What if we could calculate the bending of light around black holes and just hammer away data at space and pick it up again at a set interval.... No storage needed!
Am looking for research funding.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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"Hey babe, what what temperature do I cook the chicken at?"
"Um... give me ten thousand years or so and I'll let you know."
Maybe I should just use these and cancel my internet
I remember when offline backups that were unaffected by EMP were everywhere.
They called them books.
"And this here is my Wikipedia room."
And over there is my pornography stadium
I prefer to call it the masterbatorium.
It's a little off the beaten path.
If you enjoy this sort of stuff make sure to support the Kiwix Project which like 90% of these commercial offshoots are based off of.
Ooh. As a hobbyist "mostly for funzies" prepper I was mildly interested. But then I clicked around their site a bit and I found preorders for a version of the prepper disk with an LLM chatbot "companion.". Assuming the LLM is using RAG on the library of source documents and isn't just relying on its training, that's really neat. I know people will exclaim "hallucination!", but in a situation where you literally have no idea what to do, no way to get help, and the alternative is lying down and dying, I could see this being really handy. Often the hardest part of having a giant archive of information is how to find what you need out of it and interpret what it's telling you.
I'd rather use an "open" version of this, though. Prepper Disk's website sounds like they're trying to keep their data at least partially locked down, and while I can understand that they want to recoup the cost of the effort they put into setting this up it kind of goes against the grain of prepping to rely on something that you can't repair or modify yourself.
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My problem with preppers is the over estimating on whether they’ll be in a position that these skills will have any effect, and the under valuing on steps we could just take to not have this future in the first place.
Like, you’ll need a farm right off the bat, or your first steps in any guider are how to violently take somebody else’s land. Followed by step two, keeping that land from other humans who don’t want to die.
Instead of prepping, become nomadic scroungers or live in a fricking farming commune in the first place. Basically descend a couple levels of societal development and you’ll already be self sufficient and ready. Like the Amish.
Or, you know, voting for politicians who listen to scientists.
Anything beyond being self sufficient for a month is overkill in my opinion.
I love seeing all the tacticool "operators" with their tricked out ARs, bulletproof vests and helmets, flexicuffs, and other shit but look like they get gassed slowly ascending the stairs from their mother's basement. Rule #1 in the zombie apocalypse is Cardio.
Also society isn't going to collapse overnight. If it does it will be a slow crawl until going full Gravy Seal is warranted. They need to survive until then.
Also society isn’t going to collapse overnight.
Not if it goes down like you expect it to.
In my experience, the real problems are the ones you weren't planning for.
Even if we don't end up nuking each other like we thought we would in the 60s-90s, we could still get a massive asteroid / comet strike with less than a week's notice. That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.
More likely: something we don't even know about comes along and makes life far more challenging than it has been for 100,000 years.
Humans are very bad at intuitively grasping very large and very small numbers, and that includes very small probabilities. The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule. Especially with the "not seeing it until it's a week away" condition, we've come a very long way when it comes to mapping near-Earth asteroids and there just aren't any places for them to hide any more. Especially not once Vera C. Rubin goes online.
That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.
A star that's capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not "innocent-looking", it's actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us. They'd also need to have a very precisely aimed axis to hit us, gamma ray bursts look so bright in part because their "beam" is so narrow.
The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule.
Absolutely, based on the information we have today.
That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that's coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don't know about that one.
The thing about our probabilities of events that haven't happened yet to leave a scar that we can notice on the surface of the Earth, we haven't been very good at observing the sky except for the last 100 years or so, really 50. So, we're learning more and more about things and newly discovered hazards don't lower the probability of occurrence...
A star that’s capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not “innocent-looking”, it’s actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us.
That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst. What we don't know about that star is the super Jupiters orbiting it in a quasi stable multi-body arrangement that could collapse a bunch of mass into the star and turn it from Jekyll to Hyde under your bed ASAP.
Space is BIG. Even if your asteroid idea happened, I can confidently say it won't hit us, because the numbers are so much in favor of them not. Earth is a ridiculously small target compared to the space in the solar system, and we have Jupiter that throws everything out and protects us. It's not happening, and even if it did it'll likely hit water, and even if it hits land it likely won't be near you.
Prepare for a car accident. Don't prepare for asteroid impact. Youre wasting your time and money in the later and, though the former is relatively unlikely to be needed, it's actually realistic that it may happen to you. Until you're prepared for that, for a house fire, for a break in, for a medical emergency, and for anything else that's relatively likely, you're wasting your resources.
Absolutely, based on the information we have today.
Right. You have to dream up counterfactual fantasies in order for it to be a problem.
That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that's coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don't know about that one.
And you don't need to worry about it, because as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.
Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this. How much mass do those asteroids have? What's their collective cross-section, and how does that compare to the volume of space they'd be passing through? How big is Earth in comparison?
I'm betting the odds will still be microscopic. I feel safe betting that because we have real world evidence that bodies in our solar system don't frequently get hit by ghost asteroids from the Magellanic Cloud (there's an 80's sci-fi movie title for you). Large impacts are few and far between these days,
That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst.
Once again, sure, you could imagine that ordinary stars sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.
If you want it to actually be a worrying scenario, though, it needs to be backed up with some kind of evidence or theory that makes it plausible. And again, we don't actually see frequent gamma ray bursts in reality, so whatever mechanism you propose needs to be rare for it to fit the data.
I think you're overlooking a more likely (and more reasonable) approach preppers take; become skilled in various survival-oriented skills and then if things go south you can go to one of those farms and offer to help out in exchange for some of the food. The lone rambo raider types aren't going to last long, humans are social animals that do best in tribes and for the most part want to form tribes.
Preemptively apocalypsing yourself by forcing yourself to live in some sort of self-sufficient compound right now isn't reasonable for most people, but having some plans and resources in your back pocket in case of disaster is not at all unreasonable.
If nothing else, it makes camping more fun and lets you ride out a power outage or local disaster in style.
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https://www.prepperdisk.com/pages/how-does-it-work
Would be nice if they'd offer downloads for the disk image. Or at least sell the disk image since I don't need yet another Pi lol.
Go get it directly from Kiwix
Yeah Kiwix is great for this, I just put together what this company is essentially selling for free by myself a few months ago. In fact I would be surprised if this company wasn't using Kiwix as most of the resources they listed are on it already.
Kiwix is awesome. Many many years ago we made a sharepx from all of Gutenbergs library and creative commons works. We also added public maps.
Less end of the world, more entertainment and helping out the community.
There are also pirate boxes that do the same with not so free resources. And they work offline for hundreds of devices.
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Has room for a porn folder too right?
Seems like an amateur apocalyptic preparation oversight that it wasn't included already.
Just check under homework.
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Yeah, but won't you need enough electricity to power a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for this to work?
That doesn't take much power, a solar panel or two should be more than sufficient, or you can rig something up w/ a defunct ebike (just run the motor backwards to generate electricity).
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It should at least be in a (sorta-)Raid1. What good does it do if it implodes?
If you're concerned why not just have two of them? That's more secure, you can store them in different places.
Why not both?
Money. Raid 1 would make every Prepper Drive cost a lot more, since it would need double the storage space. Fewer people will buy them. Instead, keep them cheap and let the people who are truly concerned about redundancy solve the problem themselves by buying two.
It's should be a 3 drive raid 5 parity but you can only buy 1. Then when the world ends you must find the people that have the other two.
Imstant RAID-party generator for Doomsday
Sounds like a good plot for a novel.
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