If we fail to prevent one or more
of the possible "end of the world" scenarios listed on the Catastrophic
Events page, then we must have a plan in place to preserve a remnant
of our species. If we survive and keep advancing for another century or two, we
will probably have colonies on the moon and perhaps on Mars. Once we do,
it will be much harder for any catastrophe to threaten all of human civilization.
That said, there is a very real chance that we
will face a catastrophe well before the end of the
next century. Therefore, we must consider ways to preserve human
life here on Earth through the worst possible threats.
We here at The Future
Watch believe that it is possible to protect from the most likely
catastrophic scenarios a core group of people who would be capable of rebuilding
civilization. During the Cold War the U.S. government created several
hardened underground bunkers in case of nuclear attack. A similar
approach could be successful in preserving a small number of people from many
other dangers. As always please feel free to contact admin@thefuturewatch.com with any
comments or suggestions regarding the plan posted below.
A well funded program should build a
few remote underground bunkers that are able to be as self-sufficient as possible for
several decades. At a minimum, these bunkers should be fully supplied with
food for a few decades, their own water source, their own
buried power source, and a system for decontaminating any air obtained from
the outside. The bunkers should also contain all sorts of educational material, entertainment, tools, seed,
and the other items necessary for rebuilding. The program should then hire groups of 1000 carefully selected
people to fill these bunkers. The bunkers would be filled on a rotating schedule - one bunker
would be filled in the first year, then another in the fifth year, and then
another in the tenth year, and so on. Groups would rotate out every 10
or 20 years. The people in each group would have to live
in these bunkers continuously for the entire stint, with no physical contact with
the outside world (phone calls, web cams, etc. would be fine). This way, these
people would be protected from events with long incubation periods (such as a
well-designed virus) and many more immediate threats. In order to entice people to agree live
in these bunkers, the program could pay extremely high wages. Even if
you had to pay each participant a million dollars a year in order to get the
appropriate selection of skills, the total cost of running a couple of these bunkers
would still only be two or three billion a year - a small price for preserving our
species.