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What would a climate crisis doomsday bunker need?
I have been thinking recently, if a climate crisis is almost inevitable at this point what actions could an individual take to stay safe? I'm thinking some kind of underground bunker able to to sustain life. The main things you would need is power, water and food. The power is fairly simple since you could set up solar and wind generation and probably use that to grow food underground but I'm wondering what you would do for water. How possible would it be to collect barrels from the sea and have a personal desalination plant.
Doomsday bunker as a meme was a product of nuclear terror, and it doesn't really help you with this one. You can't actually survive apocalypse alone.
The threat is not nuclear fallout or zombies, or even the climate directly. What climate crisis might eventually cause is the winding down of global trade and shrinking of the state and other complex society.
What you need is long term self-suffiency (not hoarding), and for that you above all need other people. Then after that you need food, water, power and so on.
So: Focus on building communities and networks. Learn skills like farming and low-tech engineering. Build a farm instead of a bunker.
I think a bunker wouldn't actually be a bad idea, but it would need to be combined with farming and sustainability.
The thing that a lot of people get wrong about climate change is the threat. If it were really just rising sea levels, more intense storms, and shifting agricultural belts, all of those things are trivial to deal with. Just don't live near the coast, and don't live in a area that already gets very hot.
The real threats are the knock on affects of those things though. Shifting agriculture leads to failed crop yields, which leads to famine, which leads to increased pressure on governments and societies, which leads to war. More intense storms leads to destruction, which leads to refugees, which leads to increased border security, which leads to skirmishes, which leads to war. Rising sea levels leads to ports becoming unusable, which leads to economic stagnation, which leads to unemployment, which leads to discontent, which leads to war. You can see some of this already starting to play out in parts of the world. The Syrian civil war, for example, was exacerbated by crop failures due to drought in 2006. That war has been raging for several years, and because of the refugees its producing that Western European nations have been absorbing, is responsible for a rise in right wing populist politics in Europe. Events like these will become more and more common, and because right wing populism is an inherently selfish set of policies, it produces a positive feedback loop where international cooperation to solve the root issue becomes less and less likely.
All of these threats would be trivial if humans were able to perfectly allocate resources, and work together to overcome common threats. History has shown us that we are not capable of that. We look out for ourselves, our families, maybe our community, and possibly our country. Besides that, people don't care about one another, so if they think an invasion or a nuke will help them maintain their current lifestyle, that will be the option they take. Bunkers may come in handy in that situation.
If you think bunkers are going to save you from the hordes of people desperate for some of your resources...
I mean it's not a bad idea, but it's only a matter of time at that point. You either die alone, living out your days in a hole in the ground or you get killed by someone desperate for your resources.
What kind of life is that to live?
Yep, as fucked up as that one town was, they had solar panels providing energy, somewhat modern conveniences, and a cohesive community that worked together for survival.
Self-sufficiency is possible, but it's you against the world, and the world has a lot of fucked up people. And more coming in the future.
Well no, but it'll save you from a bomb. Most moderately populated places in the US are within the blast or radiation radius of a large nuclear weapon, and a nuclear exchange is pretty likely at some point in the future.
I don't think it'd be a particularly pleasant way to live, but it's better than dying.
I mean we all die eventually. I'd say being stuck in a hole for the rest of my natural life would be a worse living hell than any nuclear situation...
That's just me though.
I think the big issue with Bunkers will be rising sea levels. I assume most bunkers are planned/designed with nuclear winters in mind. I'd be curious what people who've put more thought into it have to say about bunkers and rising sea levels.
I doubt this would render many bunkers obsolete. The sea level rises predicted for the next century don't seem to go over 3m. This will completely destroy a lot of cities, but if you're bunker is in a major city it would be too likely to take a direct strike to be a good nuclear bunker (In the era hydrogen bombs at least).
Over the next few centuries, sea level are expected to rise considerably more, but that would likely be outside of the scope a climate bunker.
The prime example of a nuclear bunker constructed with plenty of resources (that we know about) would be the one at The Greenbriar. Being in West Virginia, it is well beyond sea level rise. If you try to build far away from population centers, you'll probably be far from coastlines too.
I genuinely think the ideas of Daemon (by Daniel Suarez) are one of the best ways to convert society from a hyper-centralized capitalistic nightmare into a decentralized, yet still networked, community-focused lifestyle.
Obviously the deconstruction of capitalism happens via a near-magical computer virus as well as some future tech that is a tad bit oversold, but the society that it builds is focused on sustainability, living within the means/constraints of the natural local environment, and actively working to fix the environment we've screwed up.
Just want to second this with the anecdote that the advice to build communities is what I have gathered from the accounts of refugees - people who have actually lived through a catastrophic breakdown in society and normal life. In real situations, the "lone-wolf bunker fantasy" people tend to come out of their hidey-holes after a while and join up with communities because it is vastly better for their comfort and survival.
The other thing I recall hearing more than once is that you can never have enough cooking oil.
If you have solar panels, or wind turbines above ground, why are you building underground?
(There's valid reasons to build underground, just trying to understand yours).
Growing food underground is pretty much a useless effort, unless the ceiling is glass.
It's trivial to farm indoors using LEDs and modern vertical farming techniques. It's all the rage right now but certainly not without some kinks in profitability. You'll outproduce above ground farms handily even in ideal growing conditions and farm year round without caring what's going on with the outside climate. If there's nuclear fallout that might be the best solution, since anything grown above ground is going to have radioactive contamination and you don't want to eat that. Seems like the excavation of so much underground area just for farming would be expensive, though. There's also a steeper power requirement running those systems all the time, so you're going to have higher energy costs.
Something has to exist above ground - solar panels, windmills, whatever is powering your bunker. The ideal solution for long term high energy would be portable nuclear reactors, but we haven't finished designing those yet. With the farming and nuclear power one could have a completely underground bunker that shows no evidence it's there.
I've heard of people buying and converting old missile silos for this stuff. Seems like a fun project if you've got money to burn.
That silo has always been my "If I ever win the lottery" project. There's little I'd like more than to live in a spacious, protected, well-equipped underground abode.
So, yes... Either with a glass roof, or fields of electric power, you can farm underground... Because light is the key to growing. And to make enough light you either need lots of electricity, or lots of sun. Oh, also temperature control (More electricity, or fossil fuels, geothermal wont really work for this), humidity control (Electricity), etc etc
I think I said that?
Underground has natural protection from the sun. There is a town in Australia where everyone lives underground to keep cool
To keep cool is a valid reason, but they dont do farming underground.
But none of that addresses the very real possibility of a massive die-off of flora/fauna that could lead to massive famines/shortages. We still don't fully understand how to replicate something as "simple" as how bees pollinate plants, how can we expect to handle when they've all bit the dust?
Right, but you see how that doesn't scale beyond hobbyists, right?
That's a very good point.
Your energy is better spent fighting against climate change. With global famine and drought, social unrest, potentially even a reduction in oxygen levels, it would take a real feat of engineering to overcome - and then what happens when, 10 years down the line, your CO2 scrubber dies in the middle of the night, or your indoor crops catch some kind of fungus? The best you can hope for is living mostly alone in the midst of a global hellscape, until one or two things go wrong. Or you can fight now to prevent that future.
Would you like to live in an underground bunker? I think I'd rather die.
With that in mind, I think resources are much better spent trying to mitigate the problem, even if it looks completely hopeless, than trying to plan for a very uncertain future.
Well, I don't see myself living too long in an absolute climate apocalypse, so if I was going to die anyway...
The ideal bunker would have a Chocolate Fountain, Gigabit Ethernet, one of those cool Robot dogs, a pool, a rave room with lights and a kicking sound setup, and a laser mounted on top to go "pew pew" when stragglers I don't like come by. The cool ones are invited in though.
If I were going to build some kind of bunker, though, I'd probably make my first decision based on location. To me, it makes sense to go close to the equator because that's where temperatures will change the least. High elevation to avoid sea level rise and further moderate temperatures - this could be an issue though in a deoxygenation scenario. Places like this exist in Central and South America as well as Southeast Asia. If you find somewhere sufficiently remote, you might not need a bunker at all. A small group could subsistence farm and hunt for what is available. Then the trick becomes, how do you get th local community to not kill you if things get really desperate?
I largely agree with others that a long term underground bunker is not likely feasible. You can certainly have you're home be underground(not really a bad idea if the water table permits it), but if you have to go above ground to live, its no longer a bunker. That said, I wouldn't discount the idea entirely. Not for living indefinitely underground, but to ride out the worst of it.
As others have pointed out, climate change will (has already?) cause war. Having a bunker (or at least a fort) may be helpful even if it is not indefinitely sustainable by itself. Just something to retreat into to ride out the storm of conflict, and store supplies for afterwards(e.g. a seed bank). A climate bunker may very well need to be a nuclear bunker. I am not sure if it is possible or needed to protect farm soil in the event of a nuclear war (maybe lay a tarp out before going in your bunker?), and I suppose no one knows for sure if/how you can choose a location away from nuclear strikes.
Also, of course this could be for more than one person, not sure why so many in this thread assume otherwise. Many hands make the digging light.