Hope is is the right forum for this thread. If not, mods please move it.
For quite some time now I have been contemplating what might happen if I should find myself in some kind of survival situaiton and did not have my glasses or contact lenses, or had managed to lose or destroy them. My unaided eyesight is atrocious - worse than 20/200. (Yes, that is two hundred - I couldn't see an elephant if it sat on my face.) Without glasses or contacts, I and many others like me would be practially blind. Chances are that quite a few WSF members can relate.
So, my question is, how can you get by in a survival situation without your prescription glasses or contacts?
The only solution that I can think of is to make a set of "pinhole glasses." The science behind these things is lengthy to describe, and frankly a little over my head, so I will let you research how it works for yourself. However it works, it works. If you wear glasses, try poking a tiny hole through a piece of paper and looking through it. You may be surprised to find that you can actually see noticiably better than with the unaided eye.
The bottom line is that pinhole glasses can improve your vision quite a bit, hopefully enough to get you out of the situation you are in. Something tells me that it would be very difficult to find decent materials (maybe birch bark or thin opaque plastic?) or to make a reliable set of pinhole glasses - especially since you couldn't see what you are doing! Even so, something has to be better than nothing. Those with good vision cannot imagine how frustrating it is to not be able to effectively use what is perhaps your most useful sense.
Manufactured pinhole glasses look like this:
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Here is the link to the Wikipedia article on pinhole glasses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_glasses
Given the difficulty of trying to make something like this in the wild, I would much rather have an easier solution to the dilemma of being stranded without desperately needed glasses. But this is the very best thing I can come up with.
Has anyone else ever considered this problem, and most importantly, do you have any better soultion?
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