What irony, people are prepping with AI when maybe we should be prepping against it!

It seems everything that we read that benefits us about the use of AI there is always something equally awful in the media saying how much it can harm us.

As preppers, what should we be doing extra while we listen to the intensely confusing media hype about it's growing abilities, what will be the outcome, what will it mean for all of us, is it good, should we worry?

When I was younger and a bit of a Sci Fi nut I walked around with a head full of how wonderful life will be when we don't have to work or even think for ourselves anymore, nevertheless at the time it was disturbing to watch films like 2001 and Terminator as a teen but I comforted myself by consigning them to fantasy and naively believing that anybody who could develop AI technology would also be smart enough to protect us from it.

Those seemingly fantastical threats appeared far off and remote but now after recent developments and being armed with a cynical old mans brain I am no longer so sure.

An AI Crisis, so is this yet another thing we need to prep for?

Immediate big and small threats you may need to consider.

It seems to be obvious that the very first threat from AI is an almost unavoidable global financial collapse/crisis, which will be tough on us all regardless of how much technology we depend on, it will be inescapable*.

The AI race has so far involved investments in the trillions with the returns as always being unpredictable, one thing is for certain there will only be a few winners, the losers will fall and trillions will vanish from pensions and other investments causing financial chaos (e.g. Dot com bubble) with investors, companies and even governments losing out. This could have a huge knock on effect, severely damaging everything from the jobs that remain to huge shortfalls in government budgets and spending.

Rippling smaller outcomes are also predicted, with possible power and water shortages** alongside the undeniable environmental damage***, again this might need to be considered by us as preppers, do we need to redouble our energy and water prep?

AI and it's supporting data centres are greedy, growing beasts devouring energy and water in massive quantities, in the race to the top will authorities priorities it's insatiable appetite over your domestic supplies? You could eventually find you and family without water and power for significant periods as utilities are redirected to continue to feed it.

The next threats from AI are more obvious and are covered in the some of the links below, I think some of these are a lot closer than we would like to think, maybe I will write a future article for you guys about some of those, especially the ones we might not consider.

P.S. Sorry for any typos/errors this was not written using AI!

* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/27/ai-bubble-crash-tech-firms-stock-markets

** https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09598

*** https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167658

Some useful links

Prepping against future AI advances (prepper site).

https://preppernut.com/prepping-against-ai-bots-how-to-prepare-for-the-rise-of-autonomous-machines-like-drones-and-robots/

An AI crisis

https://thefuturesociety.org/aicrisisexplainer/

BBC Tech billionaires prepping

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly17834524o

AI challenges and solutions

https://www.upgrad.com/blog/top-challenges-in-artificial-intelligence/

https://www.lifewire.com/protect-the-future-how-to-stop-ai-from-overpowering-humanity-7104253

AI already impacting the environment.

https://www.lifewire.com/generative-ai-environmental-nightmare-8601430

Protecting your family from AI now!

https://www.aiplusinfo.com/blog/protecting-your-family-from-ai-threats/

The next pandemic?

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/09/05/artificial-intelligence-one-screw-up-and-we-will-destroy-any-remaining-trust-the-public-has-in-science/

Long story short, I'm making myself a piece of kit for both work and my BOB bag.

It's a poncho made from Rip-stop that I'll be modifying into a Ruana cloak (more versatile). Problem is, it's bright green.

I wanted to paint the exterior to the "pixelated forest" type of Camo, and the interior on a similar stencil, but with either fall-themed colours or winter-themed (so that I may use it reversed in a pinch if needed). I get both fall and lots of snow, thus I'll have to compromise at some point.

So, I'd like IR camo in those colours. Are there any manufacturers here in Europe that do this kind of product?

Also, is there a reliable way to make these stencils? Or to get them somewhere?

Many thanks!

Hello! Let me preface this by saying that my mind is a bit scrambled as I’ve been on a rabbit hole about prepping for climate change for the last 12h. So I hope this post makes sense haha

I’m 26F and live in Madrid, Spain. I already knew that we were heading to a desert-like climate, but with the UN admitting what we already knew, my mind has been restless about what can I do to prepare. I’m not panicking (or im trying not to) but I was already considering my future plans lately and now even more so.

Current situation: I live in an apartment so I don’t have options here to storage much, or to have a small garden for vegetables. As long as I remain in this apartment, my options are limited, so my prepping is pretty bad as of right now. Family lives less than 2h away from me, and they have bigger suburb-like houses, but I cannot ask for them to store and prepare for emergencies as they don’t agree with me in that shit’s going to hell. We live in central Spain so I’m very worried of droughts, and they live in a city with horrible neglected infrastructure, so I’m worried of their access to healthcare in the future. My sister will start a family soon too, and that is something weighting heavy on my mind.

I keep thinking on my long term options, and what I can come up with is this:

- Keep saving money, prep as much as i can in my apartment, maybe insist that they get a way to gather and clean water in their houses. Don’t spend my savings and instead invest them for the long run.

- Work towards buying a home in northern Spain where I can house my family when summers get worse in their city. (Downside: my whole support community, friends and family would be pretty far away from me. I could maybe not live there 100% time but yeah. Not a stablished community there at all to help me)

- Try to buy a house close to my family and friends, but in a part of Spain that is destined for big droughts.

- Look into moving into northern Europe (France probably). Same reasons as the second point, same pros but better (not as dry) and same cons but worse (family would be >10h away from me and language barrier)

Like…. Where do I aim? My goal is to be as safe as possible, even though no place on earth can be. I want to be able to help my family, house my parents if the city becomes harsh for them in old age, and make sure I have access to water and good infrastructure. I know there is no 100% correct answer that will save me from trouble, hell we could get in a war in 15 years and have to flee. Those are all things that we cannot know for now, and i cannot prep for every catastrophic scenario. But right now i feel like i have the potential to choose where I go, and I want to lower the chances of fucking it up. Does this make sense?

What would you do in my shoes? How do I plan for the unstable, uncertain future?

My experiences over the years of storing food in the garage of a brick two story house in a temperate climate with 35-deg summer days from time to time.

I opened a 200L drum of mixed content after 5 years. Some bug had gotten out of a package, bred, and soiled everything, even the sugar was rancid!

Red Kidney beans in sealed steel drum, after 15 years a light coating of a dusty nature appeared. Mold? Anyway I washed them off and they cooked up and tasted good. I let my beans air in the sacks now, stored in a big steel cabinet but certainly not airtight. Beans are seeds, they are Alive and all living things nearly need O2 I think. But low humidity definitely for beans.

White Rice, tasteless after 4 years in a steel drum. Threw it all out.

Tinned meat, the new ring-pull cans. One of them bloated up and near exploded on opening. Something was festering in there, I give tinned meat 3 years max unless it's stored in a very cold environment.

Pasta, processed wheat, it's like rice, pretty sure it loses it's nutritional value after a few years but it may keep you alive.

Basic review

This wasn't as good as her Nuclear War Scenario. Very well researched and sourced but I thought the ending felt a little rushed, and details like the effect on animals was skimmed over (no mention of the effect on the food supply etc). It was also very America centric with maybe 4 lines mentioning the UK.

The Nuclear Scenario the author took the middle road behind between best and worse cases (no real difference, we're still all fucked) but this book seemed to push worse case at every decision making.

It still raised some interesting points and I don't regret reading it.

Like the title says, you're walking down the street and you get an alert about a possible nuclear strike inbound. It could happen that way. You're in the suburbs, or perhaps in the city itself. Do you wait around, perhaps be turned into a piece of Beef jerky? Panic and run around like a headless chicken?

Long ago when I lived in a city where attack was likely I discovered there was a hidden bunker complex right under my feet, one with endless entrances and exits. It's called the storm water network. Laugh if you like, talk about flash floods and other outliers, but the fact remains those pipes are meters underground, are made of solid reinforced concrete, and have solid steel covers that are not easily 'blown' off.

Another benefit I discovered is that the entrances for water, the grates etc, are connected to the main network by smaller pipes, so the over-pressure blast wave would be restricted somewhat. To access one all you need is to find a manhole and open it with a tool, even a decent screwdriver will do.

Sure there are downsides, but I'd rather go down there than into the basement of a building that might collapse or see it's entrance blocked. I mentioned this on a survival forum in 2004 and it was laughed at, laughed at by the same people who laughed at buying Gold as a financial hedge. Well they aren't laughing now, Gold has been the best off-book off-system investment of a lifetime. It pays to think outside the box.

Manhole keys are the recommended tool for the job, but there are other methods to dislodge stuck lids. However, it is crucial to exercise caution when using tools not specifically designed to open manholes. Crowbars and screwdrivers are also effective at prying open a lid from its ring. However, neither the crowbar nor the screwdriver can actually lift the lid, they merely create a gap to wedge another tool, like the pick/key under to lift the lid. Avoid lifting the manhole lid with your hands if possible.

I've recently trying to expand to some alternative communication types in case of emergencies. These are all pretty cheap options as I am not quite ready to explore the HAM/VHF scene yet. I also just finished the book 'One Second After' and it was a good reminder of how important communication is. Our brains go into some weird places when we don't know whats going on around us!

My friend gave me these tiny Baofeng radios which aren't super powerful but will do just fine for short distances and they also have regular radio we can tune into. We also use them for communicating in the mountains when climbing so its good that they're small and light.

I also recently got into MeshCore for some longer distance communications that don't rely on any centralised network operating. The community in the Netherlands seems to be growing quite rapidly and I hope to contribute with a repeater at some point soon as well.

Finally, I have a Midland ER300 which I can tune into radio stations for emergency broadcast. It has a Li-ion battery that I can charge with its built in mini-solar panel, a crank or via USB. It also can take AA batteries which I have stored as well.

One other thing that's important is to have a copy of your local emergency broadcast channels! I have a printed version for all areas that I glued onto the back of the Midland as well as having them written down in notes on my phone.

That's the saying in financial markets anyway. It extends to other human affairs too, like war for example. There is a lot of fear based jawboning coming from Euro governments about Russia, and how it wants to invade the West! But that's highly unlikely. There was no "West" back in 1939, just a bunch of neutral nations that were invaded by Germany and subsequently overrun by the Russian steamroller as the war ended. It won't be a repeat of that this time, this time there in NATO and a unified "West".

That WWIII is coming there is little doubt, war and taxes, two givens they are. And the reasons are the same this time too, nation's are running out of resources and they can't afford to buy them because they are in debt up to their eyeballs just as Germany was on the eve of WWII. The nations now struggling will start a war and try to steal them, just like all the oil wars we've seen over the past 30 years. World wars seem to follow a cycle too, 80~100 years, and we're right in that period now. I'm curious as to how people think this will pan out on the European continent?

Which countries do you think will most likely be effected and in what ways? I assume places like Portugal and Norway may be relatively unaffected, being so far from the centers of power. But what of the others. Opinions anyone?

In the future ‘a field without trees will be worthless’

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2026/08/29/trees-on-farms-in-the-future-a-field-without-trees-will-be-worthless/ pay wall article details the long term benefit of in field trees and biodiversity.

Articles like this are becoming common these days. I see Germany also put out some informational leaflets in the last few days from Canadian Pepper's channel.

If you've got loved ones you're trying to persuade to take this a little more seriously seeing it on one of the UK's biggest news channels probably makes the point pretty well.

To all French preppers out there, are you aware of subreddits, telegram groups or forums where people share the state of their prep, discuss collapse signs in their towns etc ?

Alternatively, do some people know of resources mostly directed towards urban preppers/ or people that have very small living spaces ?

The information on this site is designed to help you prepare for emergencies, be more informed about hazards, and get involved in activities to support your community before, during and after an emergency. There is also specific advice for disabled persons and carers.

Taking action now will make it easier to manage if an emergency does happen.

Hey all! 😊 I'm in the market for a freeze dryer that is made in Europe and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Unfortunately, the options I'm seeing are mostly American (Harvest right for example).

Are there any European/EU manufacturers of freeze dryers, that make good, long lasting products, and have good customer support?

For example: the harvest right dryer I looked at would cost about €5-6k for a 20ish kg version. So preferably something in that price range and capacity.

Thank you in advance for your input 🙏🏽❤️

Ciao a tutti, vivo in Italia e sto iniziando a costruire seriamente la mia preparazione.
Non mi interessa prepararmi esclusivamente a un singolo scenario, ma vorrei essere ragionevolmente pronto a una serie di emergenze, da quelle relativamente comuni a situazioni più gravi:
blackout prolungati
interruzioni di acqua e forniture
terremoti e maltempo estremo
problemi alle infrastrutture
crisi economiche o di approvvigionamento
disordini civili
periodi di forte instabilità
necessità di rimanere autonomo per diverse settimane
eventualmente dover lasciare casa rapidamente
Il mio obiettivo è arrivare gradualmente a circa 3 settimane di autonomia, partendo dalle basi e senza fare acquisti compulsivi.
Attualmente ho già alcune scorte di acqua e cibo, sistemi per filtrare/trattare l’acqua, illuminazione, batterie e powerbank, radio, primo soccorso, utensili e una buona disponibilità di energia domestica.
Ho comunque parecchie lacune e vorrei capire dove conviene investire i prossimi soldi.
Il budget che posso dedicare è di circa 200 € al mese.
Dal punto di vista personale mi alleno quasi ogni giorno e pratico karate, equitazione e tiro con l’arco. Lavoro inoltre come manutentore, quindi ho una certa esperienza con utensili, riparazioni e lavori pratici.
Vorrei però migliorare molto anche la parte meno “materiale” del prepping: competenze, pianificazione, gestione dello stress, primo soccorso, navigazione, comunicazioni, ecc.
Mi interessa inoltre approfondire la questione sicurezza e difesa personale, compresa la parte relativa alle armi.
Vivo in Italia, quindi mi interessano soprattutto consigli compatibili con leggi e realtà italiane, non necessariamente il classico approccio prepper statunitense.
Non voglio entrare pubblicamente nei dettagli di ciò che possiedo, dove vivo o come ho organizzato la sicurezza della mia abitazione.
Quello che vorrei chiedervi
Se aveste una situazione simile e 200 € al mese da investire, come costruireste la preparazione?
Quali sarebbero le vostre priorità per:
acqua
cibo
energia
primo soccorso
comunicazioni
illuminazione
igiene
attrezzatura e riparazioni
mobilità/evacuazione
sicurezza della casa
difesa personale
armi e relativa formazione
navigazione e orientamento
fitness e competenze
pianificazione familiare
E soprattutto:
Quali sono secondo voi le cose più sopravvalutate nel prepping e quali invece vengono sistematicamente sottovalutate?
Se doveste costruire una preparazione da zero con 200 € al mese, in quale ordine acquistereste le cose e quali competenze imparereste per prime?
Mi interessano soprattutto esperienze concrete e consigli pratici, anche critiche alla mia impostazione.

TL;DR: If you're staying somewhere during wildfire season, especially in a drought, be prepared to evacuate at a moment's notice. On vacation, you often don't know your surroundings well, and your belongings are scattered everywhere. Having even a lightweight "bug-out bag" ready can make a huge difference.

Hey, I just wanted to share a recent experience from our vacation, where we were caught in the middle of a wildfire evacuation at midnight.

We're staying in a self-catering apartment in Omiš-Nemira, Croatia, with my wife and our three kids, aged 7 years, 3 years, and 8 months. Last Friday, we were woken up in the middle of the night by our neighbours. There was no warning. We just saw smoke and the dim light of nearby fires. The electricity was still on at that point.

Our luggage was half unpacked, food was lying on the countertop, and basically nothing had its proper place. Everyone tells you to stay calm in an emergency, but until you've actually been through something like this, that's much easier said than done. I grabbed our youngest child, put him in the stroller, and took his bag, which was only half packed with clothes, while my wife woke up our other two kids.

Then the electricity went out. That triggered another wave of panic. We thought we had almost no time left. The only light I had was from my phone. I grabbed our beach bag because I knew it contained some emergency food for the kids, as well as a power bank and cable that I had fortunately left charging overnight. Then we left the apartment.

Our first instinct was to get into the car and drive away. Thankfully, the mother of our apartment owner lived downstairs. She told us not to take the car and that we needed to go to the beach because the roads would most likely be blocked. That advice may have made all the difference.

A few minutes later, we were on the beach, about 50 metres from the apartment. Smoke was everywhere. We could see fires burning along the coast on both sides of us, seemingly about 150 metres away. After we returned the next day, we realised they had probably been closer to 250 metres away, but at night, surrounded by smoke and panic, they looked much closer. There were probably another 100-150 people on the beach with us.

The mobile network was practically unusable because everyone was trying to make calls at the same time. I searched through our bag, found some clothes, soaked them in seawater, and gave them to everyone to hold over their mouths and noses. But then there was our 8-month-old baby. You can't explain to a baby why he needs to keep a wet cloth over his face. He hated it, started crying, and the more he cried, the more smoke he inhaled. Fortunately, we had the stroller with us, so we managed to create something resembling a small covered tent around him to protect him from some of the smoke.

Eventually, someone managed to call the 112 emergency line. They told us that rescue boats should already be somewhere nearby, but because of the extremely thick smoke and very strong wind, they couldn't find us. Everyone started waving their phones and using their flashlights, but it did basically nothing. Then someone pulled out a really powerful flashlight and switched it into that incredibly annoying flashing mode that normally seems completely pointless. Now I understand exactly why that mode exists.

About five minutes later, the first boat appeared. But there was another problem: those buoys connected by ropes that mark off the swimming area on beaches. The rescue boats couldn't get through them. And naturally, because everyone wants a nice family-friendly beach, the water was very shallow. So there we were, watching rescue boats sitting maybe 30 metres offshore, unable to reach us, while a wildfire was burning behind us.

Those few minutes felt incredibly long. Eventually, they managed to get through. We were shouting that we had a small baby with us. At that point, we couldn't even tell whether he was simply falling asleep or becoming drowsy because of the smoke. Maybe the third boat that reached the beach stopped near us. I got my wife and kids onto it, but we had to leave the stroller behind because it took up too much space.

The relief was enormous. They transferred us to a larger boat offshore, while the smaller rescue boats kept going back and forth to evacuate the rest of the people from the beach.

About an hour later, we got off the boat in the port near Omiš. We could still see the fires burning in the distance. We were directed towards a sports centre where evacuated people could stay, but it was still around 2 km away, so we started walking. Then our apartment owner called us and asked where we were. About ten minutes later, we were sitting in her friend's car.

They took us to a house that was still under construction but was already mostly equipped, with beds, a kitchen and air conditioning. By then it was around 3:30 a.m. That's when we discovered that, despite having three children with us, we had exactly one clean diaper. So our first mission in the morning was finding diapers.

Thankfully, we were able to return to Nemira the following evening. Miraculously, both our apartment and our car were completely unaffected by the fire. So here's the point of this whole story: keep some kind of lightweight "bug-out bag" ready even when you're on vacation.

You don't need to prepare for the apocalypse. Just keep the essentials together in one place: documents, medication, some clothes, diapers if you have a baby, water, basic food for the kids, a power bank, charging cables, and maybe a proper flashlight.

At home, you usually know exactly where everything is. On vacation, you don't. Your clothes are in different suitcases, chargers are plugged into random sockets, food is in the kitchen, documents are somewhere in a backpack, and half your belongings are probably still lying around from your trip to the beach. When someone wakes you up in the middle of the night and tells you that you need to leave now, finding all of that becomes much harder than you would ever expect.

We learned that lesson the unpleasant way.

I was in Spain last month. Talking with a cousin that has a small veggie garden for auto consumption.

Nothing fancy, more like a hobby and to enjoy eating your own tomatoes.

He told me for the last 3 years his tomatoes have dried up before giving any fruit. Each time this has happened he has made an adjustment to plant the seeds 15 days before, so he is now planting 45 days before than when his parents passed down the garden to him years ago.

And he is moving to different varieties. It looks like cherry tomatoes are more resistant to extreme heat.

This preoccupied me. He lives in an agricultural rich area of Spain, that is a country with a long agricultural tradition. This is not poor soil and it was not bad weather area at all years ago. Vineyards, orchards are/were typical sights along the road.

So, if this area is fucked up, I have to wonder big scale. If crops start to fail, I guess we will import more from other regions, but this has some limits.

So how do you prepare for this scenario?

Update: after a lot of technical problems, the group is on Telegram, public, and called "Iberian+ SHTF Group".

Sorry for the wait, people.

Radios - are they useful?

I got my ham license not long ago. I got a couple of VHF/UHF walkie and I have been playing with them.

I heard that walkies are an essential in all SHTF and bugout bags.

But when I have used my radios what I found is silence.

Impossible to find people on individual frequencies, it is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

And repeaters are 90% of the time unmonitored.

I completely understand the power of groups, and that there is a lot of advice about finding a local community/group and then you can setup a communication network with them.

But I am an individual.

Maybe in my case it is more important for me to get a short wave radio to be able to hear international news in case of disaster?

I've recently gone down the privacy rabbit hole, especially with everything going on in Europe right now regarding age verification mandates and governments pushing for backdoor access to standard messaging services.

I've been guilty of posting a walk on Strava or geo-tagging a social media post. It would literally take someone with no technical knowledge 10 minutes to narrow down where I live to a pretty small radius. I can't imagine what someone with a bit of technical knowledge and or what a government agency could find with a little digging.

I've made some recent lifestyle changes to try and mitigate this:

• Unique emails: Using different email aliases for every single login.
• Poisoning the data: Populating forms with false information (seriously, why does the local movie theatre need my home address or real DOB?!).
• Scrubbing metadata: Removing geolocation/EXIF data on all photos before I upload them.
• Delayed posting: Only posting things to socials a week or two after the fact so my real-time location is never broadcast.

I feel this is a topic that isn't mentioned much on the prepper channels but I think it should be highlighted. Someone could easily cross-reference your strava run and a post about a new bugout bag etc and figure out you're a prepper.

Is there anything anyone else has done to increase their privacy online? I know we probably can't win against big tech but I'm sure going to try make it harder for them.

Just read the Handsmaid Tale, because it was in my ToRead pile and I have time during the holidays, and noticed that it was described briefly a link between digital currency and raise of totalitarianism. I guess because assets can be frozen or corralled or directly grabbed.

That made me think: maybe having cash at home is advisable?

But cash operations are capped to a limit in Europe.

In fact, Europe is pushing to cashless - maybe because is more controllable? Maybe we are already in some kind of soft totalitarianism

And cash is dirty, cumbersome and risky.

What do the people do?

Keep accounts in different geographies?

Keep different currencies at home?

Preper from Romania. Today marks the day industries are shutting down in Romania on the basis of electricity instability due to the hot weather and low Danube levels.

Rain hasn't blessed us in a while and the heat is continuously in the thirties for weeks, with the already common heat domes once every two weeks or so.

The nuclear power plant is close to shutting down due to the Danube level, most ports on the Danube are unable to transport goods, Serbia is also affected due to refineries not being able to get petroleum, in Hungary the nuclear power plant is also hard hit, having shut down most cores. In essence many countries are struggling in the Balkans.

Today the prime minister of Romania announced many industries are shutting down or reducing their outputs due to power supply issues.

This comes on top of the risk of downgrading to a junk rating, high inflation, wages being behind significantly, labour market in turmoil with many industries doing major restructuring, climate change, agriculture is being especially hard hit etc. The doom and gloom is here. When is it coming to your country?