This is why the Flint water crisis was such a big deal: it doesn’t take long to die when water runs out.
Comment on Wait until they find out about chickens!
Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks agoIt’s actually worse than that. Starvation takes a long time to happen (~3 weeks). Lack of access to water takes a much shorter period of time. If water pipelines and/or pumping facilities get screwed up in any way, cities will become mad max much faster and in a much more intense fashion. In a water-starved population, people are mostly composed of water…
PunnyName@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
peopleproblems@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
No, but you do lose quite a bit of weight while you turn into human jerky
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Correct … I’m Indigenous and my parents were born in the 1930s and 1940s and they lived through famine up here in northern Ontario before the province became fully developed in our part of the country. Dad had several stories where he remembered being a kid in the 1950s and watched people boil moccasins in order to get some kind of food to eat.
It takes a long, long time to die from starvation … but it also doesn’t mean that you are healthy and running around the whole time either. You go through several days or even weeks of no food and you can survive and just exist miserably. After that you can linger just sitting still or lying still for days or weeks before you actually expire. There are plenty of stories from the second world war about this in places like Auschwitz or Buchenwald concentration camps … or besieged cities like Leningrad or Stalingrad where thousands of people starved for weeks and months, yet survived.
Even as you are starving and on your feet, you’ll probably go insane first and do things like actually wanting to kill people just to eat them … this is actually the basis of many of our stories and legends of Windigo and monsters, it was creatures that were once people that turned to hunting and eating people.
Water is plentiful here in northern Ontario so we’ll probably be safe from that shortage … it might not be safe or convenient but we’ll have access to enough. Starvation from food might not take hold for several days, weeks or even months … but people will sure be miserable and very dangerous and unpredictable almost immediately once they know there will be a food shortage.
I don’t bother prepping for these reasons … the ones who survive won’t be the ones who prepared or are the strongest or the smartest … the ones who survive will be the lucky ones who just happen to survive the longest without getting killed or murdered by other people.