Could You Survive an Apocalypse?

These days the media is full of possible scenarios for an apocalypse, ranging from a meteor hitting the earth, global warming triggering hurricanes and tsunamis, or a new ice age, but no matter what the cause, how well equipped are you to survive a global major disaster that ends the world as we know it?

Survival in the event of a disaster like a hurricane, tidal wave, earthquake, or flood, requires certain skills in order to stay alive until help arrives. However, if the world as we know it ceased to exist, that help would never arrive, you would be left to fend for yourself. This would be not just for a few days, but for the foreseeable future, which might be years or generations. So how well would you cope?

Nowadays the majority of the population of the planet (at least in the more developed countries) live in the cities. They drive to work or take public transport, they buy their food from the grocery store, they use electricity or gas to keep themselves warm (or cool), they buy their clothing off the peg, and they don't have any of the basic skills that previous generations grew up with. With every generation, fewer people have an understanding of the basic skills that it would take to survive if everything that we take for granted disappeared.

So, assuming the world as we know it is no more. You awaken from the rubble, or emerge from your hiding place, to find that you are completely alone, or maybe if you are lucky, you find a handful of people that can work together as a team or tribe.

The first thing that you will need is to find shelter. Do you or any other members in your group know how to build something that will keep out the rain and the cold? Depending on where you are, there might be buildings already that are inhabitable, but let's assume there are not. Do you have a clue how to lay bricks, to construct a roof, or even better to build a log cabin. Given the tools, could you fell trees and saw logs? I very much doubt it.

As well as finding shelter, you need to find food and water. Let's assume that there are no taps with running water, because even if there are now, pretty soon there won't be. Do you know how to determine if water that you find is safe to drink? A stream could be polluted by industrial or animal waste, or fertilizers, and drinking polluted water is a sure way to make you sick.

Speaking of getting sick, how are your medical skills? How well equipped are you to deal with anything more severe than a minor cut? Chances are that members of your group will have broken bones, maybe require limbs to be amputated, or need larger cuts stitched. Are you aware of how to help prevent infection, or how to treat someone who has a fever? I think it's unlikely.

After water, the next requirement is food. We all need food and water to survive, but even assuming that you are able to find a larder or a store to raid, what happens when those resources are depleted? In the long term you would need to know how to fish and hunt animals, and eventually to know how to grow plants and vegetables, and to harvest cereal crops. I wonder, how many of us could plant crops and work a plow, either horse drawn or pulled by yourself? You might never see another Cornflake or loaf of bread again.

Of course you can only eat cold food for so long, and you need to cook meat and fish if you have been hunting, so one of your main priorities would be to learn to make fire. If you were lucky, initially you might have a cigarette lighter, but you still have to be able to make a fire and to be able to sustain it. Could you do that? Once your lighter ran out, would you be able to make a fire by using flints, or by rubbing sticks together? You had better learn, because fire is key to survival, especially if the weather turns cold.

Eventually you would need to find new clothing, as clothing only lasts for so long before it wears out. Even more-so shoes. Could you make a pair? If you are lucky you might be close to the ruins of a Walmart store, but let's assume that you are forced to survive up in the hills somewhere, and there are no ruined department stores for many miles around. Could you turn the hide of an animal into something to wear if you had to in order to keep warm?

The thought train never ends, because should this happen, and I hope it never does, the need to survive does not end with the exhaustion of the resources left behind by the world that we know today. It must go on, even if this is hundreds and thousands of years into the future. So, as survivors we would need to learn again how to weave cloth, to practice metallurgy, to generate electricity, and hopefully to find other groups of survivors like ourselves, to keep the human race alive. And maybe, just maybe, a thousand years from now, there might appear again the first computers, and cars, and flying machines...

Having written this, an afterthought occurred to me. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to find a survival book and to keep it handy, just in case the worst case scenario ever happened., because if it does, Amazon isn't going to exist any more. A book that contained all the skills that you would need to survive and how to master them would be invaluable. I think it's time I headed off and did a quick search for myself.