On 21/09/2011 01:05 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Le 21/09/2011 10:54, Invisible a écrit :
>> And you're still going to die a slow, lingering death by starvation,
>> terrified and alone...
>
> You should have been using more attention to the farming tutorials.

As a practical matter, I don't think it's feasible to practise 
one-person agriculture.

In pre-industrial times, it took entire villages to bring in the year's 
crop. Admittedly I don't need to feed an entire village, but all the same...

> Assuming the electrical system is still working, you can first establish
> yourself in a mega-market near some fields.
> hunger and thirst would be filled with the frozen&  canned foods of the
> mega-market. This gives you a few months to start exploiting the nearby
> fields the traditional way.

Shops and other venues with high densities of food would appear the 
logical place to start. Plus, if it turns out that I'm *not* the last 
person alive, this is the place were I am most likely to discover over 
survivors. (Now debate whether this is a good or bad thing...)

The real question is "what happens when the shelves run out?" Given that 
I only eat meat and dairy products, there's going to be kind of a 
problem. Yes, it's probably not /that/ hard to grow lettuce. On the 
other hand, you would have to be *really* hungry to consider eating 
lettuce. I mean, like, you would have to be literally about to *die* of 
hunger... (Plus, I gather that lettuce is 100% water, so the nearest 3 
decimal places anyway.)

> You'd better start cleaning the area around of all corpses, as it will
> soon stink a lot. Sanitizing about 1 kilometre radius should keep you
> busy while the vegetables are growing in the fields.

Do you have any idea how large a 1 km radius is?

Last time I tried it, it took about 8 hours to talk a distance which (we 
were told) was 5 miles. Since that's about 8 km, that makes typical 
walking speed equal to roughly 1 km/hour. Now work out how long it'll 
take to traverse almost one square km. (!)

Now, I don't know if you know this, but adult humans are actually 
/heavy/. Like, *really* heavy. Way heavier than you'd imagine. Even the 
skinny ones. Moving just a few of them would be quite a lot of work.

> A great fire is
> probably the best disposable way, and it leaves ashes full of potassium,
> a great fertilizer for most plants.

There's a few problems with this.

Most of the modern landscape isn't especially flammable. People don't 
live in wooden houses, they live in constructs of brick, glass, concrete 
and steel. None of which is especially flammable.

For this kind of thing to make sense, you'd really need all the bodies 
in one place. That's still a hell of a lot of work.

Try not to kill yourself with the toxic fumes. It may produce a lot of 
ash, but given all the plastics involved, it's probably loaded with 
carcinogens and so forth.

Realistically, it might be better to just find a sparsely-populated 
area. But then there won't be too many shops around...

Post a reply to this message