do you think real vaults would work?

[Jimbo san]

The Vaults would, from my own estimations, correct me if i'm wrong, need to supply people for hundreds of years, so that the radioactive contamination could go through enough half lives to be "safe".

[Miracleasd]

if i remember correctly the eden experiment was designed to see if the plants in a sealed biodome could generate sufficient oxygen for the people inside. it didn't, they ended up having to pump air in and abandoning the project.

i recon an underground vault could work. the problems are

genetic diversity. if the vault population is too small and they are expeced to remain for generations it would eventualy reach a point of inbreeding. if there is an imbalance (ie 5 men and 50 women) it would happen even sooner
food. the average human needs to consume around 2000 calories per day. this roughly works out to around 1Kg of food per day. now, if we work on the basis of the vault containing 100 people and wanted to keep them for at least 100 years that would work out to be 100Kg per day 3,650 metric tons. space, a bit of a problem. you could grow your own food but you would still need to generate 1Kg per person per day so you would probably need more space for that than stored food.
water. easily recycled if you can get over the "so this has been through some one else" syndrome.
power. nuclear plant would suffice though i guess you could have giant hamster wheels for emergencys
recreation. big problem. any stored material would soon be exausted so you would have to be able to make new entertainment. there is only so much inspiration that can be drawn from a group of 100 so the entertainment would soon grow stale. at that point you would have to make sure the supply of contraceptives are still good.

[Sirgalahadwizard]

There ain't no way in hell any kinda vault would work for more than even a year... remember that biosphere experiment out in arizona? It didnt work, and while different than a "vault", it still proves the point - humans are animals and dont live very well as house pets, they need to run free.

For the amount of time that a vault would need to run in operation to bypass fallout bi-products, a hundred years or so, the amount of space and water and food and everything else per person would have to be enormous.

And how exactly are you going to preserve the food long enough - lord knows that in an underground environment you cant really grow anything. Anything you take with you will last at most 5 years - even completly free of organisms and toxins (almost impossible), and vaccum sealed... the molecular bonds in the food will slowly degenerate because it's food, making toxic substances that'll kill you. NTM that plastic isn't a perfect barrier, and things can get through it.

What about breathing air? it would need to be completly recycled and you would need lots of it... and you'd need batteries to run the recyclers (batteries will last you at most - 20 years)... and the air filter wont run forever either, it'll die long before the batteries do.

There's just so many factors against a long-term stay like that, it just wouldn't work - we dont have the technology and we probably wont ever have the technology (it's like trying to live on a spaceship for hundred years y'know - same situation mostly).

[Flamescreen]

True but in Biosphere 2(I think is the full name) they had several restrictions, plus it was an experiment. Its like, you have all these movies describing nuclear wars, but there is no real way to describe the monstrocity and implications of a real Nuclear war(and I'm talking of the global version, not like planting a couple of nukes in 2 major cities, hoping this scenario I heard of lately doesn't actually happen...).

[Walks with the Snails]

It really wouldn't have to run 100 years. Radiation levels drop off exponentially, so if you can wait out the relatively brief period when it's deadly outside, you'll live. There are people living safely in Hiroshima right now if you weren't aware. Sure, there would probably be more health problems due to cancer and and the like for the people who didn't stay in vaults until the absolute last effects of a nuclear exchange were completely gone, but it's not like stepping outside a year after the bombs drop means you'll be dead in a week. So yeah, vaults could work for as long as they would be needed just to ensure survival.

[actonious]

I'd take my family, steal a boat, head to Antartica, build a nice airtight igloo (or the likes of), make a hole through the ice to eat fish and other crustacians, melt the ice for drinking water and oxygen. It would take a LOT of nuclear fallout to make the entire ocean posionous... right? A little nuclear waste never hurt anyone anyhow. We'd adapt... eventually.

Not to worry about entertainment, somehow our species survived way back even before milton bradley invented monopoly. Remember the Pre-Internet days guys?

I'm sure the collections of Shakespear and Mark Twain could hold me over for quite some time. The entire Encyclopedia Britannica collection, works by Aristotle and Socrates... lots to read.

Now that I think about it.... I'd need more than my family there if the species is to procreate. I don't think even in a post-apocolyptic world I could lower my standards to reproduce with my family... (yuck) We certainly wouldn't need the likes of Kentucky to follow us into that world. (ducking from shotgun blasts by Kentuckians).

Well, whatever method we can dream up for the survival of our species in even the harshest of climates, I believe it would be possible. I believe there is enough technology readily and rapidly available so that we would not all die out. There may only be pockets of 30 or 40 of us in areas, but that's all it would take. I think the worst lose of all would be the destruction of information. The ammount of knowledge destroyed so that we would have to start all over again from scratch... having to rediscover that e=mc2, reinvent the concepts of freedom and democracy, and reexploring that world is round.

Theotretically we wouldn't lose all our gathered knowledge. ArpaNet (our early internet for those of you who don't know where it came from) was designed specifically by the DOD so that we could maintain communications and information even in the event of a multi-megaton nuclear disaster.

Yes, I believe we could survive.... and I don't even think it would be hard. After the generations of us die off that know what life was like when we could go anywhere and do anything we wanted, the next generation would only know what life is supposed to be like the way it would be currently for them. Does that make sense? I mean, "you don't miss the water till the well runs dry" kinda attitude. They never experienced it, so they wouldn't miss it. Hope that makes sense.... You don't think you live in a craphole because you never lived outside a craphole.

Okay, I've covered my points.

[Genghis Khan]

here's an intresting link

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A593778

[NordicTiger]

Vaults may or may not work. All closed biosphere projects so far has been more or less failed. There was even some speculations about minimum size needed to create such totally self-containing ecosystem and it was pretty huge. Given a fact that vault should not be totally independent (it can still use oxygen, water and maybe some other stuff) there are possibilities that vaults can survive. On the other hand, vaults are not working to save mankind because of just too limited capacity. I think that mankind will survive easily even after nuclear war. Most probably all nuclear warheads will not be distributed evenly around the globe but targeting biggest nuke-owners (USA, Russia, India and whatever other countries own nuke). It will still keep a lot of space untouched. Currently Earth is heavily overpopulated, so significant decrease from current 6 billion will not erase mankind. I think that even few millions survivors can carry on (less than 0.1% of current population). Well, there will be no microwave ovens and Internet, though.

[NordicTiger]

I'd take my family, steal a boat, head to Antartica, build a nice airtight igloo (or the likes of), make a hole through the ice to eat fish and other crustacians, melt the ice for drinking water and oxygen.

That would be hell of disappointing trip to your family. After arriving in Antarctica the first disappointment will be the fact that ice cap in Antarctica is in average 1 mile (1.5 km) thick. So making a hole will keep you busy for years. Second and even bigger disappointment (because you already can smell fish after all this years of digging through ice) is sudden recognition that Antarctica is actually continent. So there will no water below this ice. No fish either in that case I think.

Anyway, I got your point and in general my behavior would be similar. Grab some vital tools and get away into some far-side areas.

[Megatron]

If you WERE going to make a vault, you need to have the humans BORN inside the vault first, so they dont desire the outside world or freedom, theyre whole world is the metal cave they live in.

For entertainment, just have 2 members fighting, wich also is for excercise.

To stop them from going insane, make them read a book and write down in a diary every day, that is then read by a computer to read theyre mental state etc

For food, just have every vault dweller grow theyre own food under theyre bed or something, and you can use cloning for meat.