I am calling on everyone reading this, to turn in the direction of Yellowstone (rhumb and great-circle bearings both acceptable), and channel your chi into the mantra "NOT NOW"
ed: although, yes, the danger of eruption is not heightened now.
Please stop spreading FUD. That's not even close to a close pass. From the linked article:
> At its closest approach, which will happen at about 5:56 a.m. EDT (0956 GMT), asteroid 1998 OR2 will be 3.9 million miles (6.3 million km) from Earth. That's more than 16 times the average distance between Earth and the moon.
To be fair, various media outlets are also calling it a "close pass".
You're right, of course, that it's much larger than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, but that doesn't stop mainstream media from calling it a close pass.
You might be onto something. We've hit the trifecta of health crisis, faltering economies and bars closing their doors except now we've got smartphones and air conditioning.
I can't even figure out the genre anymore - political drama shifted into a medical procedural, now we're going to end in a full on disaster movie? Pick a lane people.
Maybe, but with all the people stuck at home, it really should be on everyone's Netflix to-watch list. Fantastic movie.
Some other good picks relevant for these times:
The Andromeda Strain (1971)
Outbreak (1995)
Contagion (2011)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 versions)
28 Days Later (2002)
Drawing paralels to computer systems, It usually take 3 or more separate events to take a system down. No one thought that we would get both a pandemic, big volcano eruption, and a asteroid hit at the same time. When you roll a dice and get two sixes there is still 1/6 chance to roll a third six in a row.
My guess is, at this scale, it's at least one heist film (more likely a concurrent series of them), with the earmarks of a biblical tragedy providing a smoke screen; starring old white dudes who prefer not to appear on the marquee. I'd imagine the exchange "isn't that illegal?", "not yet!" appears in the script at least once.
This reminds me of when the .com bubble burst in 2000 PBS's Nova series ran a set of shows on every way humanity could suddenly end from Yellowstone exploding to an asteroid hitting as the solar system passes through the galactic disk to the ice caps melting and changing the salinity of the oceans. It was strangely comforting.
If you're going to do this kind of thing, do it with positive language, not negative. (in a very literal sense) You want to focus on peace, not anti-war. You want to focus on health, not anti-virus. You want to focus on stability in Yellowstone, not "please don't erupt."
It was the first science fiction story I ever read, and I was 11. I still remember the opening line. "At first Potiphar Breen did not notice the girl who was undressing."
"For more than two decades, an area larger than Chicago centered near the basin has been inflating and deflating by several inches in erratic bursts. In a hyperactive volcanic region like Yellowstone, the exact causes of any specific movement are difficult to pin down."
[...]
"To be clear, the new research does not indicate that the supervolcano that created Yellowstone’s caldera—which last erupted 640,000 years ago—is any more likely to erupt now."
Thank you for this. The headline of the article certainly seems to be taking advantage of the recent hysteria around everything else happening in our lives right now (covid-19)
Headlines of previously respectful media have always been inching towards more drama, shock and FUD in general, so I don't think it's specific to the current mass hysteria. I'd bet COVID-19 has been a boon to all media though.
Is there any guide or plan how to rebuild from such a catastrophe?
Even brief nuclear winter would cause billion of deaths from starvation (and chaos caused by collapsing economy).
I just wonder if we have a plan B to rebuild stuff (relatively) quickly or humans will be thrown into preindustrial world condemned to reinvent everything again?
Plans A-Z call for us avoiding all nuclear winters and impacts from large asteroids. We don’t and won’t ever have a way to quickly rebuild after extinction level events. It will affect multiple generations in the best case.
My point is... If you have enough foodstore for X% of the population to make it through the 5-10 year period of crop failure, but can't do that if you try to feed 100% of the people what do you do?
I choose the 10% and continuity of civilization over 100% and complete destruction of society. And if I'm in the 90% .... I'll be pissed, but what needs to be done must be done.
In WW2 sailors sealed themselves up below the waterline to save the ship at certain doom to themselves.
The universe is an ugly place... But to see the light of humanity possibly extinguished is a worse prospect for me personally.
The world just got caught completely flat footed by a virus that's closely related to the seasonal flu. I shudder to think what will happen when something 1000 times more novel and deadly inevitably comes along.
The MERS virus was much more deadly than this thing, and that wasn't very long ago. The problem with it was that it was too deadly: it killed people off pretty quickly. Pathogens that are highly deadly usually aren't very good at starting plagues, because they kill off their hosts too quickly and for that reason don't spread that much. This one is worse because it has a really long incubation period with few or no symptoms and then does its thing, but still with a relatively low mortality rate.
I guess what would really cause civilization to collapse would be a virus that has a very long incubation time with no symptoms, and then sudden very high mortality.
HIV didn't spread very quickly because it required fluid transfer (and usually sexual, even kissing generally didn't spread it). It's hard to have an "outbreak" when a virus is so difficult to spread between people.
If society was actually thrown back into preindustrial levels, odds are good we would never get back, because all of the easy to acquire oil/coal is already gone.
"Is there any guide or plan how to rebuild from such a catastrophe?"
There's a ton of them. You can google "prepper community".
IMHO all of them tend to underestimate the cleverness of the remaining humans; i.e., holing up in a cabin in the mountains with a metric ton of freezedried food won't help when you've got people with a metric ton of freezedried motivation to find you.
It doesn't matter how much planning you do; such plans would not survive contact with the enemy anyhow.
I stick to the regular amounts of prep I've been advising anyhow. It helps even if such a worst-case occurs and gives you time to plan your next move, which is all you can really ask for anyhow.
To close out on a happier note, it isn't even all bad news, and it may be getting better over time. Even a catastrophic collapse of civilization could still leave you with a lot more resources than you'd expect, as society gets wealthier over time. For instance, every house that has solar panels on it is just a few components away from being able to provide small, but potentially vital, amounts of power, power that will have all sorts of uses. It may not be fun but people may surprise you with what even the "shattered remnants" of civilization can do. After all, we bootstrapped once already with none of that stuff.
Yeah, my first though: so this is how Q2 2020 is going to start. Will we even get to Q3, or will the gods cancel humanity mid-season because of low ratings?
To me, this is the scariest aspect of a fast&hot pandemic. If hospitals are already overloaded, supplies already exhausted, what happens in the event of a significant natural disaster? Typically, nations around the world rally to assist with hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunami, etc. What would that look like today?
Black swan events extreme enough to push our normal operating infrastructure to the limit are very hard to prepare for efficiently and effectively. Preparing for them to double up is likely a fool's errand. This is obviously cold comfort if we have an extinction level event on the heels of a pandemic, but at some point you have to just accept your fate.
Till shade is gone,
Till water is gone,
Into the shadow with teeth bared,
Screaming defiance with the last breath,
To spit in Sightblinder's eye on the last day.
I suppose the Mark Watney "Keep solving problems" is more in keeping with the HN zeitgeist. Ah well.
I'm not worried about extinction-level events -- more like the 100-year earthquakes and hurricanes that are improbable in any one place but somewhat frequent on a global scale... things like hurricane Katrina
I totally get why people delivering great content want to maximize their readership this way, but I've never read an article on that site before, so how would I know if its worth giving my email?
@Kye - After seeing the crap that comes on the History Channel, I don't know if I can trust anything anymore. National Geographic might just become National Geothermal Signatures of Alien Presence... But that's just my ignorance of NG speaking.
Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything does a good job of describing it, I'd butcher a paraphrasing. Essentially, feet of ash covering hundreds to thousands of miles.
It also highlights that this is been going on and areas bulge constantly.
I, on the other hand, have been having a better than usual time, now that the rest of humanity is finally as concerned with germ control as I have been for nearly two decades.
"In May 1980, a strong earthquake swarm that included four Richter magnitude 6 earthquakes struck the southern margin of the Long Valley Caldera. It was associated with a 10-inch (250 mm) dome-shaped uplift of the caldera floor"
135 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threaded: although, yes, the danger of eruption is not heightened now.
https://www.space.com/asteroid-1998-or2-earth-flyby-april-20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(52768)_1998_OR2#2020_approach
https://www.news18.com/news/tech/four-new-asteroids-are-appr...
> At its closest approach, which will happen at about 5:56 a.m. EDT (0956 GMT), asteroid 1998 OR2 will be 3.9 million miles (6.3 million km) from Earth. That's more than 16 times the average distance between Earth and the moon.
You're right, of course, that it's much larger than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, but that doesn't stop mainstream media from calling it a close pass.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeane_Dixon
A million monkeys with a million typewriters and all that.
Also, there's a literal Dixon Effect that's about ignoring all the bad and focusing on just the one or two correct things.
Maybe we should regroup and try again.
https://youtu.be/VmW-ScmGRMA
If someone had tried to make a movie that showed the true events of 2020, people would think it's ridiculously unrealistic.
Some other good picks relevant for these times: The Andromeda Strain (1971) Outbreak (1995) Contagion (2011) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 versions) 28 Days Later (2002)
It was a huge mistake to ask all of humanity to focus their chi on this as that was what caused the explosion that made Krakatoa look like a piker.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law
Ends with the Sun going nova.
[...]
"To be clear, the new research does not indicate that the supervolcano that created Yellowstone’s caldera—which last erupted 640,000 years ago—is any more likely to erupt now."
Even brief nuclear winter would cause billion of deaths from starvation (and chaos caused by collapsing economy).
I just wonder if we have a plan B to rebuild stuff (relatively) quickly or humans will be thrown into preindustrial world condemned to reinvent everything again?
Such plans are inherently unpalletable.
The right answer would be murder 90% of the population to sustain the resources for the 10% during the recovery.
How many people are game for that?
I choose the 10% and continuity of civilization over 100% and complete destruction of society. And if I'm in the 90% .... I'll be pissed, but what needs to be done must be done.
In WW2 sailors sealed themselves up below the waterline to save the ship at certain doom to themselves.
The universe is an ugly place... But to see the light of humanity possibly extinguished is a worse prospect for me personally.
The MERS virus was much more deadly than this thing, and that wasn't very long ago. The problem with it was that it was too deadly: it killed people off pretty quickly. Pathogens that are highly deadly usually aren't very good at starting plagues, because they kill off their hosts too quickly and for that reason don't spread that much. This one is worse because it has a really long incubation period with few or no symptoms and then does its thing, but still with a relatively low mortality rate.
I guess what would really cause civilization to collapse would be a virus that has a very long incubation time with no symptoms, and then sudden very high mortality.
It's killed millions but still hasn't wiped out civilization.
There's a ton of them. You can google "prepper community".
IMHO all of them tend to underestimate the cleverness of the remaining humans; i.e., holing up in a cabin in the mountains with a metric ton of freezedried food won't help when you've got people with a metric ton of freezedried motivation to find you.
It doesn't matter how much planning you do; such plans would not survive contact with the enemy anyhow.
I stick to the regular amounts of prep I've been advising anyhow. It helps even if such a worst-case occurs and gives you time to plan your next move, which is all you can really ask for anyhow.
To close out on a happier note, it isn't even all bad news, and it may be getting better over time. Even a catastrophic collapse of civilization could still leave you with a lot more resources than you'd expect, as society gets wealthier over time. For instance, every house that has solar panels on it is just a few components away from being able to provide small, but potentially vital, amounts of power, power that will have all sorts of uses. It may not be fun but people may surprise you with what even the "shattered remnants" of civilization can do. After all, we bootstrapped once already with none of that stuff.
A civilization ending asteroid is going to miss us! https://www.space.com/asteroid-1998-or2-earth-flyby-april-20...
(I did just look, `dig any you.xxx` returns NOTIMP, probably a reserved name.)
Given there's no discernable HN requirement to remain on topic (ever) the origin of this quote makes interesting reading.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/
https://i.redd.it/trycnbzmy0m41.jpg
It also highlights that this is been going on and areas bulge constantly.
I, on the other hand, have been having a better than usual time, now that the rest of humanity is finally as concerned with germ control as I have been for nearly two decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Valley_Caldera