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A NASA thought experiment called, Defending Human Civilisation From Supervolcanic Eruptions, stated that a supervolcano eruption was more likely to happen in the future than an asteroid hitting the earth, according to the Daily Star. It said: “Supervolcanic eruptions occur more frequently than a large asteroid or comet impacts that would have a similarly catastrophic effect to human civilization.” Jet Propulsion Laboratory researchers found that collisions from asteroids which are more than 2km in diameter occurred “half as often as supervolcanic eruptions”.
[...]Yellowstone Caldera[*] is classed as a supervolcano which erupted 60,000 years ago and again 60,000 years before that.
Although there is no guarantee, if the volcano follows the same pattern then it is now due for another eruption.
Researchers have found that if a supervolcano like Yellowstone did erupt, then a “volcanic winter” would ensue which could surpass the “amount of stored food worldwide”.
People living on another continent would not be spared from the aftermath of a supervolcanic eruption.
[*] Wikipedia entry on the Yellowstone Caldera (aka Supervolcano).
The referenced NASA document — Defending Human Civilization From Supervolcanic Eruptions (pdf) — is less sensational; here is the abstract from the paper:
Large volcanic eruptions greater or equal to a magnitude 8 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (i.e., supervolcanic eruptions) eject >10 15 kg of ash and sulfate aerosols, sufficient to blanket sizeable fractions of continents and create a regional or global "volcanic winter." Such events could seriously reduce worldwide agricultural production for multiple years, causing mass famine. Supervolcanic eruptions occur more frequently than large asteroid or comet impacts that would have a similarly catastrophic effect to human civilization, especially now that many asteroid orbits have been mapped. We assess whether future supervolcanic eruptions could be dampened, delayed, or prevented by engineering solutions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @04:17PM (44 children)
How is this less sensational?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday April 09 2019, @04:25PM (43 children)
What's the definition of sensational in context? The dictionary definition of Arousing or intended to arouse strong curiosity, interest, or reaction, especially by exaggerated or lurid details" is less than helpful.
Those aren't lurid details, they're kinda non-descript factual statements. Megadisasters are real and of a scale you can't even begin to put into the context of your life. They're also so rare that only one is known to have happened since the dawn of civilizations. (Unless you count "the year without a summer")
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @05:06PM (38 children)
I'd put the number at least at two with the Black Death and the disease-based depopulation of the New World. Physical disasters like supervolcanoes and large asteroid impacts really aren't that dangerous in comparison to a high lethality pandemic which can kill as many people, but has a much fatter tail - and often can continue to kill people long after the pandemic itself has ended.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday April 09 2019, @05:53PM (30 children)
The problem is, if there is a pandemic and you are self-sufficient in the deep woods, you should be okay.
If a super volcano goes off it could block the sun like crazy and kill off vegetation/cause winter everywhere, even for your garden in the woods which WOULD affect you.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @06:07PM (26 children)
But not the two years of rice and beans you buried in your bomb shelter. There's some people who've got this apocalypse thing figured out.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 09 2019, @07:01PM (25 children)
"Fuck you, got mine" works only so well and for so long. What happens when you poke your head out of your little rathole 730.48 days in, as forecasted? What is awaiting you? Do you truly think you'll be returning to anything even close to what you knew? And the knock-on effects of even another Krakatau, let alone another Yellowstone caldera blowout, would make themselves felt for decades.
You don't seem to understand how interconnected and interdependent the bits and pieces of our civilization are. Even assuming you survive the aftermath, you may very quickly find yourself envying the dead...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday April 09 2019, @07:51PM
That entirely depends on how well prepped you are. I'm already fairly disconnected from civilization anyways, so wouldn't lose sleep over it largely disappearing. Not much value in it anymore anyways, at least not from what is visible. I got a place that meets the definition "the middle of nowhere", but has quite adequate water supplies, microclimate, and at least 5 years of stored food by now. Canning and drying veggies and fruits, pasta sauce, etc. It's where I will be disappearing to in a year or two.
If you are truly sustainable, then you need very little from civilization to keep going. Maybe 50 years in after some tech has broken down and you need repair parts, but properly prepared, you could sit tight for 5 years easy.
You also make the assumption that some people want to come back to society at all. Literally the only thing I get from civilization these days are more resources to get away from civilization at some point.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday April 09 2019, @08:47PM (16 children)
Come on now, you know khallow lives in a fantasy world where "rational actors"enact "voluntary contracts" between themselves.
It looks like he's one of those preppers I hear about occasionally too. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the A/C who unironically told me vaccines cause autism a few weeks ago.
If he thinks
then that might not be the nuttiest thing he believes.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 09 2019, @09:10PM (8 children)
Yeah, I know. He's fucking nuts. But until said apocalypse happens, the rest of us are stuck with him.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday April 09 2019, @10:30PM (7 children)
I suppose so, but it's quite fun having an arch-enemy sometimes.
Sort of like a really inept costumed villain who won't actually be able to do me any harm.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 10 2019, @01:04AM (6 children)
That kind of villain needs to be funny though. You know, like Johnny Rotten and the "We Are Number One" crew? Hallow...isn't. The only redeeming thing about him is that he is mortal and will one day die.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 10 2019, @01:51AM (5 children)
That's true. He's also never wrong even in the middle of shifting the goalposts which gets a bit wearing.
The funny thing is that I'm sure he has never traveled outside the awful mid-west state he lives in, where the height of sophistication is having a gun rack in your pickup truck.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @04:07AM (4 children)
He also complains when people assert things without providing evidence for the assertion. Of course, if people did that, then we're have less assertions.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 10 2019, @04:53AM (3 children)
Then he pretends the evidence didn't happen, rinses and repeats.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @06:05PM (2 children)
No pretending here. The evidence didn't happen.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 10 2019, @07:28PM (1 child)
Of course.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @07:39PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @11:21PM (6 children)
Well, it does happen in the real world. Unless, of course, everyone who ever makes voluntary contracts is sufficiently irrational that they're, I don't know, legally incompetent or some such. I'm not sure why I'd ever want a human in charge under that situation, if they're so bad off.
Or maybe you are said AC because "it looks like".
I guess you never heard of preppers (despite your use of the term earlier), eh? For example, in my neck of the woods, there is the Church Universal and Triumphant [wikipedia.org] or CUT for short. They have bomb shelters, two plus years of food (hence why I used that particular number), and other prepper things. They wouldn't survive a Yellowstone supervolcano eruption because they're too close, but things like nuclear war and other global disasters whose certain death zones lie elsewhere, they'll survive.
Now, one can do a rational cost/benefits on the value of prepping for global disaster, but it's not nutty to assume that the choice to not prep will always win. For example, if the US and China are in a military conflict and nukes have already been used in anger, I'm not going to assume that everything will stay non-disastrous. That would be nutty.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday April 09 2019, @11:53PM (5 children)
Even the briefest of glances at your link the CUT shows that those guys are not surviving anything.
Like all cults, they need a way for disillusioned members to leave, or they will be killing each other in months.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @02:25AM (4 children)
"Like all cults". Not many cult mass murders. Maybe you're a bit off on the timing?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 10 2019, @03:10AM (3 children)
Apart from Jonestown, Aum Shinrikyo, Order of the Solar Temple, or Heaven's Gate, you mean?
The other cults like the various Fundamentalist Mormon sects who practice polygamy force the extra men to leave.
If they didn't there would be violence.
From the CUT Wikipedia article:
That is really going to go down well when your dictations go against whatever the leaders have announced, won't it?
What happens when there's nowhere to run?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @03:56AM (2 children)
There's a lot more cults than four.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 10 2019, @04:51AM (1 child)
That's OK then.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @06:05PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @11:04PM (6 children)
Two years is long enough.
It's better than starving to death. Unless, of course, you have (as an alternative to starving to death) some magic solution that fixes worldwide disasters inside of two years and requires that particular batch of rice and beans in order to work.
I would think rather the big problem is "Thank you, Mr. Khallow for providing that delicious food." *bang* *thump*. But then I guess thinking clearly enough to argue against yourself is not a skill you've cultivated.
Finally, I find it remarkable how individual planning to avoid the worst effects of disaster are considered selfish and foolish, even though it's quite obvious that it beats the alternatives. Better to be just another statistic than to be around to rebuild society?
Unless, of course, it doesn't turn out that way. Not really any point to your babble.
A natural disaster like Yellowstone is to an extent predictable, inevitable, and not the fault of humanity. There's no virtue to killing yourself so society can suck even more in the aftermath of the disaster. Instead, if I were you, I'd wonder who wants your head wired so that you'll dispose of yourself and conveniently get out of the way of competition for resources post-disaster.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 10 2019, @01:01AM (5 children)
Christ, this isn't even paranoia anymore. *I'm* paranoid. THIS is some kind of persecution fantasy.
I'm with the poster below who says he wouldn't want to survive something like that, personally. As it is, the world is already an awful enough place. If anything, my plan for something like this would be a well-hidden and very large dose of barbituate or something similar.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @02:18AM (4 children)
Maybe you should stop doing that then?
Ok, so what? I think that's mental illness myself. One can't even think rationally about large disasters if one gives up before even seeing how the disaster turns out. I think this sort of thinking came out of the Cold War with urban populations, particularly of the Hollywood kind, trying to convince themselves (and others) that nobody could survive a nuclear blast. This later got expanded to any tribulation which was perceived as ending civilization. End result is a mental paralysis when it comes to thinking about such things.
My view is that I take what comes. Hopefully, there's no disasters in our future for a long time and we make our world better than ever before, but I'm not planning on giving up if things turn out poorly. Sure, if I get buried tonight by several hundred meters of superhot ash, that sucks. But if I get an opportunity to adapt and fix things, I will. Setbacks happen, but that doesn't mean that we have to accept that.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 10 2019, @03:20AM (3 children)
> Implying you contribute anything to society
Delusions of grandeur are a mental illness :) I wish you luck in your newly-irradiated, cropless brave new world, Sir Hallow.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @03:56AM (2 children)
Last I checked supervolcanos don't irradiate anything? But maybe they're nuclear powered now?
And as to crops, the climate will return to something that lets light through. Then crops will grow normally again.
Sure, these sorts of events suck. But they don't stay that way.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 10 2019, @05:19AM (1 child)
Like I said, have fun in post-$DISASTER world. Somehow I don't think you're the rugged-individual hybrid of Galt, Wayne, Mad Max, and Iron John you think you are :) I'll see you in (front of) Hell, buddy.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @06:03PM
So what? Real people have survived real disasters before.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday April 09 2019, @06:08PM
Maybe I'm unusual, but my spouse and I feel that we do not want to have a place to hide out and survive the destruction of civilization. My sincerest hope would be that if something that bad is going to happen (nuclear war, volcanic winter, windows 11, etc) then I personally do not want to survive it. I am happy in my life and am not looking to hasten my own demise. But that type of outcome is not a world I want to live in. No matter how 'prepped'. Just sayin'
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @06:29PM (1 child)
You'd think that, wouldn't you. Considering its vector, look into the strange way they think that the Black Death spread to isolated communities sometime, if you don't want to go back that far, have a look at the 1918 influenza pandemic and how it both unexpectedly spread to isolated locations, and, paradoxically, seemed to bypass the occasional population centre in the middle of infected areas (can't give you references, all my paper books are packed away, some google-fu might show up some links)
Caves and Mushrooms FTW!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @06:58PM
Yea, the 1918 epidemic during which doctors overdosed people with aspirin, which has the same symptoms as the flu. Good luck sir.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday April 09 2019, @05:54PM
*scratching head*
It's hard to imagine any biological - especially naturally evolving - agent devastating life on earth, so thoroughly as a kinetic weapon, or a volcano. Think of the theory of the moon, originating as ejecta from a big rock impacting earth. That is one HUGE impact. Everything on earth felt that impact, from the highest mountain top, to the deepest ocean valley. The black death? It only affected mankind, and maybe a few other species, in a relatively slow, and quiet fashion.
On a global scale, germ warfare doesn't really rank as high as a volcano on the threat scale. At least after the ultimate pandemic wiped out mankind and all the simians, the ants and the cockroaches would be available to evolve into something awesome. Or, the octopus, or maybe raccoons, or - something.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @06:15PM
I'm sure all the dinosaurs around today would agree with. you
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 09 2019, @06:56PM
The Black Death was no picnic, but some of us survived. And there was a sudden surge in demand for backhoe rentals, so kind of an economic win, for some people. In fact, some say it was the catastrophic depopulation that broke the feudal system, and allowed for the emergence of a new liberal bourgeoisie capitalist order. Counter-factually speaking, then, no Black Death, no khallow.
Nothing like a super-volcano caldera explosive eruption, but it you total up the entire destructive effects of capitalism, . . .
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday April 09 2019, @07:42PM (1 child)
You mean the conquistadors had nothing to do with it? ;)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 10 2019, @02:28AM
Sure, they did. They were carriers.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 10 2019, @01:17PM (1 child)
The Black Death wasn't even remotely a megadisaster, the two biggest reasons being:
1) Hardly anyone died: It was mostly confined to Europe and nearby portions of Asia, and only killed around 30-60% of the population, while most of the world was untouched. A megadisaster can reasonably be expected to kill at least 80-90% of the global population, eventually quite possibly into the high 90s or even 100%.
2) Only humans were affected: If you survived the black death, the fields and woods were still thriving and healthy to support you - probably better than ever thanks to the lowered demands of the human population. In a megadisaster pretty much the entire global ecosystem is hit just as hard or harder than us - there will be no thriving ecosystem to support the survivors. And it will likely be centuries or millenia before there is, as new species will have to evolve to fill the many niches important niches left empty by the extinction of most species on Earth.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 11 2019, @11:33AM
Then Yellowstone and those asteroid strikes probably aren't megadisasters either. There's probably been hundreds to thousands of supervolcano eruptions since the end of the dinosaurs without significant impact on the fossil record. Similarly, there's been a number of significant asteroid strikes (though none as big as the one that ended the dinosaurs).
Which is still a lot of the world's population dead. I brought it up precisely because that's the scale of a Yellowstone eruption - IF we don't bother to prep for it when we figure out it is coming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @05:25PM (3 children)
The dawn of the current civilizations...
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday April 09 2019, @09:57PM (2 children)
No, really, human beings settling down, doing agriculture and industry in an organized fashion. That whole time frame had one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @02:05AM (1 child)
Records are pretty shoddy before ~10k BC.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 10 2019, @01:20PM
True, but that's around the time agriculture began, and it's relatively unlikely that prior civilizations existed without at least leaving evidence of their agriculture behind.