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from the does-anyone-have-to-go-outside-to-clean-the-sensors? dept.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/01/3m-price-tag-inside-luxury-doomsday-bunker
Afraid of nuclear war, natural disasters, economic meltdown? The Survival Condo could be the answer
"Mechanical level", "medical level", "store level" the voice announces as the lift descends into the earth. I'd entered at parking lot level, the building's apex. I am travelling through an inverted skyscraper, the floor numbers ascending – third, fourth – as we plumb the building's depths. A hulking man in his late 50s called Larry Hall stands next to me, whistling, black shirt tucked into blue jeans.
When the doors open, I can't suppress a laugh. In front of us, four storeys below central Kansas, is a supermarket complete with shopping baskets, cold cabinets and an espresso machine behind the counter. Hall smiles.
"It's good, isn't it? On the original blueprint for the renovation, it just said 'storerooms' on this level. The psychologist we hired for the project took one look at that and said, 'No, no, no, this needs to feel like a miniature Whole Foods supermarket. We need a tile floor and nicely presented cases, because if people are locked in this silo and they have to come down here and rifle through cardboard boxes to get their food, you'll have depressed people everywhere.'"
I am inside the most lavish and sophisticated private bunker in the world: the Survival Condo. It was once a cold war US government missile silo. Constructed in the early 60s, at a cost of approximately $15m to the US taxpayer, it was one of 72 structures built to protect [against] a nuclear warhead 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Many of these silos were blown up and buried after decades of disuse. But not all of them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 03 2020, @12:49PM
Why are you applying your viewpoint instead of theirs? I think it's quite clear that they would disagree.
In other words, they probably already have something else going for them than nothing but suffering. And if your'e a primitive people, then you probably could do better in a primitive world.
Seems a good reason to me.
My take on this is that there's plenty of times throughout history when things sucked badly, be it the Late Bronze Age collapse, the ending of the Western Roman Empire (with corresponding disruption of civilization in India and China), the Black Death, etc. But they got better. We have a pretty good deal today because after each of those horrible events, someone picked up the pieces and tried again.
I think there's a bit of fantasy here. These people may well feel that they'll survive the collapse of civilization handily, and be the ones to lead and shape the next era of humanity. Or that things will be better in said collapse of civilization. Or this might be a coping mechanism for the uncertainties of the future.
But what I can say is that there's not much point to not even trying to understand the viewpoint. I think this whole discussion illustrates one or more fundamental divides in humanity: perhaps optimism versus pessimism, urban versus rural, and perhaps others.