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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

Having 72 hours of shelter/water/food, a first aid kit, and some other bits and pieces is not how prepping is colloquially used.

Given a disaster with a 1% yearly chance, and a lifespan of 80 years, lifetime odds of encountering that disaster are close to 50%. Given a disaster with a 0% or a 0.000001% chance, lifetime odds are still pretty close to zero. Disaster preparedness worries about the 1%, prepping worries about what many people including me would consider the 0.000001%, which is why having a pack of water bottles and a first aid kit in a cupboard seems like common sense, but prepping for the fall of civilisation seems ridiculous.

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You really think the probability of such a disaster is 0.000001% per year? The cold war wasn't that long ago and came very close to the brink a number of times. If we were just lucky, and there is an expected rate of 1 nuclear war every 73 years, that already gets us over your 1% threshold. And nuclear war is far from the only risk. Nuclear weapons are already 70 year old tech, we are always progressing towards scarier technologies. I think your estimate is off by a factor of a million.

After the Spanish flu, multiple near-missed accidental nuclear launches as well as political crises during the Cold War, September 11, SARS scare, Ebola scare, weather events like Katrina or the Ottawa ice storm, as well as your bog-standard surprise wars from history, it seems obvious to me that the chance of a mass-destruction event requiring over 3 days of supplies far exceeds 0.000001% chance per year.

I agree that the odds of "society" dissolving are very small. However, the penalty for encountering a blizzard without preparation -- maybe not having enough food to eat full meals for, say, a week -- is FAR lower than then penalty for encountering armageddon without preparation. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if the fall of civilization is 1,000 times less likely, and the consequences are 1,000 times worse, the calculus gets a little more complex.

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