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Pretty for young and unencumbered, less so for the COPD patient with an oxygen concentrator, or the parent of an infant running out of sterile bottles, etc.

Sterile bottles? Millions of babies around the world are doing just fine every day without that.

Some parents of infants would be able to find a way to feed their children safely.

With breastfeeding, which millions can't, for whatever reason (even if only prior preference, you can't turn it on at will). Bottle feeding young babies without the ability to semi-sterilise formula and sterilise bottles will lead to higher infant mortality.

Obviously, but not all. I can't believe I have to say this, but prolonged blackouts (with all the downstream ramifications they bring to hygiene, temperature control, food safety, food availability, etc) would cause infant mortality to exponentially rise as days pass without power.

Hopefully it isn't controversial to acknowledge that a few extra dead babies is actually a terrible thing not something you brush aside, right?

To sterilize a bottle you simply need boiling water without a significant amount of toxic materials in it. To get boiling water you need water, a container for the water, a combustible fuel, an ignition source, and a means of transferring heat from the burning fuel to the water. Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container filled with water to get to a boil.

> Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container filled with water to get to a boil.

That can get you sterile water, although it's extremely difficult to do and involves many more rocks than you'd imagine easily 5x the mass of rock to water to get a rolling boil for a full minute, but it doesn't get you clean water. Now you have sterile water with a lot of potentially very unpleasant dissolved solids. Certainly not something you'll be using to feed an infant.

Without the power grid we are right back to the dark ages in a matter of a few days. Except at least in the dark ages people sort of knew how to survive. Now, only a minority of people really know how to survive without modern conveniences.

it takes 5 minutes to build a simple but effective alcohol stove out of a soda can.

I would disagree. The dark ages were hundreds of years ago, the electric grid is much less than a century old. Plenty of countries have unreliable supply and rolling blackouts and have adapted to it or have just never became accustomed to the luxury of 24/7 electricity on demand. Being without juice is not the end of the world.

Those places generally have the luxury of 24/7 electricity, normally via diesel gensets, for key parts of their infrastructure, such as fuel transfer, hospital, food supply.

The places that don't have the fallback ready access to fallback diesel genset, like rural South Sudan or Burundi, are pretty close to an end of the world scenario.

Don't romanticise disaster. If a developed country indefinitely lost power, a huge swathe of the population would die, starting with the infants, elderly, and chronically ill. Then hunger and disease would come for the rest. Nonsense ideas that we'd MacGyver or bushcraft our way out of trouble are infantile.

You mean everyone who didn't have an issue because modern hospitals have backup generators that can run for days, or even indefinitely if diesel-based?

The diesel supply in all countries is dependent on the grid, so days is the absolute maximum. The reality is often much less. During the recent power outage in Portugal, the Alfredo da Costa maternity hospital had only one hour's diesel and had to be resupplied by ministerial chauffeurs delivering Jerry cans of fuel.

Still, all the ancillary services that go into a hospital like water, sewage, medical gasses, cold chains, etc are all dependent on the grid, as are the people who make them work. If a large-scale outage happens, most hospitals will start losing patients within 24-48 hours and will close as functioning hospitals well within a week.

Put the bottle in a smaller container of clean water inside the larger container of water with the top sticking out of the water so it doesn't overflow into it. It'll take longer to boil without the convection but you'll get there eventually. You can fashion tongs out of sticks to pull rocks back out after their heat has mostly transferred to the water while you put newly heated ones in.

You're romanticising the situation with nonsense solutions.