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Comment by ahnick | Hacker News Reader

Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food. If all grocery stores and restaurants run out of food for a long enough time people will starve. This isn't a problem in practice though, because there are so many grocery stores and restaurants and supply chains source from multiple areas that the redundant and decentralized nature makes it not a problem. Thus it is the same with making your own food. Eventually if you have enough robots or food replicators around knowing how to make food becomes irrelevant, because you always will be able to find one even if yours is broken. (Note: we are not there yet)

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>If all grocery stores and restaurants run out of food for a long enough time people will starve. This isn't a problem in practice though...

I fail to see how this isn't a problem? Grid failures happen? So do wars and natural disasters which can cause grids and supply chains to fail.

That is short hand. The problem exists of course, but it is improbable that it will actually occur in our lifetimes. An asteroid could slam into the earth or a gamma ray burst could sanitize the planet of all life. We could also experience nuclear war. These are problems that exist, yet we all just blissfully go on about our lives, b/c there is basically nothing that can be done to stop these things if they do happen and they likely won't. Basically we should only worry about these problems in so much as we as a species are able to actually do something about them.

If they are at small scale then it's fine.

If it's at large scale then millions die of starvation.

> Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food

That's a bizarre claim, confidently stated.

Of course I can make a fire, cook and my own food. You can, too. When it comes to hunting, skinning and the cutting of animals, that takes a bit more practice but anyone can manage something even if the result isn't pretty.

If stores ran out of food we would have devastating problems but because of specialization, just because we live in cities now you simply can't go out hunting even if you wanted to. Plus there is probably much more pressing problems to take care of, such as the lack of water and fuel.

If most people actually couldn't cook their own food, should they need, that would be a huge problem. Which makes the comparison with IT apt.

I don't think they're saying _you_ can't do those things, just that most people can't which I have to agree with.

They're not saying people can't learn those things either, but that's the practice you're talking about here. The real question is, can you learn to do it before you starve or freeze to death? Or perhaps poison yourself because you ate something you shouldn't or cooked it badly.

> The real question is, can you learn to do it before you starve or freeze to death? Or perhaps poison yourself because you ate something you shouldn't or cooked it badly.

You can eat some real terrible stuff and like 99.999% of the time only get the shits, which isn't really a concern if you have good access to clean drinking water and can stay hydrated.

The overwhelming majority of people probably would figure it out even if they wind up eating a lot of questionable stuff in the first month and productivity in other areas would dedicate more resources to it.

You're not going to be any good for hunting, farming or keeping warm if you have the shits though.

Can you list a situation where this matters that you know this personally?

Maybe if you end up alone and lost in a huge forest or the Outback, but this is a highly unlikely scenario.

If society falls apart cooking isn’t something you need to be that worried about unless you survive the first few weeks. Getting people to work together with different skills is going to be far more beneficial.

The existential crisis part for me is that no-one (or not enough people) have the skills or knowledge required to do these things. Getting people to work together only works if some people have those skills to begin with.

I also wasn't putting the focus is on cooking, the ability to hunt/gather/grow enough food and keep yourself warm are far more important.

And you are far more optimistic about people than me if you think people working together is the likely scenario here.

>the ability to hunt/gather/grow enough food and keep yourself warm are far more important

These are very important when you're alone. Like deep in the woods with a tiny group maybe.

The kinds of problems you'll actually see are something going bad and there being a lot of people around trying to survive on ever decreasing resources. A single person out of 100 can teach people how to cook, or hunt, or grow crops.

If things are that bad then there is nearly a zero percent change that any of those, other than maybe clean water, are going to be your biggest issue. People that do form groups and don't care about committing acts of violence are going to take everything you have and leave you for dead if not just outright kill you. You will have to have a big enough group to defend your holdings 24/7 with the ability to take some losses.

Simply put there is not enough room on the planet for hunter gathers and 8 billion people. That number has to fall down to the 1 billion or so range pretty quickly, like we saw around the 1900s.

The well known SHTF story that summarises your point written by a guy who lived in Sarajevo:

https://www.scribd.com/document/110974061/Selco-s-Survival

From a real situation, only alluding to the true horrors of the situation.

You think that the majority of people actually know how to do those things successfully in the absence of modern logistics or looking up how to do it online?

I have a general idea of how those things work, but successfully hunting an animal isn't something I have ever done or have the tools (and training on those tools) to accomplish.

Which crops can I grow in my climate zone to actually feed my family, and where would I get seeds and supplies to do so? Again I might have some general ideas here but not specifics about how to be successful given short notice.

I might successfully get a squirrel or two, or get a few plants to grow, but the result is still likely starvation for myself and my family if we were to attempt full self-reliance in those areas without preparation.

In the same way that I have a general idea of how CPU registers, cache, and instructions work but couldn't actually produce a working assembly program without reference materials.

I mean before you stave to death because you don’t have food in your granary from last year, you don’t even have the land to hunt or plant food so it’s not even relevant

Ok, poof. Now everyone knows how to hunt, farm, and cook.

What problem does this solve? In the event of breakdown of society there is nowhere near enough game or arable land near, for example, New York City to prevent mass starvation if the supply chain breaks down totally.

This is a common prepper trope, but it doesn't make any sense.

The actual valuable skill is trade connections and community. A group of people you know and trust, and the ability to reach out and form mini supply chains.

I don't think that comment is advocating for most people to be able to do these things or stating that this is a problem.

In fact it says "This isn't a problem in practice though"

> This is a common prepper trope, but it doesn't make any sense.

In case the supply chain breaks, preppers don't want to be the ones that starve. They don't claim they can prevent mass starvation.

(Very off topic from the article)

Preppers are maybe the worst of the nonsense cosplay subcultures in modern memory. The moment things go south the people who come out ahead are always the people able to convince and control their fellow humans. The weirdo in the woods with the bunker gets his food stolen on like day 12. The post apocalypse warlord makes it through just fine. Better, maybe!

The key to survival has always been tribal dynamics. This wouldn't change in the apocalypse.

> Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food. If all grocery stores and restaurants run out of food for a long enough time people will starve.

I doubt people would starve. It's trivial to figure out the hunting and fire part in enough time that that won't happen. That said, I think a lot of people will die, but it will be as a result of competition for resources.

People would absolutely starve, especially in the cities.

It’s just not possible to feed 8 billion people without the industrial system of agriculture and food distribution. There aren’t enough wild animals to hunt.

If I could hunt, it wouldn't actually matter, because nearly all the animals I would want are in stables. So all I would need to do is find a large enough rock and throw it at them, until they die. The much larger problem would be to keep all the other humans from doing that before me.

In Star Trek they just 3D printed everything via light.

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