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Ask HN: What tech resources would you gather for a catastrophic worldwide event?

by neverminder on 9/10/24, 11:05 AM with 3 comments

I'm talking China attacking Taiwan, WW3, another mega pandemic and stuff like that. Would you stock up on essential components like CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, hard drives, RAM, etc? Make backup images of your Linux distros with all the apps included? Download Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap?

  • by bell-cot on 9/10/24, 11:19 AM

    There are vaguely 3 categories of catastrophic events:

    I - many long-distance supply chains are unreliable or broken

    II - long-distance supply chains are broken, even for essential bulk goods

    III - local social collapse / [civil] war zone

    Which might be summarized as (I) stockpile tech stuff, (II) stockpile food & fuel, and (III) join a hard-core local militia

  • by JohnFen on 9/10/24, 2:48 PM

    It depends on the nature of the catastrophe. I think different catastrophes have different constraints, so the optimal tech to stockpile would change.

    In general, though, I'd assume that electricity would be highly constrained. So I'd focus on very low-power or no-power tech and components.

    In terms of information, I'd prefer it in dead-tree form over electronic.

  • by DevX101 on 9/10/24, 11:26 AM

    solar powered generator, single board computers (raspberry pi, etc), low powered display like e-ink or led, multiple sd cards, keyboard, long range radio, waterproof case. Everything here, except the generator should be extremely light weight and mobile.

    Backup wikipedia, openstreetmap, survival informational handbooks, and lots of fiction reading entertainment.