If you were the only human left on earth......?

you think the power grid will maintain itself. Yeh youll learn to fly by helping yourself and watching videaos. Then, the planet would be
entirely humanity free after you solo.

you think the power grid will maintain itself. Yeh youll learn to fly by helping yourself and watching videaos. Then, the planet would be
entirely humanity free after you solo.

extra medium: the psychological stress of isolation is the biggest danger (aside from the lions and such that Cyracuz is letting out of the zoo). The Army's survival handbook recommended keeping a daily journal. I think having dogs and cats would probably be a good strategy to at least keep from becoming suicidal.

Cyracuz: why raid abandoned emergency shelters? There should be plenty of nonperishable food in the local supermarkets. Of course, after a few years you might be left with only canned goods because vermin have gotten into everything else (and might even chew the labels off the cans--then every meal could be a mystery meal).

Mills, regarding the story, I'm very myopic and, as such, it is easier for me to read without glasses. The story must have referred to a different eyesight disorder.

Cyracuz, you may not want to free the zoo animals. There will probably already be enough predators for you to cope with.

Being alone will be rough; I love the company of SOME people. But once an individual has been socialized/enculturated, OTHERS are not so indispensable, i.e., you would not have the deadly limitations of a feral child.

With all the books, art and classical music CDs--I would hope the power grid holds up for at least my lifetime (or 10 years)--I could do fairly well. Nevertheless, if the phone rang I would undoubtedly experience an immediate viagra moment!.

My grandfather had a wonderful place in the mountains with ponds, streams, and even a water wheel. This water wheel powered his cabins in the area, complete with lights, refrigerator, generators, the whole 9 yards.

There's places like this throughout especially places like the western USA, isolated mountain cabins where people have learned to live with no power grid. I've significant long periods of my life basically living out a backpack or years on a fishing boat, etc.

The power grid and all that doesn't trouble me that much. That would be good. Force me to get back to some important things, like caveman survival instincts.

Get to a city that has a huge supply of gas & oil, drive the gas truck to the emergency generators at a hospital or some such, and you're set. It might take a few weeks to figure out how to work all the above without killng yourself, but it wouldn't be nearly as hard as trying to self-teach yourself to fly an airplane.

First thing I'd do is get my rear down to a top notch backpacking store. They specialize in survival stuff: almost everything you really need to survive for at least a few months can be found in a backpacking store.

That would give me a window of a few months. In those few months, I'd set up my plan for the places I really needed to know around the city--the big supermarkets for WATER. Water is the biggie. Food secondary.

The survival/bomb shelter idea is good too, but not at all necessary.

With good water & food, and a backpacking store, thats all you really need to survive for a long long time, of course we're ignoring if you get sick or something.

So I think it wouldn't be THAT tough to survive, if you were in a decent sized city. I'd make my way to a southern city so I wouldn't have to deal with the harsh winters alone.

So I think the survival part is quite do-able without too much problem. 1-2-3, by the numbers.

____

The part that interests me more is: Lets say you've got the survival part down--you got your system, and you are surviving.

What do you do next, for 10 years, to keep yourself occupied?
(the thing about this situation is you'd probably be spending like 1/2 to 3/4 of your day on survival tasks some days)--but what if we assumed you had 10 years alone, to do whatever you wanted, you were surviving....what would you do with that time?

In the movie Castaway Tom Hanks character started to go kind of crazy, remember? Painted a volleyball to create an imaginary friend...

In any event, I guess what interests me most is what happens to a person's consciousness as they're alone for 10 years...

JLNobody: Your myopia must be slight. I also suffer from myopia and my nose has to just about touch the page for me to read the words without my glasses. I've known people with worse myopia (the folks with the Coke bottle bottom glasses) and they simply can't see without vision correction. The character in the story was of this sort.

O.K., that makes sense.

EM

Pretending you are injured duck in San Diego might be better.

Well just shoot me now and put me out of my misery.

S, if you want to give advice, why don't you go visit the NWO thread and tell him the Right Word?

FM: in The Martian Chronicles, the boy would go from town to town, and use a battery to get the pump running at a fuel station--then he'd use some of that fuel to start a generator, and use that to charge batteries which kept perishables refrigerated or frozen. Bardbury was way ahead of you in the details of how to make it work. Additionally, the human colonist population of Mars was supposedly many thousands, so canned goods alone could have fed the boy for the rest of his life.

Mills: that vignette with Burgess Meredith was classic--but i thought that was The Outer Limits, not The Twilight Zone . . . hmm?

Setanta,

Interesting about the boy and the battery. Bradbury was good at those plots.

For some reason I'm reminded of this short story by Stephen King. A surgeon is stranded on a deserted island. Little or no food source.

I think he does have his "black bag" of utensils. He can't find food for a long time, so eventually.... starts cutting off parts of himself and devouring himself, little by little. Of course he'd know how to cut off a couple fingers without too much blood loss, etc.

Set: Nope, I don't think Meredith ever did an Outer Limits episode, but he did several Twilight Zone episodes.

extra medium: That's really disgusting; which story was that?

I think it would be really difficult to survive it. The lack of human contact would drive you insane much faster than you'd imagine. After a few years you'd have heaps of friends....that didn't really exist.

"WILSON!!!!"

...and then you'd get really careless about your own safety indulging in increasingly risky behaviour through boredom, and you'd have no doctors......

...I must read "Papillon" again.

Like having unprotected sex with one of BVT's $8K love dolls. :wink:

heh

Then when you got really bored you'd probably get 6 of the dolls and they'd yell at you for cheating on them, etc.

A lot of guys would do the above.

Where's that doll factory at anyway? My friend wants to know, in case he's the only one left on earth...

JL, that's why I'd free them. Where better to hide from predators than were we used to hide predators from us? I'd let the lion out of it's cage and put myself in it whenever I needed the protection.

Re: If you were the only human left on earth......?
Well I wouldn't be able to fly (not sure I'd be confident about teaching myself to fly) so I'd have to stay in the U.S. - I could get a vehicle (any vehicle I like, since no-one to stop me from just taking one) and drive wherever I like, move into a nice house that takes my fancy, something with a pool.

Since I don't have to work any longer I would take a trip to a horse-ranch and do a little horse-back riding, freeing the horses so they can forage for their own food. Wait, what about all the cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens in slaughter houses, or penned up? All locked up and sure to starve if not freed? Would I have to go find all these creatures and free them so they could fend for themselves? Or leave them to die of starvation?

The food part is easy, there's food all around and there would be plenty for the 10 years. The only thing is I would miss fresh milk (unless I get a cow and learn how to pasteurise), fresh bread, cakes and pastries (I'd have to learn how to be a better baker), fresh meat (unless I force myself to slaughter some animals) and anything tasty that I cannot cook or prepare for myself.

You never said anything about the internet and electricity so I will presume that both will continue to work for the 10 years. Can I still communicate with A2Kers? Are you all going to be missing IRL but available via the net to keep me from going insane?

extra medium: I'm not sure where the factory is, but Real Sex on HBO did a feature on it.

Heeven: It wouldn't be possible to free all the animals before they starved to death (what about all the pets stuck in their houses?). Just focus on the animals in your area.

Getting a dairy cow would be a huge pain in the ass, but the fresh bread issue might take a while to become a problem: get a generator, a bread maker, and bread dough mix (it should last quite a while, at least until the vermin get at it).

I think it would be fair to say that power, and the internet would not last long without human involvement. Most cities would burn. It only takes one fire to start with nobody to stop it. Cities would get dangerous (-er)

You'd have to go rural really quickly and find a fresh supply of water, then put in a full day of work each day just to survive.