Surviving the Asteroid isn't too much different than a super volcano eruption or nuclear winter, where debris blots the sun from the sky. These are
about the worst case scenarios you could expect in existential threats, that you might be able to do something about. We could always get sucked into
a black hole and couldn't do much about that. Or there's always a 'skynet' takeover, or nano gray goo apocalypse, but those are seperate issues
that you wont have much luck doing anything about on your own from inside your bunker.
But you CAN survive the Black Sky.
You're going to need plenty of the typical survival stuff, water filtration, food, and enough ammo to get thru several months of the initial
'zombie' cannibal apocalypse. The later depends on how densely populated your area is. Another important one: LOTS of rechargable batteries.
But the scariest part is the idea that there might not be plant sustaining sunlight for several years time.
My guess is that stockpiling several years worth of food (think: you wont be able to grow
anything outside) could cost as much if not more than
the actual solution to the sun-less problem:
That's right, LED Grow Lights are the key.
They are rather pricey, but they last for over a decade of constant use, while hardly denting your enegry budget. And it wouldn't be a waste of an
investment, because you can still use them now to grow your favorite food crops during the winter. Keep those
perennial pepper plants growing
right thru the winter and on to a bigger yield the next year.
Problem is with a black sky you might as well make tables out of those solar panels... er, actually you could use them in your grow room to absorb
wasted light.
For power a wind turbine would be nice, except it might serve as a beacon for the 'zombies'. So it seems to me that a steam generator would be the
solution (if you can contain the sound it creates).
Only problem is I haven't had much luck ever finding practical smaller scale stream generators for purchase. Anyone have a source?
With all the trees dead you shouldn't have any problem finding wood for fuel. You could also resort to a
wood gasifier, but you'd still need to hassle trying to run a gas generator, that might
eventually give up on you even if new from running wood gas thru it.
From there you better have lots of extra building materials on hand to bunker down your compound to the extreme. You'll have 'zombies' going to all
lengths trying to get inside. I guess ammo does curb this.
But if you want your setup to handle a nuclear winter induced black sky, theres a whole list of other precautions to make your efforts pure misery.
But you can be one of the last humans to inherit the earth. Eventually the sun will come back again, although you might be pretty old by then so make
sure you have plenty of female on hand and you might just be the new Abraham
[edit on 1-12-2009 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
