Mar 3, 2023 11:30 PM
https://www.businessinsider.com/after-as...ive-2019-9
EXCERPTS: . . . Bryan Walsh's 2019 book "End Times" examines how catastrophic events, both natural and human-made, threaten our existence. In it, he points out that three types of potential catastrophes — asteroid impacts, supervolcano eruptions, and nuclear war — all have one thing in common: they could block the sunlight needed to feed plants.
"Blot out the sun, and even the best-prepared survivalist, a master of the wilderness, will starve to death along with everyone else," Walsh writes in the book.
In order to survive, he says, people would need to adopt sunlight-free agriculture — cultivating mushrooms, rats, and insects.
[...] The mushroom cultivation solution in Walsh's book comes from David Denkenberger, a civil engineer who suggested it in a 2014 book about post-apocalyptic agriculture, called "Feeding Everyone No Matter What."
"Maybe when humans go extinct the world will be ruled by fungi again," Denkenberger told Walsh. "Why don't we just eat the mushrooms and not go extinct?"
[...] Rats, much like mushrooms, can digest cellulose, the sugar that makes up 50% of wood. So anything the mushrooms leave behind could be fed to the rats, Walsh suggests. That way, any human survivors could eat meat.
[...] Insects could also provide protein, and many of them would survive a sun-blotting catastrophe.
[...] Walsh's book debunks another popular idea about how to feed ourselves during an apocalypse: cannibalism.
That would not help in the aftermath of a catastrophe that puts humans at risk of extinction, he says, because other people are simply not a sustainable food source. Walsh points to a 2017 study in which a group of undergraduate students calculated how long the human species would last if we subsisted on cannibalism alone. They found that only one person would remain after 1,149 days (about three years)... (MORE - missing details)
End Times: Brief Guide to the End of the World: Michael Shermer with Bryan Walsh ... https://youtu.be/YdguLZv2dAo
EXCERPTS: . . . Bryan Walsh's 2019 book "End Times" examines how catastrophic events, both natural and human-made, threaten our existence. In it, he points out that three types of potential catastrophes — asteroid impacts, supervolcano eruptions, and nuclear war — all have one thing in common: they could block the sunlight needed to feed plants.
"Blot out the sun, and even the best-prepared survivalist, a master of the wilderness, will starve to death along with everyone else," Walsh writes in the book.
In order to survive, he says, people would need to adopt sunlight-free agriculture — cultivating mushrooms, rats, and insects.
[...] The mushroom cultivation solution in Walsh's book comes from David Denkenberger, a civil engineer who suggested it in a 2014 book about post-apocalyptic agriculture, called "Feeding Everyone No Matter What."
"Maybe when humans go extinct the world will be ruled by fungi again," Denkenberger told Walsh. "Why don't we just eat the mushrooms and not go extinct?"
[...] Rats, much like mushrooms, can digest cellulose, the sugar that makes up 50% of wood. So anything the mushrooms leave behind could be fed to the rats, Walsh suggests. That way, any human survivors could eat meat.
[...] Insects could also provide protein, and many of them would survive a sun-blotting catastrophe.
[...] Walsh's book debunks another popular idea about how to feed ourselves during an apocalypse: cannibalism.
That would not help in the aftermath of a catastrophe that puts humans at risk of extinction, he says, because other people are simply not a sustainable food source. Walsh points to a 2017 study in which a group of undergraduate students calculated how long the human species would last if we subsisted on cannibalism alone. They found that only one person would remain after 1,149 days (about three years)... (MORE - missing details)
End Times: Brief Guide to the End of the World: Michael Shermer with Bryan Walsh ... https://youtu.be/YdguLZv2dAo
