Unrest

[bigj_16]

Originally Posted By: UberArchetype
I interpret the OP as somebody looking forward to the opportunity to indiscriminately shoot people and get away with it.

If you're serious, that was the farthest thought from my mind. I was actually thinking the opposite. My guess is any shooting going on might end up getting prosecuted down the road.

 

[DoubleWasp]

EMP does not destroy all technology forever. Would be a setback at the most.

Given the amount of tech hardened against EMP, don't be surprised if the tech giants themselves are not sitting prepared to repopulate the Earth with their tech in such an event.

I'm one of the few who believes society woukd restore itself. Society is not something that was forced down our throats. A lot of hard work went into making it, and we love it.

Nobody wants to live in a dystopic Mad Max universe, and it would not take long for people to stabilize things.

What has shaped the fallacy of a post-apocalyptic world is the comics, movies, etc. The idea that the financiers, entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, etc., will simply give up and enjoy the farming life or playing run-and-gun. Fat chance.

Those who simply want a safe home and a good night's rest will vastly outnumber the outlaws. They're the ones who are going to band together and continue to make life very hard to live for outlaws.

But as previously mentioned, the government will be the last thing to take a hit. They'll come back, and those who own property, businesses, etc, will embrace them and the law.

The thing that keeps fantasies of unrest, Anarchy, and post-apocalyptica going is the violence and death culture of our society.

How or why it is that some people look at their neighbors and community and get a thrill fantasizing about fighting or killing them is beyond me. I've spent every disaster from Hurricane Andrew, to snowstorms, to the NYC Transit Strike, to Hurricanes Ivan, Wilma, and Irma doing everything in my power to help my neighbors.

If the SHTF, I intend to be involved in creating solutions, not more problems.

 

[Astro14]

I think that you under-estimate the effect of an EMP. It can create a field of about 40,000 volts/meter. Anything, and I mean anything, not in a Faraday cage (shielded) will be fried. Every electronic box. Most electrical systems. Grid goes down instantly and for years. It's an instant reversion to 1850 technology. If it worked then, it'll work now.

Then the cascading effects because the EMP would be over an area of several hundred miles across.

Every vehicle (except, perhaps, pre-1970 cars that have points and a carb) stops instantly. Roads are impassable. Most airplanes crash if they were in the pulse area. No emergency services. No fire. No police. Not even National Guard. No phones, including land-lines. No radio.

Anyone who needs electricity dies within hours. Anyone in an ICU, on dialysis, a ventilator, getting oxygen, gone and gone quickly. Nursing homes and hospitals become uninhabitable in hours with all the dead bodies.

Fresh water becomes an instant problem. Wells stop, permanently, and water systems lose pressure. It won't be coming back for years. No fresh water, but if you can find it, then your next problem becomes food.

Anyone who plans to eat gets in trouble in days. No refrigeration. No trucks to deliver food. Areas that are heavily populated are in deep trouble. Huge numbers of starving people in a few days, and absolutely no way to get them any food. New York City alone would have millions of casualties in a week.

Sanitation becomes an issue in a couple of days. No sewers. No system. Disease follows. Disease that can't be treated because the hospitals are already full of dead people, doctors will be starving and thirsty and there will be no resupply of drugs or medical necessities like sterile bandages.

People on medication (insulin, etc.) are in trouble in days as well. Insulin has to be refrigerated. Most people who need drugs to survive won't make it past the first week, assuming that they can even get food. Let's not even consider what happens when the 25% of the population on some form of psychotropic drugs go off their meds by the end of the first week...most of them will have starved first...

Areas with farms might be OK, for a while - no way to harvest and no way to preserve what food is there. Can't feed the livestock, so eat well for the first few months, before starvation sets in there, too*...

There will be a mass die-off in a week...and then a second round of die-offs in about a month...for those that need ongoing medical care...then the starvation sets in. Ignoring the need for shelter in northern climates, survival without food, water, sanitation, or medical care will be difficult.

Various projections put the death rate by year one at around 80% of population...but it'll be closer to 99% in big metropolitan areas.

*It's my opinion that hunting won't be viable after a few weeks as every hunter shoots every viable game animal as soon as they realize that the grocery store will be closed for years.

While the rest of the nation will survive, those in the affected area will probably not survive and the death toll will be near 100 million if an EMP hits CONUS. A nuke going off in a major US city is a small, manageable crisis by comparison.

 

[BrocLuno]

Originally Posted By: Reddy45
If a nuke or emp hits, why would you want to survive? What will be left for you to enjoy? It'll be absolute chaos followed by corruption and slow death.

Are you really going to join your neighbors and start a rogue settlement with it's own laws and defense? How long before the next badder settlement invades and takes over?

And everyone who is currently on some sort of maintenance medication is screwed. Diabetics, seizure prone people, dialysis, autoimmune sufferers, and special diet people are going to be screwed in the long term.


Around here, we'd just open the cellars and drink the fruits of labor until the collapse got too bad ...

 

[ZeeOSix]

Originally Posted By: bigj
If you're serious, that was the farthest thought from my mind. I was actually thinking the opposite. My guess is any shooting going on might end up getting prosecuted down the road.

Not just any shooting. Most people are going to use guns to protect themselves, just like they legally do today.

If people were going around killing other people for thier food and shelter, then they would be murderers and open to prosecution if there was any law enforcement still around. If the disaster caused complete lawless chaos then it would be a criminal's playground, and hopes of any legal procicution for their actions would pretty much be out the window. Armed good people would have to band together to protect themselves.

 

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: Astro14
I think that you under-estimate the effect of an EMP. It can create a field of about 40,000 volts/meter. Anything, and I mean anything, not in a Faraday cage (shielded) will be fried. Every electronic box. Most electrical systems. Grid goes down instantly and for years. It's an instant reversion to 1850 technology. If it worked then, it'll work now.

Then the cascading effects because the EMP would be over an area of several hundred miles across.

I went through this debate some months back. There is a lot of disbelief in this, not to mention faith placed in the inverse square law, which doesn't apply here. Faith and disbelief don't do very well at protecting electrical systems, though. The troubles would be appalling.

DoubleWasp: As for tech companies offering help or repopulation, don't count on it. They would not be prepared for the infrastructure work ahead of them, and I doubt their own preparedness.

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: Garak
I went through this debate some months back.


LOL, that was with a qualified electrical engineer who didn't "believe" in EMP wasn't it ?

Some shell on that one.

 

[Garak]

Yes, despite the real world evidence, not to mention the math explaining very easily why the propagation is as it is. If EMP cannot transmit those distances, then everyone should turn off their radios, since they're supernatural devices.

 

[DoubleWasp]

Originally Posted By: Astro14
I think that you under-estimate the effect of an EMP. It can create a field of about 40,000 volts/meter. Anything, and I mean anything, not in a Faraday cage (shielded) will be fried. Every electronic box. Most electrical systems. Grid goes down instantly and for years. It's an instant reversion to 1850 technology. If it worked then, it'll work now.

Then the cascading effects because the EMP would be over an area of several hundred miles across.

Every vehicle (except, perhaps, pre-1970 cars that have points and a carb) stops instantly. Roads are impassable. Most airplanes crash if they were in the pulse area. No emergency services. No fire. No police. Not even National Guard. No phones, including land-lines. No radio.

Anyone who needs electricity dies within hours. Anyone in an ICU, on dialysis, a ventilator, getting oxygen, gone and gone quickly. Nursing homes and hospitals become uninhabitable in hours with all the dead bodies.

Fresh water becomes an instant problem. Wells stop, permanently, and water systems lose pressure. It won't be coming back for years. No fresh water, but if you can find it, then your next problem becomes food.

Anyone who plans to eat gets in trouble in days. No refrigeration. No trucks to deliver food. Areas that are heavily populated are in deep trouble. Huge numbers of starving people in a few days, and absolutely no way to get them any food. New York City alone would have millions of casualties in a week.

Sanitation becomes an issue in a couple of days. No sewers. No system. Disease follows. Disease that can't be treated because the hospitals are already full of dead people, doctors will be starving and thirsty and there will be no resupply of drugs or medical necessities like sterile bandages.

People on medication (insulin, etc.) are in trouble in days as well. Insulin has to be refrigerated. Most people who need drugs to survive won't make it past the first week, assuming that they can even get food. Let's not even consider what happens when the 25% of the population on some form of psychotropic drugs go off their meds by the end of the first week...most of them will have starved first...

Areas with farms might be OK, for a while - no way to harvest and no way to preserve what food is there. Can't feed the livestock, so eat well for the first few months, before starvation sets in there, too*...

There will be a mass die-off in a week...and then a second round of die-offs in about a month...for those that need ongoing medical care...then the starvation sets in. Ignoring the need for shelter in northern climates, survival without food, water, sanitation, or medical care will be difficult.

Various projections put the death rate by year one at around 80% of population...but it'll be closer to 99% in big metropolitan areas.

*It's my opinion that hunting won't be viable after a few weeks as every hunter shoots every viable game animal as soon as they realize that the grocery store will be closed for years.

While the rest of the nation will survive, those in the affected area will probably not survive and the death toll will be near 100 million if an EMP hits CONUS. A nuke going off in a major US city is a small, manageable crisis by comparison.


Trouble is, this assumes zero response from the area outside of the EMP zone, and zero evacuations from it. I've seen evacuations. Within a week of a strike, there's going to be practically nobody left who will have stayed behind.

Aid can still come in.

The EMP would have to deal a complete blow to the entire North American continent. Where would that kind of energy even come from? Not this planet.

 

[DoubleWasp]

Originally Posted By: Garak
Originally Posted By: Astro14
I think that you under-estimate the effect of an EMP. It can create a field of about 40,000 volts/meter. Anything, and I mean anything, not in a Faraday cage (shielded) will be fried. Every electronic box. Most electrical systems. Grid goes down instantly and for years. It's an instant reversion to 1850 technology. If it worked then, it'll work now.

Then the cascading effects because the EMP would be over an area of several hundred miles across.

I went through this debate some months back. There is a lot of disbelief in this, not to mention faith placed in the inverse square law, which doesn't apply here. Faith and disbelief don't do very well at protecting electrical systems, though. The troubles would be appalling.

DoubleWasp: As for tech companies offering help or repopulation, don't count on it. They would not be prepared for the infrastructure work ahead of them, and I doubt their own preparedness.


You're surprised that people don't believe in science fiction like a wide scale EMP weapon?

If human technology ever gets to the point of being able to send enough energy to another location to generate an EMP that would knock out a hundreds mile wide area, there will be very few problems tech couldn't solve in moments.

The most powerful artificial energy discharge known to man (nuclear explosion) can't make an EMP that could take out a continent. Where does the energy come from, and how does one send it from one location to another?

If we get to the point of solving that issue, we'll almost certainly have flying cars, starships, etc. Help could be teleported in seconds.

 

[CourierDriver]

Bottom line, your gonna be out of food in 3 days, water,,gone, food gone, meds gone, no trucks, no walmart, no nothing....and your cable will be out,,no reruns of the Walking Dead, we will be them.....

 

[bigj_16]

The problem with an EMP in, say, Cali, is if it took out part of the power distribution in a small, say, 50 square mile area, it could easily spread across the Western half of the U.S. It has happened naturally before.

 

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: DoubleWasp
You're surprised that people don't believe in science fiction like a wide scale EMP weapon?

You don't need that. A middling nuke at a certain altitude will take care of everything for you, on a fairly local scale.

However, from the Federation of American Scientists: "A large device detonated at 400–500 km (250 to 312 miles) over Kansas would affect all of the continental U.S. The signal from such an event extends to the visual horizon as seen from the burst point." Read about Starfish Prime and so forth.

Significantly smaller devices can also produce a significant enough pulse. We also cannot forget the uniformity of the field over the Gaussian surface.

Additionally, bigj_16's point is well taken. You don't have to take out the entire continent's grid to create havoc.

 

[Astro14]

Disaster response for a hundred million?

Where will you get the food? The refrigerator trucks? All the transport that existed will be inoperable. Roads clogged. Vehicle computers fried. There isn't enough stockpiled non-perishable food anywhere on the planet for the response to make a difference to the scale of the tens of millions of victims.

And you guys quoting inverse square fail to take into account the source of the flux. It's not a point source, it's not just the weapon, it's an widespread cascade caused by gamma radiation stripping off electrons and creating an electro-magnetic flux across hundreds of miles.

Weapon design, gamma yield, detonation altitude, and earth's own magnetic field all play into the severity determination, but it could, if done correctly, wipe out every electric/electronic device across hundreds of miles.

I've seen the calculations, the estimated damage, it's a doomsday scenario.

 

[Win]

Quote:
I think that you under-estimate the effect of an EMP. It can create a field of about 40,000 volts/meter. Anything, and I mean anything, not in a Faraday cage (shielded) will be fried. Every electronic box. ....


By definition, it's an electromagnetic wave, and follows the same rules as all other radio, including the inverse fall off in field strength as the distance between generator and receiver increases.

Someone in a big city in range of rocket man could have problems with this. He'll only get one shot at it, at least. Folks in larger cities could be at risk from portable weapons walked across the southern border by anyone with a pulse. Rational big governments are not going to mount this kind of attack because of retaliation.

So, here in fly over country, pretty safe, unless one of these Rube Goldberg devices lights off in the back of a box truck while it's being smuggled with sixty other illegals.

An EMP that leaves me alive I could probably cope with, anyway. I have lots of vacuum tube electronics, and repair parts, and know how to fix stuff and make stuff from a pile of parts. I have spares for the solid state stuff too, and can fix non digital stuff. Parts on the shelf won't get enough induced energy to be damaged, much less destroyed. You still need to make electricity. Assuming the cables from my panels receive enough energy to destroy anything on either side, I could replace half my panels from new spares in inventory, same with inverters. If you want to do it mad max water world old school, look in any of the old ham radio mags or farm life mags on how to make wind generators, water generators, and how to mechanically chop DC so it can be dealt with like AC, and stepped up. I have that stuff, too ...

The realistic threats here are:

a) tornado's. No warning is possible, so preparation is futile. If I don't get flattened, infrastructure will be back in a day or so. If I get flattened and survive, we would relocate to house #2.

b) ice storms - rare, but occur and at least you get warning. Infrastructure can be out for a week or more. You can plan for these. Best plan is to relocate to house #2, or whichever house is most likely to get service back soonest.

c) coup d'etat - not sure how that will play out. We may be watching a soft one, right now. I don't think it would have a local disruption of food, but you never know. This is uncharted territory.

You are correct that food, potable water, and ill health will be the ultimate end game in a dystopian world. Unhealthy people, people who have let themselves get out of shape ( sadly, lots of them around ), and people in the big cities are goners, only a matter of time. Food would be a problem even out here. Even if you have enough arable land, and some knowledge of how to use it ( I do ), producing your own food in sufficient quantity has a long lead time.

Guns will be useful in a short term, but the long term solution is to have survival skills that make it worthwhile for other folks to need you to be alive. If the SHTF never to leave again, I would probably relocate wife and child to some undeveloped land I have on a small lake within a day's walk, displace by whatever means necessary anyone occupying it illegally, clear it, and small farm it .....

 

[andrewg]

Win.....I agree with your reference to a "soft" coup d'etat. That is one realistic concern that seems to be occurring right at this moment in our history.

 

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: Win
By definition, it's an electromagnetic wave, and follows the same rules as all other radio, including the inverse fall off in field strength as the distance between generator and receiver increases.

It doesn't, because it's being conducted. I spoke of the Gaussian surface, already. If the earth didn't have a magnetic field and an ionosphere, then the inverse square law would apply strictly. We also wouldn't be able to get radio beyond line of sight then, either, but we clearly can.

 

[Win]

Originally Posted By: Garak
Originally Posted By: Win
By definition, it's an electromagnetic wave, and follows the same rules as all other radio, including the inverse fall off in field strength as the distance between generator and receiver increases.

It doesn't, because it's being conducted. I spoke of the Gaussian surface, already. If the earth didn't have a magnetic field and an ionosphere, then the inverse square law would apply strictly. We also wouldn't be able to get radio beyond line of sight then, either, but we clearly can.


It's an electromagnetic wave capable of inducing current and voltage at points remote from the origin, however difuse and vast that may be, or it's not. You can't have it both ways.

Conduction and propagation are different things. When it conducts it conducts. When it is no longer conducted and propagates, it will follow inverse square, as any other electromagnetic wave.

BTW, when shortwave broadcasting was a thing, transmitters ran in the hundreds of megawatts to high gain rhombic antennas, continuously. Stuff in the direction path of the antenna didn't just roll over and die.

 

[Claud]

North America, Europe, anywhere with high density population is screwed. Third world sparsely opulated areas where the the local people rely on their own manual labor and wits to make a living, they will come out on top. Forget your doomsday preppers, maybe they will last a few months before they break down into anarchy, in fact anything relying on modern tech is doomed.
Siberian peasants, aboriginal South Americans and Australians, other similar marginal primitive populations, they will have the last laugh.

Claud.

 

[bigj_16]

If, in our life time, a biggish (maybe 8.0) quake manifests in SoCal, in the LA Basin, we might have an insight to some of the stuff we have been proposing.