Seeds for Water

Its the near future, greedy politicians have burned down civilization through failed foreign policy and misguided financial principals. Then zombies, aliens, or terminators devastate whats left. Its every sentient creature and AI drone bot for himself, imported alien mutants and all. Somehow your alive, and working your way up the food chain, like any point in a timeline of life.

Your in some post apocalyptic merchant traders bazaar. You know what you got, whatever it happens to be in your situation and living conditions. As you walk around, seeing lighters, canned goods, faux jewelry and alcohol and so much more haggled back and forth. Gun fire is the daily soundtrack of the city. You approach a merchant, you discuss various updates in the local community, exchange rates and commodity prices. The deal has come down to this. Somebody has seeds, and somebody has water.

You choose to walk away, or make a trade. If you make a trade, what kind for seeds were they, are you just growing food for self, family, trade?? How do you verify water quality? Do you even care? Is the water fortified with electrolytes (trace minerals)? How much water/ how many seeds etc. etc..

What kind of bind are you in? What would it take?? Seeds for water, I wonder if this is now, or ever has been a trade that has been offered and made. Are there examples today in the form of water rights for agriculture subsidies type deals??

Seeds and water. What will find in the aporcalypsE??

I save my bottlecaps to spend at the bordello . Everything else already available in the vault .
Vault tec thought of everything .

a reply to: VengefulGhost My Uncles father rode with Pancho Villa. That will give a time frame, but he made a Bottle cap mosaic on a desk I remember as a kid.... It was a Stallion horse and Fighting Cock.


Water is the life blood of every nation. Civilizations have vanished from lack of it. The Anasazi for instance. Seeds have some chance of a monetary value, a future, water is an immediate thing.

I would choose the seeds.

a reply to: worldstarcountry

Your post sounds more like a videogame than real life. You can't make that kind of decision without more information. Do you have land to plant the seeds? Do you have time to grow them? Is it the right time of year?

If water is so scarce that people are trading it on street corners (which is historically unusual, to say the least... our bottled water culture is more a signnof opulence than scarcity), how thirsty are you and wherevare you getting your water? What do you have to trade with that you can afford to give up for a gallon of water every day (or more, if it's ungodly hot or you're walking a lot, or if you ever want to wash anything).

Typically, when water doesn't come out of the tap, people walk to where the water is and then carry it back to where they live. They don't usually pay for it (unless someone is selling access to a well nearby while the free water is a few more miles away). I would say if you have to trade resources to access water, it's time to move somewhere else.

a reply to: anotheramethyst
I thought I left that open for interpretation?? Well if it was not clear, your entire living situation, background, and/or zone of control is entirely up to your interpretation. It kind of is a video game, you decide if the trade works because you have a very clean well and land up the wazoo, or because your in need of water after your well ran dry. Or your just fine, sorry don't need seeds or water right now. PASS! 4th of July weekend, drinks are in me.

I'll never live where the water isn't.
Can't swing a dead cat without hitting a lake, river, pond or steam, and that's the way it should be.

We came from the water- we are made of the water.

Live there, die there.

You don't need anything.

There's always food all around you.

You only have to be prepared to discard your "prejudices" about what you can eat.

If you choose the seeds, that implies that you are confident it will rain at some point fairly soon. Because otherwise they wouldn't grow, which would make them useless.

So I'd choose the water, and drink it very sparingly, because a human deprived of water will die quicker than someone without food. And every day that I stayed alive would be another day with the chance of rain, and more water. So it would buy me around another month of life, on average, and during that time I might find something to eat.

TL;DR - seeds would be a poor choice.

I totally popped in here thinking someone had created some sort of 'seed' to plant that brought forth a spring-lol
now wouldn't that be something?

a reply to: worldstarcountry

My thinking on this, is that the people who are really surviving, are going to be in contact with other humans other than their relatives or living in commune with, only very rarely, at trading posts.

The rest of the time, they will be wherever they elected to bed down, to survive the hell that came for civilisation at the hands of its former owners. They will have abandoned the cities, the structures, the obvious dwellings, and instead retreated into nature. They will have need of no seeds, because they will have harvested them from nearby their new dwelling, be already planting crops, have access to clean water from streams so high up in the hydrological cycle, that they are not contaminated. Either that, or will already have a method for processing water so that it is safe to drink.

No one who survives the end of civilisation, will have done so without having these things already on stream.