Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
There’s no shortage of books, movies, TV shows, and video games about doomsday, and there’s a simple reason: it gives the writers plenty of material to work with. When the world is ending, almost anything is possible.
But could a doomsday event actually happen, or is it all just fiction? The unfortunate answer is yes, doomsday could happen, and it already has happened many times in Earth’s history.
In the past, there were all kinds of disasters that affected the entire planet. Volcanic eruptions brought humanity to its knees 70,000 years ago as the global population was reduced to 10,000 people. And long before that, a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs, which had been ruling the planet for hundreds of millions of years.
You’ll notice that these previous doomsday events were caused by nature. Today is different. Today, the most likely cause of doomsday is us. Our population has grown from that fragile 10,000 to over 8 billion people today, and the fight for natural resources is getting worse all the time.
Right now, we face shaky economies, fragile political systems, dangerous border conflicts, on-going wars, relentless cyber-attacks, the threat of a new pandemic, and more. The list goes on and on, and the more volatile things get, the more likely it is that we’ll wipe ourselves out through nuclear war, EMP blasts, cyber warfare, or weaponized diseases.
In this article, we’ll cover the basic preparations for a doomsday scenario and get into specific preps for each one. Can you prepare for all of them? Probably not, although many preps for a disaster are the same, regardless of the source or the reason.
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An All-Purpose Doomsday Plan
If you want to survive doomsday, you need food, water, and shelter. After that, it starts to get a bit complicated as you think about clothing, self-defense and weapons, heating and cooling, first aid and medical supplies, and anything else you might need to survive.
What follows is a basic kit that would get you through some of the more common disasters. Following this, we’ll get into gear and supplies that are more doomsday specific.
Plan to Harvest, Purify, and Store Water
This is another prep that makes sense for most disasters, but doomsday is different. At a time when you can’t count on anything, it stands to reason that water supplies will be inconsistent and most likely contaminated.
Here are some primary supplies to consider:
And here are some articles on collecting, storing, and purify water:
Stockpile Foods and Seeds for Planting
Food stockpiling is a standard preparation for most disasters. Rather than go through the extensive lists of food items, we’re going to list links to in-depth and basic food stockpiling instructions. At a time when you may not want to go to the grocery store, (or simply can’t) it’s good to have plenty on hand.
But there’s more to it than filling a basement storeroom with a lot of food. If this is truly a doomsday scenario, food resources are going to disappear fast. Forget about the grocery store, and good luck finding a farmer’s market. That means you have to grow your own.
Here are links to seed harvesting and seed banks you can buy or harvest that you should keep you growing in any type of home garden.
Stockpile Medical Supplies
Doomsday is no time to mess around. Get an expedition level first-aid package. Take classes for basic first aid. Learn and understand how contagious disease spreads.
Here again we’re going to list valuable links to first aid equipment, supplies, books and videos in addition to online medical consultation. How much information you can get from outside sources may be a challenge, but it’s worth knowing.
Here’s the basic checklist:
Here are a few more lists to consider:
BOOKS:
Self Defense
You don’t call 911 after doomsday. That’ll be another distant memory from a long-forgotten past. Worse, self-defense is probably going to be a daily priority. When all that remains is a world of desperate people, there are few rules.
If you are living in your home or apartment, think about home security. This would include:
More Info:
Location, Location, Location
In so many ways, surviving a doomsday is dependent on location. Cities may be the greatest challenge as a large population competes for resources. Crime and violence seem inevitable as many cities have already demonstrated.
Apartments may present the biggest challenge. The lack of a yard for a garden and limited space between neighbors will always be difficult. And while neighbors can be a great help, that can always change.
The suburbs are better than most cities for a relatively safe haven depending on the size of you lot and once again – the neighbors. The bottom line is that if you have nowhere else to go, you have to stand your ground and make the best of it.
Rural locations offer the advantages of acreage for farming, and a fence around the perimeter will give you some relative security. Rural areas also create extra space for animal husbandry and a homesteading lifestyle.
Security is still a concern as remote locations sometimes tempt opportunists, trespassers, and worse. A couple of dogs rooming inside the fenced property always helps. In fact a dog can help just about anywhere even if it just alerts you to someone approaching your home or apartment.
Wilderness locations offer excellent possibilities, opening up the potential for gardening, hunting, fishing, wild-foraging, and a good amount of natural building materials. The obvious downside is that many other people will see the same opportunities, so fencing is a definite consideration, whether it’s manmade or grown from natural thorn bushes.
Power and Light
There’s no guarantees about electricity after doomsday. Figure the grid is gone or at least unreliable. Generating your own power is one option. Solar power and wind power with the necessary batteries for storage or a solar generator make a lot of sense.
Lanterns are an idea, but they need fuel. You may be better off with torches or small, solar powered LED lights. You’ll also confront some new challenges related to refrigeration, freezing, and heating. Here are a few articles that cover these subjects well.
Tools and Hardware
If you don’t have it, you’ll have to build it. And then repair it. And then add to it. None of that is easy without tools and hardware. Most of us who have a home and garage have a fairly good set of tools.
Start to think 19th century. A power saw is worthless if the grid is down. And while you could always recharge battery powered tools with a solar panel, those hand-powered tools could last years or even decades.
Here are some links to articles about various other tools you should assemble and how to care for them and restore them:
Doomsday Scenarios
And now it’s beyond the basics. Prepping for these various scenarios can be demanding, especially when you consider the fact that stores won’t be open, and you’ll get little help from anyone other than friends and family.
Below are the possibilities and the unique preps for various doomsday scenarios. We’ll also include many links to more information. In the end (no pun intended), what you prepare for depends on your level of concern about any one or more of these events.
Pandemic Redux
Covid may be here to stay, but it’s not going to end the world. The real doomsday scenario is if a new disease (such as bird flu) evolves until it can spread among humans.
Ebola is one of the most feared diseases and largely confined to Africa. But a scenario where strains of Ebola combined with other diseases that spread easily is an ominous thought. With international air travel continuing to shuttle people back and forth on a daily basis, the possibility of another pandemic emerging and spreading from a densely populated country will always be a possibility.
Worse is the possibility of biological warfare as a rogue nation or a lab experiment gone wrong spreads the worst possible genetically engineered combinations.
Prepping for Future Pandemics
We’ve all had our share of experience with this recently, but be careful about making assumptions. Diseases are different in their symptoms, transmission, and contagiousness. Here are some of the basics for prepping for a pandemic.
Plan for Social Isolation
If the disease is serious enough, it’s a good bet kids will once again be going to school at home and, for those who can, working from home rather than working at a location.
Social isolation also requires good communication capabilities including:
The big question with any communication device is the status of the grid and power in general. Solar rechargeable batteries make a lot sense.
Pandemic Specific Medical Supplies
These are the standard items for living through a pandemic, and we’ve also added links for how to make much of this equipment.
More Info:
It’s tempting to go on and on with preps for a world-ending pandemic. The links have more information, and it’s worth remembering that all pandemics from the past eventually died out. It’s just a question of when.
Nuclear War
There’s no lack of Sabre-rattling from North Korea to Russia on the topic of nuclear war. What’s unfortunate is that’s the way most wars start. It’s hard to know where anyone will be safe, but some locations have been identified.
New Zealand always shows up as a safe haven for cataclysmic disaster. You just have to wonder what happens to New Zealand when the whole world shows up on their doorstep.
Other possible safe havens include wilderness and rural locations far from cities. But here again, there’s always a catch. Many of those rural and wilderness locations are the sites of nuclear ICBM silos. Those are also targets for any attack.
The key is to find a location far from cities with no known missile silos in the area. There will still be the risk of drifting fallout and the ultimate collapse of society, but damage from the shock wave and initial blast could be less of an issue – hopefully.
Prepping for Nuclear War
As we continue to explore scenarios, it will become apparent that many preps like food stockpiling, water storage, and medical supplies are redundant in any extreme emergency. As a result, we’ll start to focus on the unique supplies you need for prepping for a specific event.
Here are some examples for nuclear war preps:
More Info:
BOOKS:
Cybergeddon
Another growing and all-too-common occurrence lately has been the number of cyber-attacks on companies, hospitals, banks, and even individuals. Rogue actors have crashed major systems, and cyber ransoms have become the new crime-wave.
The ominous threat is an attempt to crash the global Internet. We hear from time to time that safeguards are in place, but the latest wave of cyber-attacks leaves us wondering.
We may take it for granted, but so much of our lives and lifestyles are dependent on the ability of digital communication to guide and direct our lives. Cybergeddon is the actual term coined for result and it would affect most everything in our lives from commerce to medical treatment to education, work, and the most fundamental – communication.
The end result would be what is known as a compound or cascading disaster. It’s when the failure of one thing leads to the rapid collapse of everything surrounding it. Think of it as a domino effect, and the dominoes would fall fast including the power grid, cell phone and internet communications, and on and on.
There are various arguments about duration with some saying pockets and places would recover. It all depends on the sophistication and determination of the attackers. Preparing for it will be a bit different because life will revert to a lifestyle from centuries ago.
Homesteading or the ability to grow, gather, and process your own food, water, and everything else you may need will be the only true measure of success.
Prepping for Cybergeddon
This scenario is the classic cascading or compound disaster. The loss of all things digital will affect everything that depends on it, and these days that seems like everything.
It’s hard to guess what to do beyond the basic preps we covered at the beginning. If nothing works, you’re living a very rustic lifestyle that includes cooking outdoors and everything else that a primitive society did without technology.
Epic Natural Disasters
Beyond the manmade threats and possible disasters is the looming possibility that nature will strike again. These are cataclysmic natural disasters that have global impacts including super volcano eruptions, massive solar storms, rare but very real gamma ray bursts from exploding stars, or even asteroid strikes.
The answer to survival in those scenarios is really all about the luck of where you happen to live, or a safe location you can get to. And that’s only to avoid the immediate impact of the natural disaster.
With doomsday, all you can do is the best you can do. Some people think it’s futile to prepare for doomsday, but one thing’s for sure: Not preparing is the only way to guarantee you don’t survive.
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