Or a not-all-that-realistic, made-for-cable facsimile thereof? The, er, creative types at Pilgrim Studios are holding a digital cattle call for aspiring prepper families who want to be famous…or as famous as you can get on an obscure cable show these days. “Nuclear war, terrorism, pole shifting, killer comets and tsunamis all have the potential to create national and worldwide disaster. Some even think the Mayan Calendar predicts the end of the world on December 21, 2012. If you think you have the skills and determination to be one of the last people on earth — and to rebuild the earth with a community of true survivors — then SPIKE TV wants you to compete on their new show ‘Last Family on Earth.'” So it’s “Survivor” for the survivor set . . .
Sure, it’d be nice if you can use a gun well enough to feed yourself or fashion a working generator out of switchgrass and duct tape. But your application’s odds of acceptance increase on a nearly one-to-one basis with the number of dollars your wife’s spent on surgical enhancements. And if your teenage daughter looks good in tank tops and cutoffs, your intrepid band is automatically moved to the final group for consideration.
But the best part is the prize that goes to the winning family after everyone else has been voted off the post-apocalyptic island. They won’t be stuck foraging for grubs or standing in line for their soylent green ration when the S really does HTF.
On this exciting new show, you will compete in a series of thrilling challenges for a chance to win a prized spot in a state-of-the-art, community underground shelter for you AND your immediate family in case a worldwide emergency ever strikes. Vivos Shelters will give the winner ownership shares in one of their Luxury Shelters for up to 6 immediate family members.
Check out their promo video. Screw the clean water, plush accommodations and abundant food supply, the lighted cupholders in the video theater are all we need to get our application together and sent in.
Lemme know how much it sucked. I’ll be tending my garden.
I think I’ll pass on this. I probably wouldn’t like the other people in the community shelter. I’m rather fussy about who I want to hang around with as the world comes to an end And it kinda sucks to win a prize that you hope you never need or have to use. I’d much prefer cash, or a Dodge truck.
Prepare all you want, but if you’re a plane flight, or even a bridge or tunnel away from your thoroughly prepared shelter when disaster strikes, it’s all for naught – you simply won’t get there.
Anyone lucky enough (and I truly believe it’s more luck than smarts) to be hunkered and bunkered when the clock o’doom strikes 12 times, will be faced with a probably unprecedented mix of physical and psychological challenges to staying alive, even if they are provisioned with years’ worth of consumable and renewable resources.
If civilization as we know it has been knocked “offline” by a lare enough natural disaster, I could see the end or near-end of agriculture, even at the sustenance level. Widespread disease, from the lack of sewage to the lack of people to cart away the heaps of dead. If it’s a nuke, supervolcano, or asteroid strike, the atmospheric particulates could slowly choke us to death. The unearthly dim light and increasingly dark prospects of survival would probably make anyone who got through the initial baptism of fire to seriously reconsider struggling along for a bit more life…
For a bit of a taste of what large-scale destruction does to the human spirit, read John Hershey’s Hiroshima, and see Peter Watkins’ BBC Docu “The War Game.”
That Mayan calendar must be wrong. My Tactical Girls 2012 Gun Calendar ends on December 31, so that must be the real expiration date for the planet, right?
“And if your teenage daughter looks good in tank tops and cutoffs”
Yup.
Paige Wyatt.
didnt Discovery do something like this a few years ago? The Colony? it was pretty decent if i remember.
I love how people think that in an end of the world scenario, you will have time to travel to a secure location and be able to survive the “End of days”. Unless the Seven Horsemen of the Apocalypse send you a text message 2 days in advance of a global catastrophe, you may as well just stick your head between you legs and kiss your… you get the point.
To me, prepping for the end of our government and social structure as we know it has more merit and plausability than building an uber asteroid/supervolcano/nuclear/atomic bomb/biologic warfare/zombie outbreak/T-rex attack/alien invasion shelter. Learn to farm, disappear and survive in nature, kill and cook your own food, and your time and money is much better spent than installing a second 50 foot thick cement barrier wall in your SHTF vault/underground supervillian lair.
My $0.02. I’d sell the prize to some doomsday cult at an extreme markup and buy a nice car and a trophy wife to enjoy my time on Earth. Future be damned.
+100. I’d add to your list- “build community”
We have suvived all these millennia through teamwork.
Building a community is a big one in my book. One of the most underrated and under-discussed challenges of surviving these scenarios is telling enemies, friends or neutrals apart.
I would argue that in a total SHTF situation one doesn’t survive so much as delay the inevitable. The consequences of a nuclear war or global extinction level event are such that the lucky ones are the people who died in the initial incident. The so-called “survivors” can look forward spending years underground waiting for death to take them via slow progression of a disease like cancer, or even worse through radiation poisoning.
The psychological strain could sap the will to live from even the best-prepared survivalists. Imagine a greyish world full of uncontrolled structural and forest fires, nonfunctioning sewage and garbage disposal, heaps of decaying dead, etc. If things are screwed up enough that even sustenance-level agriculture becomes impossible, then it’s just a matter of time before death comes a-knocking.
Peter Watkins’ movie The War Game does a really good job of showing us how survivors of devastation have very little will or ability to function normally.
Nice will to die… perfectly normal.
Great. Another scripted reality show where people give up dignity and self respect so they ” …can be on the TV.”
if you’re not a doctor or in med school then you are just pretending
You mean that all I have to do is be a total scheming asshole on TV and I’ll get live in Vault 101? I want to read the Vault-Tech, er, Vivos contract first.
You think that’s bad? Try joining the Brotherhood of Steel. Fifteen showers later and the dirt still won’t come off…
Waste money prepping or just take it with force from someone else.
…and this is why I own and train with firearms. I hope that was sarcasm.
“Spin the wheel, Raggedy Man!”
Great MM reference. Relevant to the theme of the thread come to think of it. Way too little gas in that chainsaw though.
If only we could incapacitate the looters with a whistle!
Exactly. If the show doesn’t involve strapping on a bunch of mall ninja gear to raid your neighbor’s gruel stash in the middle of the night with riot guns, then its gonna be snoozerific.
I’ll wait for an episode to pass my thoughts. We don’t want another Top Shot thread, do we?
I nominate the entire cast of The Jersey Shore, plus a few people with a clue.
OK, I’ve been pondering this, and the prize of living in the Vivos shelter got me thinking. Who decides when you can move into the shelter? If say, I was to win the show, why couldn’t I move in the next day? What definition of SHTF are we/they using? I guess my point is what if the show’s winner is just plain tired of paying his mortgage, buying groceries, dealing with teenagers, etc. and wants to move into this totally stocked shelter now, and “beat the rush” to hide from dooms day? So is this shelter locked up in storage mode currently because the fan is still too clean to make the official disaster call? There are areas of Detroit where it could be said their “end of the world as we know it” event already happened a couple of years ago.