[mcmcmc]

This is nothing new though; industrialization and specialization have already caused basic survival skills to atrophy in most of the population. Take the case of a massive EMP taking out all computer systems. Gaps in supply chains and power failures would lead to millions (or billions) dying of starvation, dehydration, or exposure because they don’t know how to provide for themselves. People who’ve studied and practiced survival skills (or who retained that knowledge in physical media like a book) would survive. Drop someone from humanity’s hunter-gatherer days into the same situation and they’d have a better chance of surviving than most contemporary humans.

[varenc]

If everyone in Manhattan had Bear Grylls-level survival skills, most would still starve in the long term without modern supply chains and industrial agriculture. The damaged ecosystems around large population centers can't support millions of primates, however skilled, suddenly relying on it.

Same would be true if you dropped off a million wild black bears in their natural habitat. The natural environment just can't support that many large animals in a small area.

[AndrewKemendo]

Which is why every major city center is where the apocalypse actually occurs

Go look at Gaza or Lebanon if you want to look into the future of what being in a city that is dominated by a technologically capable adversary with no remorse would look like.

[EdwardDiego]

> Gaps in supply chains and power failures would lead to millions (or billions) dying of starvation, dehydration, or exposure because they don’t know how to provide for themselves. People who’ve studied and practiced survival skills (or who retained that knowledge in physical media like a book) would survive.

Hahaha, bless. I'm one of those people, I hunt, so I spend a lot of time out in the wilderness.

And if civilisation suddenly collapsed? My hunting and survival skills aren't going to do shit when I'm surrounded by thousands of other people who are competing for the same limited pool of resources. I might be able to identify the signs that a deer has browsed here recently, but so can many other people, and when we all turn up in the same forest looking for food en masse, well there's only so many deer a given area can support.

> Drop someone from humanity’s hunter-gatherer days into the same situation and they’d have a better chance of surviving than most contemporary humans.

Unfortunately, as the contemporary humans will likely resort to banditry to supplement their survival chances, your idealized hunter-gatherers are doomed to being stood over at best, murderered at worst.

[XorNot]

Its irrelevant if you can provide for yourself. The ecosystem cannot support 9 billion Hunter gatherers - period. Subsistence level agriculture is also wildly inefficient and so again: the ecosystem cannot support it.

A hunter-gatherer dropped into a metropolis where all the logistics has suddenly failed would be as dead as everybody else.

[mcmcmc]

> Its irrelevant if you can provide for yourself. The ecosystem cannot support 9 billion Hunter gatherers - period.

I didn’t suggest that it could, but the number that it can support is certainly more than zero. If that’s the only choice in a hypothetical scenario where global infrastructure goes kablooey, then people who can figure out how to provide for themselves will outlive those who can’t. From there it’s natural selection.

[XorNot]

Whether you survive is going to be almost entirely determined by factors not in your control and an obtainable skillset is statistically insignificant. The one critical skill is the one people discount almost immediately: social.

You're statistically likely to simply be stuck in collapsing logistics system alongside everyone else: whether you can kill and dress your own rabbit doesn't matter because their aren't any.

[EdwardDiego]

And being able to find one rabbit and actually catch it will feed you for a few days at best, albeit with hunger pangs.

But then there's rabbit starvation... https://web.archive.org/web/20090405155151/https://www.westo...

[mcmcmc]

So where you live is out of your control? The US has a ton of great hunting, your take might be more true in cities but the rats and pigeons will still be around. People still need to know how to find and purify water, how to make shelter and fire.