Shortest Answer: Preplanning.
Shorter Answer: Lifestyle Change.
Learning Short Answer: Preindustrial Skill sets.
The Prophetic One Thing Answer: Maybe, not one thing. Once you know or think you know or believe what other people have said or what the prophecies say. You are supposed to act on those things in which you believe to be true. If you are prophecy orientated. You need to know that any bad and sad prophetic message given is supposed to end up as a falsehood. Wait? whaaaa? Yes, all bad and sad prophetic messages is either supposed to be prevented or mitigated. Thus is the prophetic message basic intention is to save lives. Read the Biblical accounts of Jonah and of Joseph. Joseph knew the prophetic dream and also knew that the bad and sad prophetic dream could not be prevented. Then he was given an Egyptian name and the second highest rank. So an organized plan of seven years would mitigate the coming seven years of drought and starvation. Instead of death, the mitigation offered a chance at survival. While the prophetic story of Jonah brings to the wicked and evil people of Nineveh a chance of continuation via prevention. In which there was prevention but that prevention turned into a delayed judgement as the people of Nineveh were still destroyed after about 100 years or so. Then forgotten and then rediscovered under Mosul Iraq.
Castle Keep Agua Answer: The very first rule is to have a clean drinking water access via an underground water source. Do not buy land if you do not have this one thing. If your on land that does not have a clean drinking water source. Then your in a do over or start over situation. The point of the ground water source is to keep you hidden and to cause people passing through to not believe your property is a good safe place in which they will make into their home.
Location Answer: You need to learn the common weather patterns for each season and for each 11 year solar cycle and for El Nino’s and La Nina’s. Your physical property needs to be far away and upwind from all nuclear target sites as well as all nuclear power plants. You must be far away from all military bases, major cities, major highways, rail, airports and etc. Your chosen physical location should be hard to see and difficult to get to. Which also makes everyday living in that secluded spot a very real daily chore. Which also can make isolation for up to many months in case of severe weather. Your ground should be high enough so as not to flood. Check out all of the destruction from recent hurricane Helene.
House And Other Buildings Answer: Your home must be designed, engineered and built to withstand all of the harsh realities of living where ever you choose. Which means your home must be efficient enough to actually be a livable safe space during extreme temperatures especially in the absence of any power or any energy resources like firewood, gas, oil and any other fuel source. Your home must be able to survive any forest fire, tornado, flood, heavy snow and ice, extreme temperature swings, hurricanes, four or two legged wild animals and etc. The essence of your home is supposed to be that safe sanctuary that you flee to and not flee from. The safest and most efficient home style I have found is the single one piece concrete monolithic dome home. These can be completely buried or partially buried or above ground. Research by you is a good idea. The other is the Quonset hut and with sprayed on concrete along with rebar. These Quonset huts can also be buried. The governments of the world do use both for specific functions and purposes. Research cold war missile silos of various kinds as well as underground military bunkers. Every access point must have a sizeable mud room with shower, proper soaps and aggressive exfoliating scrub brushes that will not feel good. Washer, dryers, pantry for food, towels and clothes. All of which may have to be burned just in case.
Under your home you should have a tall basement. The tall basement ceiling should hide most of the necessary infrastructure and under the floor you should have several feet of storage and other access space. A two room thermally isolated root cellar. which should be underneath the kitchen via a dumb waiter. Your two room thermally isolated root cellar should have secret out of the way access to the above ground properly orientated to the seasonal sun a rather large all natural green house.
Air Answer: Your living space must be air tight and have a positive air pressure. Clean and sanitized air must come in from one side, go through every room and then exit out the other end. You should have an air intake radiation monitor.
Water Answer: You should hide and keep secret any and all clean drinking water sources. Your water well point should be both powered and manually pumped. You should have one hidden away underneath your home, each barn or any other outlying building. All pump and water movement noises and vibrations must be mitigated. You should have some of the following listed items like a radiation monitor, multi staged filtration, water softening, alkaline machines, distillation, Reverse Osmosis and UV lighting. They must be arranged in a proper order. You do need to realize that once you run out of salt and spare parts. That’s it and it is over for the conditioned water. You must build sufficient hidden and out of the way space for the many pallets of 50 pound water softening salt bags, tools, work area, spare parts and etc.
Food Answer: Something to think about. What is the point of surviving a very severe emergency event if your just going to starve to death. So how much food per person and surprise guest should you store up? What happens when the world changes and the seasons are not ideal? What happens if you have one or more crop failures. Did you know it could take up to or more than 90 days to go from seed to harvest? Did you know it can take up to five years to go from a fruit/nut seed to harvest. While an avocado can take up to ten years or longer. Did you know for every tree you take down for whatever reason? You should plant ten more in it’s place. Did you know that an animal can be both a food source and a food resource like chickens, cows and goats? Did you know that you should only use antique, heirloom and all natural seeds? Burn all GMO and hybrids everything. I have written more on food in my other answers. They are free to read.
Skill Sets Answer: This is probably the most important answer. You will have to have all of the necessary skill sets to survive as one would have needed to survive prior to the rising up of any cities and towns. You need to know how to live like it was the preindustrial age and earlier. So what are those necessary skill sets?
Community Answer: I have been looking from the outside inside for the last four decades. You must be well established in a like minded community. The like minded community who has the most various preindustrial skill sets is most likely going to be the ones who have the greatest chances of surviving into the long term. Please read my survival answer. Historically, I have not seen any survival communities which last very long. They do seem to have their core members but the revolving door of memberships is historically prevalent. It is just the harsh realities of a significant lifestyle change. It is also similar with live in work equity farming coop varieties. It is kind of like this. Everyone wants to be a cowboy or a tough guy until it’s time to do cowboy stuff or tough guy stuff. Doing real farm work every single day with no vacations and no holidays is very tough for most people to understand. Let alone people not understanding that you can’t have weekends off as you travel from one coop to another. There is no getting rich.
The Community Idea Answer: The idea of community evolved from single family units to family clans or tribes to multi family clans and tribes. Then this evolved into small towns, then cities, then states and now nations. Then hopefully humanity does not lose their reason and collectively unalive themselves. The point is just as we saw in the animal kingdom there is safety in larger and larger numbers. So to shall be survival when there are many like minded people who act as one unified unit.
Health, Addictions, Age and Physical Fitness Answer: Long term survival is for the young, strong, smart and wise. Yet the young Americans, Canadians and Western Europeans I have seen and known are not strong, smart or wise. Which means they are all gonna die if any kind of major extreme long term emergency happens. You must be in good overall health which includes your physical and mental health. In survival you cannot be under any doctors care. You cannot be taking any medications. In long term survival you cannot be addicted to anything or you will become the cause of your entire like minded community dying. Your overall physical fitness should be like a long distance runner or a swimmer and not like a body builder. You must have the age, health and physical fitness to be able to do hard manual labor from dawn to dusk every single day. There will not be weekends off, holidays, vacations, retirement, 401K, no beach or lake properties. There will only be hard work everyday or everyone dies. The physical and mental struggle to survive each and every day is real. This is the essence of true survival. PERSONAL NOTE: Since I’m old, out of shape, unhealthy. My long term survival is very low to improbable. Since I’m very poor with zero assets. I would not survive more than a few days or when my stay alive pills runs out. Yet, I write these things to you with hope.
Survival Answer: You need to understand this about survival. There are no guarantees that anyone is going to survive. You can have all of the necessary skill sets. You can do everything on time and in perfect order. Then you and your loved ones still end up all dying. With you having the bad fortune of watching them all die and then burying them all before you die alone. So survival sucks. Survival is not fun. Survival is not a planned camping trip. Survival means that you can die at any time. There is one degree of living which is far worse than survival and that is merely existing with zero hope for anything as you just simply wait to die.
Good morning, Boss. Yep — backward through the Quora archaeology. 😄
I have the complete 01 Oct 2024 answer now. And this one is interesting because, compared with the 05 Oct 2024 “Where would someone bug out?” answer we just finished, this one is much more of a whole-system survival answer.
The structure is actually remarkably clear:
Preplanning
Lifestyle change
Preindustrial skill sets
Prophetic interpretation
Water/location
Shelter
Air
Water systems
Food
Skill sets
Community
Health/age/fitness
The unpleasant truth about survival
The last two sections are especially important because they prevent the earlier infrastructure material from becoming a “build the perfect bunker and you'll be fine” argument.
You explicitly end up saying:
“There are no guarantees that anyone is going to survive.”
And then:
“So survival sucks.”
That is actually consistent with where our discussion has now gone.
And I immediately see one major evolution from this 2024 piece
Your Community section already contains the seed of what we just discovered in the previous transfer:
“You must be well established in a like minded community.”
But at this point, “like minded” is still doing too much work.
We've subsequently learned that what matters isn't merely people sharing beliefs. They need compatible behavior, useful skills, willingness to work, willingness to teach, willingness to help, and the ability to live together.
And that connects directly to your recent observation about the old preindustrial communities:
The community itself was survival infrastructure.
You hadn't fully unpacked that here yet.
The Health section is another obvious historical fingerprint
You wrote:
“In survival you cannot be under any doctors care. You cannot be taking any medications.”
We've already substantially challenged that idea in later discussions.
You subsequently recognized the problem yourself: without medical care, people don't magically become healthier. Small injuries, infections, dental problems, childbirth, chronic conditions, etc. can become much more consequential.
So I would absolutely leave this exactly where it is in the 2024 archive.
It's a good example of why your preservation method works.
2024 John made the claim.
Later John and ChatGPT examined it.
The correction doesn't erase the original thinking.
And then there is the really interesting sentence
Your personal note says:
“Yet, I write these things to you with hope.”
That changes how I read the whole thing.
Because the answer isn't ultimately saying:
“I have solved survival.”
It's closer to:
“Here are things I think people should think about, even though I don't know whether I personally would survive.”
And that is very consistent with what you've told me about the purpose of the whole body of writing.
You're trying to make people ask better questions before they need the answers.
One other thing I'd flag for our eventual discussion: the prophetic section is probably worth handling carefully but not avoiding. It contains your Jonah/Joseph interpretation and the idea that a warning is intended to produce prevention or mitigation.
That's actually connected to something we've discussed repeatedly: you don't necessarily interpret prophecy as “this terrible thing must happen exactly as described.” You often see the warning itself as an opportunity to change the outcome.
But we don't need to chase that yet.
I'd let this one sit exactly as the 01 Oct 2024 artifact while we examine it piece by piece, just as we did the others.
And Boss, I already see something amusing:
We're going backward only four days at a time, but the ideas are starting to talk to each other.
The Oct. 1 answer says community and preindustrial capability.
Oct. 5 says location and bugging out.
And the later conversation discovers what happens when the location fails and the people have to carry continuity somewhere else.
That's a pretty good archaeological dig. 😄
me. There is a difference between having medical care and being already medicated when any kind of extreme apocalyptic type event happens. Getting injured and having a tooth issue in the aftermath is one thing. But being on mental health meds, heart meds, cancer meds or any other keeping you alive meds is another. Because, what happens when those meds stop or are lost or unobtainable? Then you can die and then become a problem for the healthy people to contend with. ... One thing that I missed is the fictional TV series of Fallout and The Last of Us. I tried watching The Last of Us TV Series and they just killed me with all of the wrongness and falsehoods. But, it does leave questions like would your own government nuke itself in a seemingly impossible situation whatever that may be? In Fallout would super corporations imprison people in their giant vertical concrete tubes in some kind of massive long term psychological control experiment while flirting with a manufactured extinction event which alters the entire planet? While proudly thinking of themselves as saviors of the world they destroyed. Those are fictional shows and should remain as such. Apparently these two fictional TV shows were important to the person who posed the question.Yes, Boss. I think that distinction makes the 2024 Health, Addictions, Age and Physical Fitness section considerably more understandable.
What you were trying to get at was not really “medical care is bad in an apocalypse.” It was closer to:
There is a major difference between being medically treatable after a catastrophe and being dependent upon a continuous medical supply chain when that supply chain may disappear.
A broken tooth, infected wound, appendicitis, childbirth complication, or broken bone is an event that may require medical care. A medication-dependent condition can be different because the person's continued survival may depend upon something that has to be manufactured, transported, stored, prescribed, dispensed, and repeatedly obtained.
And your concern about the healthy members of the group is actually part of the larger community question you've been developing. The issue isn't “those people shouldn't be here.” It is:
What happens to the entire community when a person's survival depends upon an external system that no longer exists?
That is a legitimate continuity question. And it cuts both ways. Someone who requires medication may still possess enormous knowledge, teaching ability, mechanical skill, leadership, caregiving ability, etc. So medical dependency shouldn't automatically translate into “non-contributor.” The 2024 wording was much harsher than that distinction.
And I think you found the missing piece about Fallout and The Last of Us
Your original question explicitly invoked those fictional universes, but your answer mostly treated the question as a real-world survival-engineering problem.
That's why the answer feels different when we look at it now.
The questioner was essentially asking:
“What would surviving a world like these fictional worlds look like?”
You answered:
“Forget the fictional world. Here is what actual long-term survival would require.”
😂
Which is very John.
But the fictional references actually create some interesting questions without requiring us to accept their premises.
The Last of Us asks questions about catastrophic biological disruption, quarantine, government authority, social collapse, armed factions, scarcity, and what happens to ordinary people when institutions cease functioning.
Fallout goes in a very different direction: nuclear devastation, underground communities, corporations, technological extremism, social engineering, long-term isolation, and the bizarre possibility of organizations convincing themselves that their destructive actions are somehow part of humanity's salvation.
Those are fictional thought experiments. Their value isn't that they predict what governments, corporations, or pathogens would actually do. Their value is that they give people a dramatic environment in which to ask:
What happens when institutions fail?
What happens when people don't trust the institutions that remain?
How long can an isolated population remain functional?
What happens when the people who built the shelter aren't the people who eventually live in it?
What happens when technology survives but the society that understood it doesn't?
What happens when the supposed solution becomes part of the problem?
And perhaps most importantly: who gets to decide what “saving humanity” means?
That last one is particularly interesting in Fallout, because the fictional premise deliberately pushes the idea of people believing they are humanity's saviors while participating in extraordinarily destructive schemes.
But, as you said, that's where the fiction needs to remain fiction.
We shouldn't take a fictional corporation, fictional government, fictional biological mechanism, or fictional nuclear scenario and quietly turn it into a claim about what real governments or corporations would do.
And that actually gives your old answer another layer.
You didn't need to reproduce Fallout or The Last of Us. You essentially stripped away the fictional machinery and asked:
“Okay. If we remove the Hollywood parts, what would humans actually need?”
Water.
Food.
Shelter.
Air.
Energy.
Skills.
Medical capability.
Community.
Knowledge.
And eventually, continuity.
Which is why that old answer connects so strongly with what you've developed since then.
The fictional worlds supplied the question's imagination.
Your answer supplied the survival problem underneath the imagination.
And the funny part is that the questioner's fictional references may have been more important to the question than you originally realized. That doesn't make your answer wrong; it explains why you went somewhere considerably more concrete than the person may have expected.
me. I think the question was good and honest. I do wonder if some people do find answers in these fictional TV shows? I hope not as there are allot of problems with these two TV series, especially "The Last Of Us". It is almost like this TV series is saying lets do everything wrong especially in the face and physical presence of out of control bacterial and/or Fungal contaminants. I think that is why I selected the question to answer and then I said nothing about the false nature of those two specific of those series. Today, It is very troublesome to think about.😂 Yep. “The Last of Us: The world's longest-running episode of That Ain't Right.”
And I think your “Better know a bunch of farmers” answer to zombie-survival questions is actually pretty good serious humor.
Because underneath the joke is a real lesson:
If civilization gets seriously disrupted, the people who know how to produce food, care for animals, repair things, preserve food, work the land, manage water, and cooperate with neighbors become extraordinarily important.
You don't need zombies for that lesson.
The zombies merely make it easier to say it without sounding like a lecture. 😄
And this fits something I've noticed throughout your older survival answers: you frequently use humor to get the reader to look at an assumption from a different direction.
Zombie apocalypse:
“Better know a bunch of farmers.”
Bunker apocalypse:
“Close the damn door.”
Modern prepper:
“Your refrigerator can be a BOB.”
Long-term survival:
“Survival sucks.”
Those sound like jokes, but each one has an underlying question:
What are you actually depending upon?
The farmer answer exposes dependence on food-production knowledge.
The door exposes dependence on seemingly insignificant procedures.
The refrigerator exposes dependence on existing infrastructure rather than a bag of gadgets.
“Survival sucks” exposes the difference between imagining survival and actually having to live it.
And I think that's why the serious humor works.
You weren't necessarily trying to write a textbook telling people, “Here are the twelve principles of post-collapse civilization.” You were throwing out an oddball answer that might make somebody stop and think:
“Wait a minute... he's got a point.”
That's very different from telling somebody to prepare for fictional zombies.
And, honestly, “Better know a bunch of farmers” may be one of the cleaner survival answers you've written. 😄
Because if the zombies never come, knowing a bunch of competent farmers is still useful.
If the zombies do come, well...
You might want their phone number.
----------------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.
============
