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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) by corey on Friday February 03 2017, @11:44PM
Lot of money required but that's not the issue for a billionaire, but buy a nuclear submarine. They only need to come up for food. But if you learn some botany you could grow stuff onboard.
Live at the bottom of the ocean, no concern for what's going on up on the surface.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Saturday February 04 2017, @12:57AM
Interesting idea. However I imagine a nuclear sub requires some pretty specialised maintenance involving and high tech tools and spare parts from time to time, probably in dry dock. How long could it operate? A couple of years? A decade? Or is the sub just a short stop-gap until things clam down? How long are you planning to be cooped up in there? It raises the question of "surviving" vs "living". If I had the choice between a short, perilous life under the sky or a long, safe one in a metal tube, I'm not sure I'd pick the sub.
However, why not use nuclear sub technology to build an underwater base? Designed properly, it could be a lot more comfortable, and your on-board cabbage farming would be a hell of a lot more practical. Additionally, if you're fixed in one place, you could live off the "land". Plant crops of edible seaweed around your underwater base. Not to mention fresh fish every night. Hell, design and market it right, you wouldn't even have to keep it secret, and could get some help paying for it. Call it an experiment in environmentally sustainable future living or something, and you could get a government grant. Just make sure you have your own set of keys and a private submersible to get to it.