Quote:
Originally Posted by robj3
Tony Stroppa wrote:
Contingency planning. A team could wake up in the middle of a famine, flood, wildfires, etc. etc.
Just because civilization has ended doesn't mean that something else can't go wrong. The project has a 'global' mission but has to respond to local problems.
Rob
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Rob,
That's a worthwhile sentiment, no one is arguing that the Project isn't going to try and help whoever they can, however they can.
Please keep in mind there is a serious danger of mission creep, of losing focus if too many contingencies are taken into account. As well, we need to keep in mind a few things to remain within the realm of plausibility:
- While the Project has a lot of resources available, they are not actually unlimited. That is, they must be paid for in some sense.
- All these resources not only need to be paid for, they need to be pre-emplaced in some fashion; re-supply/replenishment is going to be problematical, at least at first, so we're talking about caches and stockpiles.
- Contingency planning in this case is a zero-sum game; every ton of material devoted to refugee aid is one less available for reconstruction, the Project's core mission.
I read some of the numbers posted earlier on this list. According to Lee, a 90-day (3 month) food supply for only 3,000 people is 405,000kg. That's 27 shipping containers worth, for a few thousand people. Imagine the space that takes up! To help 3,000 people for 3 months.
Wouldn't it be more worth it to devote that 405,000kg/27 container loads to reconstruction? I agree it would be expedient to be able to hand out food or other aid immediately, but it wouldn't be more than a token unless a serious amount of Project capacity and resources were re-purposed from reconstruction to aid, which seems to defeat the purpose of the Project in the first place.
As for the destruction level, it's hard to see how the Project could function in the book scenario of a full thermonuclear/biological/chemical war, if you treat it like a thought exercise. Isolated teams, little in the way of industrial infrastructure, well-armed as individuals but not much more. Not the optimal strategy for an all-out war. Which to me would be organising many Project field teams into brigade group-sized units clustered around highly-automated industrial facilities in areas that are agriculturally self-supporting. Note, I don't normally advocate such a highly militarised Project other than as a thought-exercise for what would work best after an all-out war.
As Matt mentions, the Depots actually could be part or mostly industrial facilities. This would make sense, and provide a backup capability for the "worst-case" scenario. Still not optimal, but much better than nothing!
Tony