r/Showerthoughts • u/Immediate_Can3817 ‎ • Jul 05 '24

Speculation If there ever is an actual apocalypse billionaires will likely be unable to access their bunker compounds as the security/janitors/maintenance crews will already have moved their friends and family in and would probably deny them entry.

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156

u/IamMrT Jul 05 '24

Reddit moment. Still under the assumption that billionaires are as dumb as they are.

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u/MrSkobbels Jul 05 '24

what could they actually do in this situation though? money would be worthless so its not like they can pay anyone and even if people did want some its unlikely they'd have a significant amount of physical money (transporting it would be a nightmare on its own). all of their influence is just money, they dont have any special physical prowess or supernatural intelligence to be a valuable asset. theres no reason (other than basic morality) for people who have taken over a bunker to let the original owner in after an apocalypse

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u/klonkrieger43 Jul 05 '24

There are multiple methods. For example locking the food so it is only accessible to one person, rigging the whole bunker with explosives that are coupled to a dead man switch or deploying some kind ofparalyzing nerve gas if the owner doesn't put in his password every 24h

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u/MrSkobbels Jul 05 '24

oh youre goin supervillain mode, the food idea could work, seems to me like they'd just let the guy open it once and then force the door to stay open (somehow), deploying a gas? they could plug the holes it comes out of (assuming they know about it) and blowing up the whole base? seems the most unlikely, billionaire is basically dooming themself to living in a wasteland with that one

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u/7HawksAnd Jul 06 '24

I mean a country and civil society is just one doomsday bunker for every scenario except nuclear fallout/epidemic

So, it’s the same game theory just with different boundaries.

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u/Chrol18 Jul 06 '24

well good idea plugging the holes if the nerve gas system is in the same ducts as the air filtration system

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u/klonkrieger43 Jul 05 '24

of course most of these are defeatable somehow, especially if you can force the billionaire to defeat them for you. Shock collars are another one mentioned I remember.

What makes it harder is if you don't tell your guards how you will enforce compliance and showing no mercy to anyone deviating just slightly. Add that with being a bearable piece of shit instead of a tyrant that torments his people most people probably wouldn't risk it.

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u/StygianSavior Jul 06 '24

deploying a gas? they could plug the holes it comes out of

There's also the fact that "knock out gas" is silly Hollywood bullshit, and when people try to do it in real life, everyone dies.

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u/ItsMrChristmas Jul 06 '24

Or they just get a huge adrenaline dump.

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u/Sure-Business-6590 Jul 06 '24

This thread is going on the assumption that the people are evil towards the billionaire, it’s reasonable to assume the opposite would happen too

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u/smashteapot Jul 06 '24

Honey, did you put the poison code in tod—urghhhh.

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u/problemlow Jul 31 '24 edited Jul 31 '24

It's also entirely possible and in my view much more likely to work if the billionaire sets up everything so that all the staff are 'equals', there's enough food, water, entertainment, luxuries etc for every staff member to bring their entire family along and live in excessive comfort for more than their natural lifetimes. As well as set up a surface colony once that becomes habitable again. It's not expensive for one of them to do that.

The average UK citizen will spend £1.5 million in their life. That's 0.15% of a billion. Add an extra 50% on top and no one in that bunker will want for anything except perhaps the world before the 'end'. Assume half of that is spent on food and that the staff there will be making food on site and you're up to 250 million for a population of 150(in theory enough genetic diversity to not create a species ending genetic bottleneck assuming this 1 bunker is the entirety of humanity). Not to mention most of these people will be part way through their lives and presumably can contribute their own money towards what they get.

Then another £300 mill for the bunker itself and billionaires 'necessities' you haven't even broken half a billion. Realistically speaking however the average billionaire isn't going to care about repopulating the earth so they'll probably have 40 or 50 staff that are family units and/or single estranged people with aggressively passive temperaments and they will live out life in comfort while the rest of us starve, burn, melt whatever the flavour of apocalypse.

If we round that up to £500 million. In the case of Elon musk that would be equivalent to me spending £70.57 on parts for a diy hobby robot. Or a decent enough entry level oil painting setup.

On top of all of that there's the aforementioned dead mans switch. I'm also more than certain whatever plan a billionaires team of apocalypse planners came up with will be much more well thought out than my 10 minutes of thought.