[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

They know how to organize a long party and haven't had to do it without preexisting infrastructure in decades. Planning survival in a post-apocalypse setting is a real stretch of their abilities.

Water, toilets, EMTs, Fire Services, Food distribution, waste management, and power generation with strict zoning and maintenance of lanes and structures. Built on a site atop a desert playa to support 100,000 revelers for seven days and a few hundred for a week before and a week after..... possibly 30 - 45 days..... for a seven day event.

If you say so.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

How many topo maps do they have? Seriously, because the internet just went down for good and I don't know how many Burning Man attendees are packing USGS surveys.

These are not expensive and people out here tend to get out alot. Personally in my SUV at this moment is a topo atlas for NV, UT, OR, and CO... along with city maps for Denver, Salt Lake, Las Vegas, and a dozen others large enough to get lost in. The Ranger District can provide dozens or hundreds just ask. I don't use GPS, but I learned maps and compass in the Army. Experience in the Army taught me not to trust GPS navigation either. Maps abound.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

I categorically disagree. Gerlach and Empire to the south make absolute sense - they are far closer, have far more resources than anything north, and are probably already known to a large number of those in attendance. Long before you hit Fallon you hit Pyramid Lake. They don't know what was hit unless it was within maybe 50-100 miles or so, and they sure don't have any way to know where the fallout will be or how intense. They're not looking for someplace to whether a war, they're looking for someplace to get their collective crap together and preferably try and get back to their actual homes and loved ones. Going north does none of that. Going north makes sense only if they know everything that is going on and decide to abandon everything and gamble that a dude ranch in the desert is the best place to spend the rest of their lives. And if there is anything serious going on, heading to that dude ranch would have to be a one-way trip - can't count on gas being available, you set up shop there you're going to be walking 50 miles to Gerlach if you need anything!

Another question: how many people at Burning Man have vehicles?

If you like, going back south puts you into the fallout pattern of all the places just visited. Right back into the confused frightened mobs fleeing east from Sacrament on I80 and the confused frightened mobs fleeing west from Salt Lake City. I would like to think that some semblance of the rapidly disintegrating FedGov is broadcasting from Raven Rock Alternate Joint Command or Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center in the Emergency broadcasting system via AM/FM/Shortwave with facts on fallout and impacts.

There are thousands of vehicles at Burning Man.. During the event people must walk or use pedal power unless the vehicle has been deemed mobile art... Art cars are popular and very creative. People arrive on buses then sleep in tents. RV, campers, and all manner of conversions. Gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, hybrids, electrics, solar..... These are creative people and crafty people. Sail racing and velocipede racing are side activities.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

First, why not? It has always seemed weird to me that the Project had access to a genuine time traveler and yet get caught flat-footed all the time. I mean, sure they can't know everything... but Morrow never walks into a Project office and asks "got anything for me to take back to the 60's?" "Yeah boss, we knew you were coming because when you go back you tell them to plan for this. So here's a computer with an instruction manual. It has a lot of good stuff. See you next year!"

Oh Bruce.... According to Richard Tucholka, it isn't that certain. One Bruce also side steps dimensions.. Infinite earths. Bruce gets a small mention in Fringeworthy, another game by Richard. Second, there is also paradoxes, every change upsets all the other futures. When Bruce tries to implement large changes at some singular point things change radically. The sort where Hitler dies as corporal from allied artillery in 1917. Leon Trotsky bests Josef Stalin for the number two position in the Soviet in the 1920s forcing Stalin into exile. That sort of thing. Bruce can implement the Big Picture like organizing the Council of Tomorrow and that seems to not produce so many possible outcomes.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Second, Prime Base doesn't need to anticipate any of this. The only thing within 50 miles of desert is a single dude ranch, and the smartest thing they could do is buy the danged thing and then run it into the ground. And if someone shows up at their doorstep somehow, they just need to do the incredibly important jobs they have been training hard to do and keep the door shut.

Which I assume they would do. Is it heartless and cruel? Yes, so is a nurse debriding dead flesh off a third degree burn. The Project is to save civilization, not survivors.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Not explicitly, but if they don't then this is a staggeringly irrelevant discussion. If they do not respond to people in the area then those people have no impact on the Project. The whole conversation started because tsofian brought up the role of refugees in the fall of the Project and you proposed Burning Man as the source. If they aren't the refugees for whom Prime Base opens.... then they are irrelevant to anything.

If you say so. I think many will still be in the area five years on. Simply because there isn't much point in traveling hundreds of miles of unknown to look at another nuke impact. Will there be 100,000... not with the canon 95% death toll from nukes, disease, war plagues, and nuclear winter. A few hundred living in RVs and living on game and gardening in canyons. Sure, why not?

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Or are you saying that they stay at the dude ranch for 2 years, and THEN Prime Base takes them in? Because at that point, they aren't refugees, they're settlers. They're doing okay.

Managing, subsisting, yep. Prime Base can do better with at a minimum modern medicine and agricultural assistance.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

That does not at all sound like a crowd ready to tackle sociopathic* post-apocalyptic desert survival strategies, especially without the internet. Heck that sounds more like "get me back to civilization NOW so I can access my resources and comforts!" Seriously, that crowd has no particular knowledge or resources at Burning Man that they can leverage to help them here. I've spoken to Elon Musk, he's great in a certain role, he can't design 99% of what he is famous for producing and would not be high on my list of "guys I want leading if Mad Max isn't available."

If you say so.... I see the type that gets things done. That sold door to door or worked three jobs and made their own success. I don't think any are going to rise up and be George Washington. I think they will still rise to the top in organization and using resources to max potential making them Mayors more than Kings. That goes for the business leaders, the film stars and rock stars, I expect will just die or get their hands dirty.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

*: Sociopathic not because of outsiders but because they are going to abandon everyone and everything they didn't bring to Burning Man with them, and instead head in a direction chosen only because they are experts on fallout who know what's been hit and by what and who have determined that a dude ranch in the high desert is going to be their "forever home" whether the occupants like it or not. They're sociopaths!

Meh, we can only speculate. People do some amazing things when the other option is death.