Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:
“PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn’t store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.”
Space is BIG. Even if your asteroid idea happened, I can confidently say it won’t hit us, because the numbers are so much in favor of them not. Earth is a ridiculously small target compared to the space in the solar system, and we have Jupiter that throws everything out and protects us. It’s not happening, and even if it did it’ll likely hit water, and even if it hits land it likely won’t be near you.
Prepare for a car accident. Don’t prepare for asteroid impact. Youre wasting your time and money in the later and, though the former is relatively unlikely to be needed, it’s actually realistic that it may happen to you. Until you’re prepared for that, for a house fire, for a break in, for a medical emergency, and for anything else that’s relatively likely, you’re wasting your resources.
Andromeda is going to hit the Milky way, and it likely won’t do anything to most earth-like planets because the densities of both (all) galaxies are so low.
Individual low odds things don’t happen frequently, but collectively they happen a lot more often because there are so many low odds things with potential to happen.
The Holocene may only run 12,000 years - it looks like the Anthropocene is the most likely end for it, but life has been evolving on Earth for 3.5(ish) billion years, making the Holocene just 0.00034% of that period, 1/300,000th in round numbers.
Yes. This is why you shouldn’t play the lottery even though you may see people win it fairly frequently. Most people lose, and the cost of anyone winning is higher than the payout. Similarly, the cost for preparing for some incredibly low odds events is higher than the likelihood it’ll ever be useful.
There’s the flipside of that: cost of prepping vs what’s at stake if it happens.
This is one where development of a reasonably capable asteroid diversion system probably makes sense, or at least makes more sense than bombing each other’s cities and kidnapping each other’s children… Sure, it’s fabulously expensive to make big rockets capable of moving big rocks in space, but the cost of one of those big rocks hitting the ocean is higher. It’s low odds that a big rock is hitting any ocean tomorrow, but over the course of the next 1000 years? Even if that chance is 1/100, doing the prep work now to be able to deflect it if it comes could be a big payoff overall.
But, that still doesn’t address the unknown unknowns which - we don’t know, so calculating odds is just a matter of trying to look back in time to see when really bad things happened and assuming (incorrectly) that the odds of really bad things happening in the future are about the same.
Yeah, an asteroid detection and diversion system makes sense for a society. Those odds aren’t that low and the cost isn’t that high (and the other benefits it provides may may it regain its cost in value). It doesn’t make sense to prepare for a black hole hitting Earth and wiping us out though, for example. The cost would be insane and the likelihood is effectively zero.
However, you as an individual shouldn’t waste your time making an asteroid detection and diversion system. The cost is way more than you can afford and the likelihood is very low compared to events that could happen at any moment. It’s a waste of your resources and time to consider. Preppers are working as individuals usually.
This is where modern society is falling apart. A bunch of individuals with the “feeling” that an asteroid diversion system is “a waste of THEIR money” and that the detection system is a bigger waste still… Then we have preppers like Musk thinking about personally setting up a Mars colony, so he needs massive tax advantages and other government grift to fulfill his THC fueled visions.
About the black hole prep thing… it’s not necessarily all that expensive, you just need Musk’s Mars colony, or maybe more realistically one of Niven’s iron asteroids melted by solar power, inflated and spun to be a big hollow shell with atmosphere and gravity inside. Setup a process to make one of those every 500 years or so and string 'em out in nicely varied orbits to spread the risk. Send a few out on fusion powered slow trips to other stars…