Ask Lemmy

What a dumb message. Of course this is not a drill. This is a phone. My drill doesn't have the means to accept incoming messages.

Make sure my phone was actually on silent, put ear plugs in and go back to sleep. I'm too fucking tired to try and survive anything more.

Ah just dump all my cat's treats in her bowl and probably go lie down.

Meh. I can still doom scroll in that time. Best use of my time I tell you.

I am "lucky" enough to live within a few miles of a place I'm pretty sure would be a ground zero in an all out nuclear attack. I live in a university town. And the university I attend has a nuclear engineering program along with an accompanying research reactor. In any all-out nuclear exchange, anything related to nuclear technology is at the top of the target list. A facility that trains new nuclear engineers is definitely on the target list. We've actually talked about this. If we get this message, our plan is to round up the cats, throw then in the car, grab every mind altering substance we can get our hands on, and go get wasted outside the front gate of the reactor building. We won't try to break into the building or anything; the alert could always be in error and we don't need a felony for trying to break into a nuclear facility on our records. But when hydrogen bombs are involved, the front gate of the reactor building is close enough to ground zero to do the job.

Sorry, but there are indeed fates worse than death. For one, we would be unlikely to survive the initial bombing anyway. But most people have this idea that you'll get vaporized by a bomb. That's not how these things actually work. If you're killed in the first hour by the bomb, odds are it will be from being slowly cooked alive in the burning collapsed remnants of your own home. And sure, we could drive out into the country, but that would only ensure that we would die slowly from fallout induced radiation sickness, slow starvation after the complete collapse of all supply chains, or worse.

Trust me. If that alert comes, the ones close enough to ground zero to be atomized will be the lucky ones. This is something that you do not want to survive. I would encourage anyone that if they ever get that alert, to try to travel as close to whatever you think is your most likely ground zero as possible. You'll be doing yourself and your loved ones a favor. Unless you're already an off-grid survivalist type living in a self-sufficient compound way outside of any blast or fallout zone, all you're doing by escaping the blasts is stretching out your own misery. Do you and yours a favor by making it quick and painless.

On another note, Happy New Year!

Oh! Oh! I have an answer for this. I remember around the time that The Day After aired, one of the local news stations ran a story simulating what would happen to my city were it hit by an ICBM. We lived on the far side of a hill, far enough away from downtown for it to be potentially survivable. I decided that if we got the warning, I'd grab my bike and light out for ground zero. Fuck surviving, I don't wanna take the chance of being alive but horribly injured, and that aftermath shit just wasn't worth it.

Oh, so if you ever wonder why Gen X/Xennials are so fucked up, there ya go.

We were in this scenario last year, when NK launched a missile towards Hokkaido, and we were on the west coast, just next to a nuclear reactor.

After getting the altert, we put on clothes, went downstairs to the sturdiest room, stuck on the TV to the NHK news, and waited. The missle plopped into the ocean off the coast, and we had tempura for lunch.

There's really nothing you can do in these situations but stay calm and do the small, sensible things.

My wife's cousin actually got this text while on vacation in Hawaii. Said he just sparked up a joint n hoped for the best. It worked, so maybe I'll do the same.

Chug some NyQuil, take some sleeping pills and some Benadryl and deal with it later.

Kiss my wife, and my ass goodbye. There are no shelters here.

Double it and give it to the next person

I'd be setting off the pair of sirens I own, then awaiting the inevitable. Thankfully I live in an area where the chance of being vaporized is quite high.

At my current location, I'd expect it to be an error, since I'm about 1500 miles away from the nearest worthwhile target (Chilean Antartica Region).

The man sitting next to Ford was a bit sozzled by now. His eyes weaved their way up to Ford.
'I thought,’ he said ‘that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something.’
‘If you like, yes,’ said Ford. ‘That’s what they told us in the army,’ said the man, and his eyes began the long trek back towards his whisky. ‘Will that help?’ asked the barman. ‘No,’ said Ford and gave him a friendly smile.

I do the same thing for a missile alert that I do for a tornado alert...

Film it from my front porch as it gets uncomfortably close, while my wife screams in the background for me to get back in the house.

Immediately get in my car and drive like a bat out of hell out of my city. It’s small but it’s for sure a nuclear target

I'd immediately go into the basement and start memeing. I have redundant internet connections for these kinds of situations so I should still be able to post memes. I'm locally hosting a Mastodon instance so I can post even if the internet is down globally. I also have a TCP-over-HF setup so that I can post memes anywhere in the world without intermediate infrastructure. If humanity is completely destroyed, I would start memeing and rickrolling on cave walls for future generation

I will do the following:

Duck and cover

Seek immediate shelter, probably. And wonder why someone would send a ballistic missile to New Hampshire.

Clearly, war has come. My town won't be the one getting hit though.

Load a few jerry cans in the car, take out cash at the ATM, fill up as much fuel, clean water and firewood as possible, then stop by the local hospital and ask if they need extra hands. Meanwhile give my sis a call.