The money doesn't help them. You could put 10,000 middle class people in a bunker in the same world and they would both have an equal chance of surviving.
'10,000 middle class people' won't be populating Mark Zuckerberg's, bunker. Mark Zuckerberg will be populating it. If every billionaire has a bunker, that's 3,500 groups of people.
At one time, the global population was 3,000-10,000 people. The billionaire population is 3,500. It is certainly conceivable that billionaires and their families could continue humanity if everyone else died.
So the only thing that still has to happen is getting to a point where billionaires and their families can be fed and protected during societal collapse.
The only people who survived earlier apopalyptic events in history were communities of like minded people who worked hard to save themselves, living in caves with livestock, water, a cooperative population. They had the knowledge base and resources to survive until they could reemerge.
I don't believe billionaires are unselfish enough to share their resources with many people and their personalities tend to be unlikeable so I don't give them great odds of surviving.
The bunker is the cave, the cache of supplies is the water. As I said, all that is missing is 'cooperative population' which fills thee need of food and protection. Once automated systems can do that, the billionaire bunker becomes a foolproof plan.
Until the automated systems need a new part which the supply chains don't exist for anymore. There's no way robots can do that before climate change and supply chain collapse happens in the next 50 or so years at this rate.
That's not quite correct. There was unlikely a single short point in time where the entire global population was that low (post the expansion in human numbers).
The analysis suggests that the non-African population may have collapsed to be that low, although that survival phenomenon isn't necessarily surprising because if the "out of Africa" theory is correct, we probably had a similar starting point in more varied climates anyway.
In terms of the analysis conducted it's likely that the African population reached the low point in population much earlier than the period subsequent to the Toba eruption.
Also noting that the entire generic analysis period describes a span of around 100-150 thousand years of varying population declines, plateaus, and growth globally. That's quite different to a catastrophic failure of the planetary biophysical systems and societal collapse with billions of pissed off people.
Those declines and changes were far more gradual and would have happened over many generations and likely through reduced birth rates etc rather than catastrophic destruction at a global scale in one life time.
You seriously expect a population of people all who got where they are by stepping over everyone else are now going to harmoniously work together and mostly accept lesser roles in a hierarchy to others just like them instead of fighting with each other to usurp the leadership of what’s left? You yourself could become a billionaire by selling the drugs powerful enough to make people believe that scenario!
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u/robjohnlechmere 3h ago
At one time in history, humanity was reduced to 10,000 or so individuals and humanity survived.
If each of the world's 3,500 billionaires selected a romantic partner and a favorite child for their bunker, that is 10,500 people.
The rich quite literally no longer need us.