Planning to Fail

Good evening all.

Blog posting has been a tad remiss, great start to the new blogging intentions; however life gets in the way. Nobody wants daily updates anyway, the interesting parts of my life don’t occur that frequently. Plus I was all partied up last night at my pal’s birthday bash.

I was checking out headlines and such for blog fodder and among the full moon beer, hobbit actor blockade and such I found myself wondering at what strange artefacts these news stories and events would leave for the future, should our civilisation flicker and fade.

So then I veered back to an old train of thought of mine, namely: what I would do in case of apocalypse.

They say that if  you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. So, I’m going to start putting down my plans in a more orderly fashion, to save time on doomsday. I will go through the basics with each blog post, systematically tackling survival issues, starting today with:

Whichpocalypse?

There are loads of ways for the planet to get hostile. The nature of the end of the world has a direct impact on how one would go about dealing with it, so I have had to consider the options and stick to one or two types of apocalypse to plan for.

Firstly we can weed out the apocalypses that you simply can’t survive, and thus my planning would be limited to running screaming and biological imperatives:

• Sun goes voip. The lights go out and the planet freezes. No plan needed.
• Heat death of the universe. Theoretically inevitable state where all energy in the universe has been used up and everything goes meh. Probably not a factor for my lifetime anyway.
• Meteorite. Unless its a baby, the dust clouds and general destruction will put a stop to post-apoc coolness.
• Nuclear winter. If there is total nuclear annihilation, then we won’t be donning one-sleeved leathers and battling super mutants; we will just be dead.
• Pandemic. Okay, if it’s a case of a virus totally taking down humanity, then odds are I’ll be pushing up microbes.

These are but a few of the really big bangs that might screw the pooch on a global scale. So, I will only make plans for the survivable stuff. The list I have narrowed it down to is:

• Polydemic. Like a pandemic, but only most people being dead instead of all. Virus wipes out most people, leaves a precious few, like in Terry Nation’s Survivors. As one of the blessed ones, I will go about my survival rituals, putting a slant on protection from further infection.
• Nuclear scuffle. Some of the world has been reduced to glowing green ash, but not all, allowing for some of humanity to stagger from the ruins of civilisation and start anew. I will be concentrating efforts on clean water and shelter from fallout, etc.
• Nature all up in your shit. Supervolcanos, megatsunamis, ultraquakes, awesomehail, etc. Focus on getting to ground that isnt flooded, shattered, or upside down.
• General bad juju. AI going mad and enslaving people, worldwide famine and war, civil unrest, mass insanity, invasion by lizards, nanomasons, that kind of thing. Zombie apocalypse comes under this one but frankly its a ridiculous idea and there’s no point in planning for it any more than the others. Can’t really plan for this stuff anyway, but it bears considering. ANYONE could be a nanomason- lock up your daughters and staple down your mail.

If any of these horsemen of the apocalypse come calling, I better have a plan. I’m going to assume that any of the above factors could be in play but try to make a plan that accounts for all of them. Since it would be curtains anyway if a disaster directly struck my home town of Stoke, then I will probably assume that chaos and madness are going on around the world but not on my immediate doorstep.

Something bad has happened and going to work and making cheese and ham toasties is just not going to cut it; life will have to change forever, and to survive, I will need an awesome plan. Next post will be about the immediate pressing issues- the all important first 24 hours.

Have a good remainder of the weekend!