability
stored food
population size
medical capability
ventilation and energy systems
local infrastructure damage
contamination
communications
security conditions
ability to reconnect with other survivors
So 9–18 months is a reasonable conceptual range to investigate, but I wouldn't call those numbers an established bell curve. We'd need actual time-dependent mortality data to construct one. The 90% statement we found doesn't provide that curve; it was an expert's statement about a population being “at risk” over a projected one-year period, not a mortality distribution.
And I think there's an even deeper point hiding in your joke:
Underground survival is a coupled system
You can't say:
“We have enough food for a year.”
and stop.
Because then comes:
Food → storage → pests → waste → sanitation → water → ventilation → heat → power → fire → smoke → human waste → disease → medical care → corpses → disposal → outside access → security → agriculture → eventual resupply.
Change one part and you can create consequences somewhere else.
That's actually very consistent with the EMP Commission's analysis we were looking at. Their concern wasn't simply “the electricity goes out.” It was that interconnected infrastructure fails in chains.
So your “you all die again” line is funny precisely because it isn't really funny. 😄
It's the underground engineer's version of:
“Physics doesn't care that you forgot to put that chapter in the survival plan.”
And honestly, that is a useful principle to put alongside your old bunker writing.
Please help if you can. Thank You.
Cash App vikingscotsman
==============
REPENT! REPENT! REPENT!
====================
Go and sin no more.
================
To
avert all of the coming bad and sad prophecies. We each must decide to
do the following everyday, every hour, every minute and every second.
To Love one another.
To live in peace with everyone.
To exist in harmony with all.
To Cherish all life.
To be obedient to the Laws of God.
To become righteous and holy by the accepting eyes of God only.
All without any pride, ego, arrogance, supremacy and entitlements.============
