Poll: Stranded on a deserted island, which do you choose? + wild card round (page 5)

The problem is that it will spoil. Conserving food is not easy. Unless you can freeze it, or find loads of salt very quickly then slaughtering the dogs is pretty useless.

It is! But being only one human is the single most dangerous thing in such an environment.

I'd take any lesbian ultra-feminist nazi that hates cats, science fiction, music, planes and Warhammer. Really. In a life or death survival situation the most important thing is not being alone. Being alone and unprepared usually means death within days or weeks, a few months if you are well prepared for wilderness survival in general and know the exact environment you have to survive in. Unless you are Rüdiger Nehberg or someone similar (prepared and exceptionally skilled in survival).

Even the famous mountain men usually didn't spend more than a few months completely alone, and even then their death rate was high and most died relatively young.

In the history of mankind there are very few examples of people who survived several years completely alone and lived to tell the tale.

Some Japanese "Holdouts" survived several years alone, but AFAIK all of them started out as a group of at least three people, and they usually didn't purely live off the land, they stole stuff from other people.

Even in a tropical paradise with water, edible fruits and so on the chances of survival are actually pretty bad, even for groups of people on their own.

I have yet to see a movie that even halfway realistically depicts a survival situation in which a person could actually survive.

Absolutely! But none of those were life or death situations. That does change things a lot.

The thing is: yes, in option A you might not make the 20 years or even half of it.
In fact none of the options provides a decent chance of survival. Even a trained five man crew with a full set of survival gear doesn't have a good chance of lasting 10+ years alone.
But I am fairly sure that in option A your chances to survive the first few months, maybe even the three years until the first woman dies, is immensely higher than in option C. Just because of workload.

 

Interesting that you call three years "a short while".
That's way more than the likely period of time a single person will survive.
Either way, all three options have only a tiny chance to even reach the five year mark.
Unless you develop a sustainable long time survival environment (which is pretty much impossible alone) it doesn't matter if you are there for 1, 2, 5, or ten years. The boat doesn't matter because you won't live long enough to ever get on it.

Realistically: both you and me and all the girls and dogs will be dead by the 6 months mark. At most.

 

OK, time to analyze the options.

A.
we have a woman with shitty personality. SHe is good at fishing, but in the first 3 yrs she will have a person more important than you to care about. Guess who will be left behind in case of poor fishing? In the first month, when things will be the hardest?

hunting rifle. it's a TRAP. 300 rounds… 20 yrs. it's 15 rounds / year. You can basically afford ONE shot each month.

Booze is actually very useful, to storage water into bottles and disinfectant.

Gold. Please.

So, this is IMO the worst option.


B.
Hot chick. good for avoid the madness, as we cannot live alone 20 years or we can go crazy. But we don't know what she's good at…. and if (when?) she will become pregnant that will be a huge problem.

Fishing net + poles. OK, i don't know how much a fishing net can last before being useless, and 20 years are a long time, but it's darn useful.

Freezer. The BIG advantage of option B, as you won't be often able to catch food on a regular basis, and the freezer will let you storage the food

MP3. i suppose some music can help. Mental health is important.

Not optimal, but certainly better than option A



C.
Dogs… we don't know their kind of training, but let's suppose it's something useful for our survival, and that they are not trained to search people under the snow. Killing a dog will leave us with a useful companion for the whole time we'll stay on the island. The cans will be useful too as containers.
But we are social animals, and we need the companionship of another human to don't go crazy, and a dog is not the same thing.

Knives. We NEED them, a sharpened knife is exceptionally useful, it lets you do many thing… the problem, here, is that without the ability to storage food, we'll be forced to find it every single day. But cutting tools are a must.

Shelter. it cannot be stressed enough how much of vital importance is to have one.

Wrecked ship. 12 years instead of 20.... plus, i suppose on the sailboat there will be something else useful.




Here we are.
Option A got too many downsides I would never pick it.
Option B got a couple of very useful thing, and the girl is an unknown factor
Option C gives you only useful tools, but lacks at least a couple of crucial things. Im torned, but i believe C is the best one. Certainly not A.

 

I haven't voted because I don't believe I could survive 12 or 20 years even if I had A, B, and C.

I would consider myself lucky if I survived a single year in such a situation. Throw in a guidebook that says which plants are edible and which are poisons, add another year.

If the island was an Eden like paradise with mild weather, lots of edible plants, no dangerous animals, lots of tasty animals, I might be able to make it twelve years BUT if you have an island that nice, someone is going to claim it for something so we wouldn't have to wait 10+ years for a rescue.

 

i fear it's so true...

 

Pretty much.


Oh and btw something else that makes C not a great option: if I am not mistaken then the boat in the picture cannot be sailed alone.
I also wonder how you would repair it alone, while at the same time surviving.
Also: if the island is _that_ remote then unless you are really good at sailing and manage to get a sufficient amount of supplies together, then the boat is a death trap.

 

Those are good points… but I've assumed it will be repaired. It was specified in the setting, so i take for granted its repair, even if it's unreal. (more or less like the freezer)

 

Have they?
I actually cannot recall anything worse than that, that people actually survived.

 

Darker like in: die even more quickly? Sure.
But a situation like the one in the opening post has never been survived in the history of mankind as far as I know, so I would call that pretty bleak.

 

Lets look at these items bit by bit. First off, no one should know they will be on the island for twenty years. That's absurd.

If food or water is scarce more people is a liability. Otherwise more people increases your chances of survival. I would rather deal with someone with a shitty personality who has applicable surival skills than a sweet person with no useful skills. Even then, I imagine within a few months EVERYONE will know what everyone else knows. How to fish, build fires, find clams, purify water, etc. Starting a fire from nothing is very very hard but if you have four people, you only have to do it once. People take turns sleeping and you can keep one fire going 24/7 with a minimum of fuss.

Political leanings are irrelevant in a survival situation. Nothing helps one get over differences better than a cooperative effort that everyone is invested in. Most people are invested in survival.

Dogs can be trained to do all sorts of useful things but their most important function is to soothe human pysches. The dogs could be killed for meat and humans can subsist on dog food. I don't think I'd start by eating the dogs, but dog food is good emergency rations early on when your survival crew is getting their bearings hunting and fishing and the crew is burning calories trying to start a fire without matches for the first time or building a shelter.

I remember for a class we had to choose four items from among ten random items to decide how to survive from a plane crash. In this case we weren't learning about survival we were supposed to learn communication with the others in our group but the survival stuff was interesting. The professional survivalist instructor for (some country's military) wrote material on what people should logically pick and how to get the most out of everything.

The professional survival guide was concerned that tensions would be high in a survival situations and thus a gun would be a liability if the group had a serious argument, especially if alcohol was involved. I'm sure this applies to firearms and marijuana would be dangerous.

Granted in this case, the gun only had six shots, not 300 and, but the professional survivalist saw a gun as more useful as a fire starter or a signalling device than a hunting implement. This applies to a long term survival situation.

If you run out of ammo (or you gut all the ammo for the gunpowder to create fires with), you still have a sturdy tool. A pry bar, club, hammer, all sorts of improvised thing. If it's a top of the line scope it might double as a cheap telescope.

I would default to the fishing expert, BUT I think a net might be more useful to create an improvised shelter than as a fishing net. You can string it up and fill it with leaves and light sticks to provide shade and something of a rain barrier.

The poles could be used as improvised tools but I think they'd be more useful as fishing poles. Eventually you are going to break all your line and lose all your hooks but these are relatively easy to improvise.

Knives are extremely useful. The sharpening stones mean they will last a long time. I doubt they would last 12 years much less 20 years because you would use the knives for everything. You can carve sharpsticks for hunting, make sparks for fire, carve fish hooks, prepare fireword, stab hostile animals, descale fish, skin prey.

The professional survivalist was very clear that the disorienting effects of alcohol are very bad in a desperate survival situation. But alcohol is a coolant and disinfectant. You can use an empty bottle to store water. You can glass to be reflective to attract the attention of rescue plane. You can use the reflective power to send morse code. You can at least approximate SOS (three short flashes, three long flashes, three short flashes, everyone should know this). You can shape broken glass into a spear head or fishing hook. In theory you could juryrig a bottle into a magnfying glass to start a fire with. Messages in a bottle have worked multiple times in history though it's a long shot (but you should have bottles to spare).

Electricity is just weird. I'm guessing one my immediate concerns for water, shelter, and food are solved the number one discussion topic would be how to channel this electricity to get rescued somehow. But yeah storing excess food is great. If you can make ice from water that gives you something shiny to signal rescuers with.

A guitar would mainly be a way to maintain sanity. Barring Al Cabong! shenanigans it's usefulness as a tool would be less than an unloaded gun, but a guitar is hollow and probably water tight. I believe my hypothetical professional survivalist would view marijuana as an obstacle to survival, not an aid to it. Pain killer or not but the pot stash likely comes with matches or lighters. It probably comes with paper for rolling joints. The container it comes in would be a handy shelter. The bags of pot themselves could be cushions or pillows. If there is no clean river or stream, you can rip the plastic bags the marijuana comes in to make a rain catcher.

No one is going to hide 3 tons of drugs on an island without planning to go back for it. I'm not sure I want to be rescued by drug dealers but I'd rather take my chances there than eke out on an island for 12 or 20 years.

Gold is soft, you might be able to shape it into useful tools. Especially very expensive fish hooks. What I would do is scatter the gold in an extremely sunny spot and I would arrange the coins in SOS. Whether greed or altruism you are going to attract would-be rescuers.

An MP3 player can be used to flash Morse code but mostly this is for the psycholgical benefits.

Unless you are in a war zone or somewhere similar where all your would-be rescuers are hostile, survival rule #1 is to stay put and await rescue. With no map sailing off the island woud be reckless. If you are so close to civilization that you know you can sail to safety, that means a rescuer should find you by accident. Drag the wreckage of the sail boat somewhere highly visible. That will attract rescuers along with your big gold SOS and your pile of marijuana. Dogs barking can alert you when someone is near and then you flash them SOS while shooting the gun.

We will get rescued much faster than 3 years, the lesbians will get proper medical care. I want to keep at least one of the dogs. I'm naming it Gilligan.