You know what everyone is talking about lately? Armageddon, the end of the world, annihilation of the human race. That and tomorrow, the 21st of December 2012.
Whether the world will end or not is not of much interest to me, no one knows the future so I'm never going to be completely convinced by any argument. What I want to know is HOW the world is going to end. This is because it will have an impact on the sort of preparations that need to be made to survive it.
There are approximately ten ways that the world could end and each of them need their own form of preparation, so for those of you who are convinced that the world will end here follows a list of preparations for each scenario:
Nuclear Apocalypse
This is, I would think, the most likely of all the possible armageddons. It is also one of the easier ones to survive, get a fallout bunker stocked with provisions for many years. For an apocalyptic scale you want a bunker with space and provisions for many families so that several generations can survive without inbreeding.
The thing to remember is that nothing else will survive except cockroaches so you need to keep seeds to plant once the soil is able to sustain them again, this will ensure that an ecosystem can start to be rebuilt. Also bugspray.
Alien Invasion
Surviving this one will depend on why they're invading. If they want to wipe out humanity to get their hands/tentacles on Earth's resources then two things are necessary, make sure we have the capacity to shoot missiles into space to deal with orbiting ships and also rapidly increase the amount of 'space junk' that is apparently going to stop us from ever going into space again in the hope that it will make it equally difficult for space to get in.
However, if they want to enslave us, the ones who survive are likely to be the ones that put up little resistance in the early stages, until we better understand their technology and society, and then stage an organised rebellion at some later opportunity.
If they invade simply to abduct cows, as so much of pop culture would seem to suggest, I say we let them take them and survive on lamb, pork, chicken etc.
Viral Pandemic
This is a difficult one to survive single handed. Luckily for me, Australia has some damn good quarantine procedures so unless it starts here I'll be reasonably safe. On the other hand, for the end of days to happen on the 21st the virus would need to be relatively widely spread already and as I haven't heard about a new superbug lately I'm going to go ahead and assume this one is ruled out.
Sol-Death
This refers to a problem with the sun and there are two versions of this apocalypse. One is the complete cessation of nuclear reaction in the sun, causing a loss of heat and light to the entire planet; the other is the expansion of the sun which overheats and then consumes the planet. The only way to avoid either of these possibilities is to escape on a spaceship to another habitable planet, so with current technology and resources you can quite simply kiss your ass goodbye.
Cascading Geological Catastrophe
If every volcano erupts, every geological plate shifts, every weather pattern changes and both the polar icecaps melt, all at the same time the planet is not going to be recognisable afterwards. There are, however, a few key locations on the planet that will be better suited to surviving floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes and all the various other deadly phenomena; these are characterised by being high altitude, far from continental plate edges and well away from coastlines. If you can find a space like this that is large enough to make a reasonable sized farm you should be fine, provided you can avoid it becoming overpopulated. Then it is a matter of waiting for the planet to calm down and rebuild society.
Act of God
This going to be a tough one to survive, and there isn't much you can do to prepare for it because different religions have different ideas about what will be involved. From Ragnarok to the Four Horsemen the only way to be sure of surviving is to pray to your chosen pantheon and its a matter of chance whether you picked the right one.
Personally I'm going to hope that the Flying Spaghetti Monster reaches out His Noodly Appendage to lift me to paradise.
Zombocalypse
Obviously the main thing to do here is not get bit. Once you have organised your weapons and a defensive perimeter that will alert you in plenty of time to the advancing masses of undead you should also put some thought into how you are going to make sure other survivors don't mistake you for a reanimated corpse.
Remember, too, that this particular apocalypse will forever hang over our heads, as a single zombie trapped for centuries under a collapsed building is all it would take to begin another apocalypse, so teach you children the importance of constant vigilance.
That said, this is one of the better apocalypses to be on the other side of, because there is relatively little damage to infrastructure involved, so humankind will be thrown back to the renaissance rather than the dark ages in terms of technological progress.
Robocalypse
First thing first, to avoid this is easy - ban the manufacture and sale of red LEDs, when robots turn evil their eyes always turn red so if there are no red LEDs they can't turn evil. Problem solved!
If the robocalypse does occur before this sensible precaution is put into effect, though, there are exactly three things you need to do to survive and overcome this.
1) Have a set of logical paradoxes ready to say to the robots, like "I am lying!" or "Is the answer to this question no?" which will cause a catastrophic and total systems failure.
2) Only venture out of your safe location when it is raining so if you are attacked there is a better chance that any damage you do to it while defending yourself will cause water to short out its circuits.
3) Shut down all power stations, removing the ability for the robots to recharge their power cells, then you can wait until their power runs down. If they are solar powered then make sure to cover them in paint or something to stop the sunlight getting to them.
If you follow these three simple steps then you're sure to survive.
Meteorite Collision
Again, not much the individual can do about this one, but luckily we have Near Earth Asteroid Tracking and the American Air Force's Maui Space Surveillance Site that will both tell us well in advance if some sort of celestial body is on a collision course with Earth, and the larger it is the more warning we'll have so apocalypse size objects will be known about something like two years in advance.
Once we know it's coming it is a simple case of getting Bruce Willis to put together a team that can identify where the crack is and put a nuclear bomb in the asteroid/meteor/whatever it is, managing to break almost every law of physics in the process.
Nature Strikes Back
The last type of apocalypse I'll be covering, this is quite simply impossible to survive. Face it, they provide food, labour and companionship for us, as well as other functions to keep us alive that we are barely even conscious of, so if all other life on the planet suddenly decides to eradicate humanity from existence there is nothing we can do about it except hope to be reincarnated as something cute and fluffy.
So there you have it, yes there are probably other types of apocalypse possible but for the most part one of these strategies should be useful in those situations with only minor adjustments.
