Doomsday prep is mostly buying things. Water filters. Freeze-dried lasagna. Enough tactical gear to make a suburban garage look like a low-budget militia supply room. If money is no object, maybe a bunker. Maybe a very nice bunker. Once the missiles launch, though, there’s one thing you can’t exactly grab on the way out: a better country.A new study published in Global Challenges asked where people would have the best chance of getting through a catastrophe big enough to cripple civilization. Environmental scientist Florian Ulrich Jehn and his team at the University of Hagen looked at everything from nuclear winter and asteroid impacts to cyberattacks, geomagnetic storms, and biological disasters. Australia came out on top.And, annoyingly, the reasons are very boring. Australia grows a ton of food. It has a domestic industrial base. It has mineral and fossil fuel reserves. It is also a giant island sitting far away from a lot of other people, which becomes a decent feature once “shut the borders” stops being political rhetoric and becomes an actual survival strategy.Australia Is the Best Place to Survive Doomsday, Researchers Say“It’s an island, so it can more easily shut itself off and isolate itself,” Jehn told the University of Hagen. He also pointed to the country’s food production, mining sector, industry, wealth, and relative political stability.Australia was the only country in the study that held up across all three disaster categories. New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland, and Argentina also made the stronger end of the list, although each comes with its own problem. Switzerland has no coastline, handy if tsunamis become part of the day. Several other contenders do, and that gets less charming once an asteroid lands in the ocean.Australia has plenty going for it, but self-sufficiency has limits. It still imports fuel, medicine, fertilizer, and other essentials. A 2026 report from the Global Challenges Foundation points to the same larger issue. Every country relies on somebody else for something.The study authors are pretty sober about all this. “Prevention is always preferable to resilience,” they write, while noting that some catastrophes, including volcanic eruptions, can’t be stopped. Preparation still decides what happens once disaster arrives. As they put it, the difference between countries that invested beforehand and those that did not “will be measured in lives.”That might be the least satisfying lesson imaginable for anyone who spent $8,000 turning the basement into a survival pantry. Civilization is an annoyingly communal enterprise. You can own twelve years of lentils and the finest hand-crank radio money can buy, but eventually somebody still has to grow food, make medicine, generate electricity, repair machinery, and keep a government functioning. If the world ends, Australia just happens to have a better shot at keeping the doors open.The post The Best Country to Survive the End of the World, According to a New Study appeared first on VICE.