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Comment Threads

• Trottelreiner commented on 2512
  However, one of the best things for a home survival kit is a bunch of rat traps, because you can get by with eating rats and pigeons, so long as you've already learned how to eat them before the disaster strikes. "Hole food! Hole food! Rat! Rat! Rat-onna-stick! Rat-in-a-bun! Get them while they're dead!" Err, sorry, just got carried away. As for the pigeons, while pigeon pie may not to everyone's taste, at least not to some friends I talked to, they have something of a reputation for being a delicatesse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squab_(food) For the farming/herding, I wholeheartedly agree on...
• Trottelreiner commented on 2512
  Actually, I guess a kind of HG lifestyle might be of interest to our techno-nomadists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technogypsie as a kind of fallback mechanism or point of personal pride, though the Ancient Greek ideas of autonomia makes little economic sense (but then, coming out of the Bronze Age collapse might explain something of a survivalist mindset). Though then, don't get me started on our crusty "you have a (insert local currency here)? my dispo is late..." crowd. Err. BTW, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neotribalism "My use of ancient Sumerian Cuneiform in my photography is to show that prior to current times, ancient and primitive art, was...
• heteromeles commented on 2512
  Another way to think of hunting and gathering is that, once the high tide line of 9 billion people recedes, there's going to be a tremendous amount of crap lying around, waiting to be reused. The kind of bricolage needed to make all this stuff useful very definitely requires hunting and gathering skills. Just not paleolithic ones. As it is, animal hunting has long been the realm of either the wealthy or the outsiders, and I suspect it will remain that way....
• David L commented on 2512
  there's going to be a tremendous amount of crap lying around, waiting to be reused. The kind of bricolage needed to make all this stuff useful very definitely requires hunting and gathering skills. Just not paleolithic ones. And it's going to be very messy. I just discovered that the standard plastic gallon milk cartons around here have recently changed their composition. Used motor oil will eat through the current composition. Says he who collects his used oil and taking is to the oil recycling point periodically and now gets to clear up a patch of concrete. Fortunately it's a slow...
• Hank Roberts commented on Context is everything
  Nature doesn't build the level of biological complexity -- "services" -- that are capable of supporting space-craft-builders except from the bottom up. Look at Mir, or the ISS -- they grow a film of microorganisms, and start working up through mildew and probably mushrooms and slime molds, depending on how much housecleaning got done. A mature long-duration spacecraft is going to be lined with dirt and at least simple plants -- because that's what the surfaces want to be covered by. We interpenetrate. Local populations of various microbiological species are unique to each larger organism. Cut the complexity back --...