The cover image for this page is the space shuttle Discovery, which launched and landed 39 times, making more flights than any other spacecraft. It launched the Hubble Space Telescope, the Ulysses Space Probe, and other satellites. It was named after the ocean going ship HMS Discovery — which, along with the HMS Resolution, was commanded by Captain James Cook on his third voyage.

Here are a few ideas to get started with while this page becomes more complete...

Could you become a prepper? You can start small and work up from there.

Begin in Secret

You can begin in secret, you don't have to tell anyone.

Many (perhaps most?) of the super heroes that kids (and even many adults) idolise have an alter identity. Their superhero status is often completely hidden from those who know them in their normal everyday personality. For example Superman and Clark Kent, Batman and Bruce Wayne, Spiderman and Peter Parker, etc.

Children's heroes like Superman, Batman, and Spiderman hide their identities from almost everyone else, who know them only as average, ordinary people. Photo by Pixabay/NeuPaddy.

Also there are practical reasons why you may not want too many others to know you're a prepper, especially if you have a lot of things stored up that you may not want to freely give away all at once as soon as a crisis begins and other people begin to run out of things. So don't be at all worried about "what will other people think if I'm a prepper".

Start Small

You can start just by reading articles and gathering together information and ideas. Even if that's all you ever did you would be a lot, lot better off in a compromised future situation than if you turned away from your first ideas of becoming a prepper and forgot about it completely.

To go further than just reading and learning there are several different possible approaches. You can follow any one of them, or more than one of them.

Start with the Basics

One way to begin is to think of the most important basic needs for life, and how you would obtain them after a large scale disturbance to familiar modern society. For example water (especially to drink), food, breathable air, and physical protection. Of course some of these will be more critical than others depending on the exact future scenario. You can pick one of more of these and then plan ways to acquire it apart from the usual ways via modern industrial society and the global economy.

You don't need to spend a lot of money or time when starting out (unless you want to and have the means to). This two litre bottle of regular chlorine bleach cost $1.19 from a local supermarket, and could save your life in many collapse/disaster scenarios. Click here to search Google for more about bleach.

There are as many different approaches you could take as there are preppers, so there is no definitively right or wrong way to do things. A lot of people have strong opinions on all kinds of things, but that does not necessarily make them right or mean that they have the best approach. Don't be intimidated by all the possible things you could be doing, or by other people's ideas of what constitutes a "worthy" degree of preparation.

Begin Prepping from Two Ends

With prepping, it's good to begin thinking of it in two separate ways. You can think of this as solving a problem from both ends.

An example from familiar modern life is what to do if you don't have enough money. There are two ways to solve this problem. One is to get some more money. The other is to find ways to need less money. That's the kind of thing I mean by solving a problem from both ends.

So how does this relate to prepping?

To directly use the analogy above, imagine that "money" as used above represents all of the modern technological economy. What do you do "if you don't have enough modern economy"? (That is, if you don't have enough of the products/fruits of the modern economy, like grid water, electricity, internet, and food in the shops, etc.?) There are two ways to solve this problem. One way is to "get some more modern economy". This would entail storing things up (like food and water and gear), and setting yourself up so as to hold onto the things made by the modern economy for as long as you can in a collapse or disaster situation. The other way is to "find ways to need less modern economy". That would entail knowing alternative ways of living without the things from the modern economy. Like the ways that people lived before around 1800-1900.

That's the kind of thing I mean by beginning prepping from both ends.

These are the two "ends" to start thinking about:

1. The "Starting Line": Your immediate situation, that you're in right now, this very minute. What you can actually do from where you are right now, addressing the first things you'd need to survive without modern civilisation. Then, as you go, you add on to that.

2. The "Finish Line": The long-term ongoing, permanent situation (the other end). Where do you need to be in the long-term? Imagine being able to survive indefinitely (i.e. forever), without needing anything from modern civilisation. This is the ultimate goal. Then you think about what you need to do in order to get to that point.

Like many indigenous peoples across the world, the Sān of Southern Africa were forced out of their traditional lifestyle and into government-mandated modernisation programs. Thanks to the internet, a vast amount of information about the skills and traditional knowledge of historical life is available all over the world today. In a permanent collapse of modern society, people will of necessity return to more ancient ways of living. Which, depending on the circumstances of the particular situation, could be almost anything from the 1800s to any time before that. Photo by Ian Sewell / Isewell / Wikipedia. Two Sān men in Botswana starting a hand-drill fire.

It's good to have these two areas of focus, and to think of them as separate goals (or missions). It helps keep you organised. And also, even though the end goal is the same (to live for as long as you can without modern civilisation) the kinds of things you do for each of them are often quite different.

For the first "end", which I'll call the Starting Line, since it's where you are right now — there are many very easy things you can do. (See the heading "Immediate Priorities" below.) Like throwing in some extra food with your regular shopping trips, more than you need right now, that keeps for many years, and storing it. Like saving your empty fluid containers/bottles, washing them up like your dishes, filling them with water and a small amount of antibacterial agent (like bleach perhaps, I'll write more about this soon), and keeping them. Or just buying casks and bottles of water, which are really quite cheap compared to the amounts of money most people spend on entertainment, hobbies, and relatively unnecessary items.

For the second "end" (the Finish Line), how do you get there? This is more difficult, takes longer, and means a different set of questions. Like how could you move away from a city or suburb to a rural area eventually? Like what things would you need to know once you're there?

Immediate Priorities

In some locations, especially urban ones, water will be a very high priority in many possible scenarios. It's good to think about this a bit. Water is much more important than food in the short term. You can live without food easily for a week or more, but only a few days or less without water (or some means of hydration).

You can store water in many different ways. Examples to follow soon on this site. Even having a few bottles is much better than nothing. Having lots of bottles is a lot better than that. You can buy casks of water from supermarkets in different sizes like 5 or 10 litre. One or a few of these would make a huge difference compared to having nothing at all if the water supply was interrupted without much notice.

Getting a water tank is a very good idea if you possibly can. You can get small, cheap ones from hardware stores that can fit in an ordinary car and be kept inside. If you own your house and can afford it you can get much larger ones.

Also, in a crisis you're likely to have access to water that isn't drinkable untreated, so methods of purification and/or filtration are very good to have available. The good thing is that these usually take up much less space (and are less visible to others) than storing water itself.

[More information about water here]

White rice, tinned food, and dried beans can be stored for a very long time. You can often find these cheap at supermarkets and just add a bit extra to your ordinary shopping. When there are five or 10 kilogram bags of white rice for half price, throw at least two or three in with your ordinary shopping and no-one will bat an eye or think that is strange (they're on special, right?).

[More information about food storage here]

Then Think Big

The greatest journeys and achievements of humanity all began with one small first step. Think about where you'd like to be. There will be plenty of ideas posted on this site in future to help with this.

The biggest journey begins with the first step. Buzz Aldrin (pictured) walked on the Moon with Neil Armstrong, on Apollo 11, July 20–21, 1969. Photo by NASA / Wikipedia.

Also you can look online at other websites and at videos to see what other preppers are doing. Sometimes this can seem overwhelming, so I'm going to really try to make it seem like something that anyone can do.

It's good to apply a combination of the small picture and the big picture. (As described above about the two ends). The small picture is all the important details that you need, that you can work on right now, where you are. The big picture, apart from giving you an overall direction to be heading, should include things that inspire you. Try to think of some. There will be a lot more than it seems at first. Stay tuned to this channel for many more ideas in future...

All you have to do to start with, is begin...

Next page: How to Really Begin Prepping.

Alternative next page: Restart — Begin Prepping Again From the Start.

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