SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Doomsday prepping is not a usual Soylent subject, but apocalypses are a staple of geek culture. Do Peter Thiel's preparations make sense?
You know things are getting risky when billionaires start making plans to flee to New Zealand on the off chance civilization might collapse. This week's New Yorker details the doomsday survival plans of Peter Thiel, and other notable Silicon Valley tech moguls.
The thing is, despite their virtually unlimited budgets, none of these guys is doing it right.
[...] In more realistic circumstances, there are 21.8 million veterans in the U.S., with various levels of professional expertise in solving problems like bunker busting. Hell, there's more guns than people in this country. Fixed locations are inherently vulnerable by their very nature, subject to siege, and allowing attackers to patiently plan ways to penetrate them. Any billionaire's hoard of survival supplies will be a natural target following the breakdown of society. Keeping them secret will be a challenge too, when contractors have been paid to construct them, delivery men have carried the supplies in, and even the armed guards may decide their friends and families could use all those tins of spam a little more desperately than their paranoid employer.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @08:11AM
You want to move to areas where it's always below freezing. Zombies can't move when they're frozen. Best to get out into space, but even the ultra rich are having a hard time with that one. A space floating zombie could be attracted by your station's gravity pull, but at least it'll still be frozen when you're on the dark side of the planet.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday February 03 2017, @11:41AM
Those must not be pure aryan zombies then.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1278340/ [imdb.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday February 03 2017, @02:46PM
I think his plan to flee to New Zealand is a pretty good one, I mean how many Americans even know where NZ is [youtube.com]? It's somewhere near Austria, the place with the kangaroos, sure, but can you point to it on a globe (without reading the labels)?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @02:49PM
yea, actually, we can. After the breakdown of society how do we or peter fly there?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @05:12PM
Protip: you want one with inertial navigation, radio beacons will shut down when their backup generators run out of fuel and GPS will eventually stop working without updates from the USAF. Also, on-board stairs. It would look really dumb to fly all the way to New Zealand and then break your leg jumping from the airplane because nobody was there to push some boarding stairs up to the door.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Friday February 03 2017, @06:41PM
Afaik are alle commercial airplanes required to have (inertial) navigation and are pilots trained to navigate without systems like GPS.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday February 03 2017, @11:03PM
Good point about the stairs, but you could just use the emergency escape slides.