Disaster Shelters
I am in awe. I didn’t realize how mature was the bomb shelter industry. From the October 2010 Wired (p.112, not yet online):
Kennedy-era fallout shelters were little more than cement boxes filled with cans of spinach. Modern end-time housing structures, like those from Radius Engineering, are smart and stylish. Take the [$160M] Trongonia 8, a modular, self-sufficient, radiation-proof colony – complete with fitness center, restaurants, and city hall – that will keep as many as 2000 people safe and snug for up to five years. …. Radius’ shelters start at $200,000; the [36 person] multifamily pod shown below goes for $2 million, plus about 25 percent for shipping and installation. They all have fiberglass shells. … The bunkers can run for [4] years entirely off the grid. … And they’re buried far enough underground to be impervious to radiation. … The sealed and pressurized units come with specially designed air filtration that uses three different physical purifiers and an ultraviolet-radiation sterilization system. Radius has installed more than 1000 shelters worldwide over the past 30 years; most are intended to protect key people in the government, military, insurance industry, and medical services.
Check out the impressive attention to detail at the Radius Engineering website.
To me, this is all good news about humanity’s ability to survive severe disaster. And it makes me sad that the usual reaction to stories like this is to make fun of the people who would want such a shelter. Apparently, being concerned about disaster is taken to be a bad sign; they might believe in 2012 Mayan calendar prophesies, for example, or worry too much about their precious bodily fluids. But regardless of the impressiveness of their motives, the act of creating a shelter which might make the difference in preventing humanity’s extinction is a kind and generous act toward vast future generations which might not otherwise exist. If charity was about help, rather than signaling loyalty or wealth, we would celebrate such people.
I wonder where it would be legal to rent out a bed in such a shelter, to support refuge futures. Radius says:
The smaller shelters have no foundation and are therefore not considered a permanent structure and therefore DO NOT require a building permit. The larger shelters have a concrete foundation however it is poured in a fiberglass tray. Since the concrete is within the Radius structure, the foundation is not considered permanent.
Could one rent it as a “campsite”?
The amount of resources being spent on survival shelters is so small as to not be worth worrying about. If that's your concern.
Building self-sufficient other planets would be incredibly expensive. Many orders of magnitude more than building a few fallout shelters, maybe even impossible with our technology level. Not that the money spent on fallout shelters would go to it otherwise, or would be enough to make any significant progress towards it.
Every country on every continent has experienced war, civil unrest and other types of peril. To say that it is "bad for a survivalist to hold irrational beliefs" is quite amusing. Who are you to judge if a belief is bad or not? In this world, it is up to the individual to hold beliefs on religion, politics and morality; its not up to the general population to make those choices for the individual. So long as the person(s) spending the thousands to millions of dollars on shelters are not harming others; it is their choice to do so.
As to your comments to the cost-justified benefits of such beliefs is also beyond ridiculous. If a persons net worth is to a point that such an investment would be minuscule and un-missed as he/she wrote the check, then is it a good investment? People have all sorts of insurance that cover events that in all likelihood, would never happen, does that mean it is not worth the price of the premium for piece of mind? Maybe for you not, but as this is a free country, lets leave it to those fortunate enough to write a check. On the bright side for you, those don't get built themselves, so at least there is a sizable benefit to the working class to build and service them. Try to think before you post, so that you don't immediately sound like a socialist. Thank you.