Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Really Big One

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 286 posts

Re: The Really Big One

#101

Post by rryan »

Sven7 wrote: post #86
nostrademons wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DiRT drills include the simultaneous loss of whole offices, including the complete obliteration of the Bay Area. Participants are instructed to pretend that they've been eaten by zombies and not communicate with anyone in a remote office, and that's backed up (as described in the article) by cutting the network links to & from the Mountain View corporate office. Now, there may certainly be larger systemic effects…

What happens if Google goes down for a while? Is it really that bad? Yes, Gmail and Drive may cause all kinds of chaos but I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine and YouTube.

The data could be lost. Part of DiRT is ensuring that the result of losing N data centers is not "oops we lost 20% of GMail users data permanently".

On the scale of devastation this article is describing, none of Google's servicing being obliterated really matters but I'm personally pretty glad Google is prepared for multiple, massive scale disasters to happen at once.

Re: The Really Big One

#102

Post by [deleted] »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #45
civilian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The viaduct's collapse in the next big earthquake and the ~80 lives it'll take is the _reason_ we're building something as a replacement! Granted, Bertha is a huge fuckup. A MBA in my python night class said that one approach to the viaduct problem would be to: fund a "victims of the viaduct" fund, today, with a couple million. And then pass a law that the compensation for families of the victims is limited to what's…

>A MBA in my python night class said that one approach to the viaduct problem would be to: fund a "victims of the viaduct" fund, today, with a couple million. And then pass a law that the compensation for families of the victims is limited to what's in the fund. What exactly is the "viaduct problem"?

[deleted]

Re: The Really Big One

#103

Post by nappy-doo »

fizixer wrote: post #87

In recent past, I had this thought that Silicon Valley is sitting on top of, or very close to, potential future fault activity. And I have a hard time believing that the key component of human civilization (technology) is so vulnerable, and was built after the 1906 disaster. It's one of the factors I would consider when deciding if I really want to move to west coast.

San Francisco has been built by the grace of the grace of the 1906 quake. When the big quakes happen, they release all kinds of stress, and make a future local quake much more unlikely. It's called the stress shadow.

The stress shadow of the 1906 quake was (depending on who you ask) about 100 years. SF is coming out of the stress shadow, and is become "due" for a new big one.

WRT the rest of the valley, the main problem is that it's built on sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rock slows the seismic waves, which since you need to conserve energy, results in larger shaking. In other words, a small quake further south could result in more damage in the valley.

Re: The Really Big One

#104

Post by trhway »

stephengillie wrote: post #31
serve_yay wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does seem likely, though as far as I know, AWS's biggest zone is located in Northern Virginia. And, I'm sure the AWS people have planned as much as they can for this eventuality. (Um, I hope.)

AWS West in Oregon are somewhat further inland from I-5. It would probably be impacted, but not to the same degree as the datacenters in other cities like Tukwila.

i think the datacenters will get soon to the status of national strategic infrastructure objects similar to bridges, power plants, etc... Given the distributed nature of the services i'd suppose the main threat though isn't from physical effect like earthquake, instead i think the main threat is introduction of something like StuxNet into say AWS (or highjacking the backdoor access that services like NSA already have there)

Re: The Really Big One

#105

Post by mokus »

rudolf0 wrote: post #64
kenferry wrote: post #35

Is there any work on inducing earthquakes to relieve stress before it builds to catastrophe levels?

I feel like one could accidentally trigger the full quake by doing this, though I'm no seismologist.

Even if that was a possible outcome, it seems like the advantage of having it at a time of your choosing would be significant.

Re: The Really Big One

#106

Post by pixl97 »

Sven7 wrote: post #86
nostrademons wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DiRT drills include the simultaneous loss of whole offices, including the complete obliteration of the Bay Area. Participants are instructed to pretend that they've been eaten by zombies and not communicate with anyone in a remote office, and that's backed up (as described in the article) by cutting the network links to & from the Mountain View corporate office. Now, there may certainly be larger systemic effects…

What happens if Google goes down for a while? Is it really that bad? Yes, Gmail and Drive may cause all kinds of chaos but I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine and YouTube.

>I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine

The search engine that holds the vast majority of the worlds traffic? The search engine that everyone is going to call on minutes after the earthquake to get news, but isn't going to be there so all the other search engines slow to a crawl. If Google search just disappeared for a week there would be a considerable number of businesses go out of business. You see it now in one off cases where a site is delisted and its traffic drops 99%.

That said, Google has datacenters around the nation and the world so that scenario is unlikely.

Re: The Really Big One

#107

Post by qq66 »

waynecochran wrote: post #99
Locke1689 wrote: post #20

Hmm, in the spirit of thinking of worst-case scenarios, most of the engineering talent for Amazon and Microsoft is in Seattle and Redmond, respectively. There's even a sizable percentage of Google cloud platform in Fremont and Kirkland. Even if most of the employees live, it's likely basic infrastructure will be a disaster for quite a while. Maybe Google would be able to offload ops work to Mountain View, but it seem…

Not only would there be significant downtime of major internet services, but lots of people would die as well!

Downtime of major internet services could also cause deaths elsewhere, as more industries become reliant on cloud services.

I could imagine hospitals losing access to health records, emergency responders losing access to mapping or route planning software, people losing access to Uber and not being able to get to the hospital because the taxi companies have gone out of business.

Of course all this stuff is supposed to have clean failover, but not all of it has had its mettle tested.

Re: The Really Big One

#108

Post by cossatot »

kenferry wrote: post #35

Is there any work on inducing earthquakes to relieve stress before it builds to catastrophe levels?

It's something that most seismologists have thought of before. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing how much stress has already been accumulated. We also don't know nearly enough about earthquake triggering to be able to do it in a controlled fashion once, let alone repeatedly.

You'd have to do this thousands of times (log scaling, remember!), in a new location each time, to produce enough small earthquakes to relieve the stress accumulated on a locked subduction zone fault: Large earthquakes produce relatively similar magnitudes of stress drop to smaller ones; this stress drop is just spread over a much larger area. So you'd have to basically tile the fault with drill holes and then do whatever to produce earthquakes. And hope it doesn't cascade. Thousands of times.

Re: The Really Big One

#109

Post by themgt »

davesque wrote: post #98

FYI, the two-hundred year figure that this article mentions appears to be in dispute. Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earth... ) includes much more specific, cited information which puts the frequency at 300-600 years between significant quakes with the earthquake of 1700 having occurred after a 780 year lull.

I would say overall the situation looks ... not great, in the medium term.

"Perhaps more striking than the probability numbers is that we can now say that we have already gone longer without an earthquake than 75 percent of the known times between earthquakes in the last 10,000 years," Goldfinger said. "And 50 years from now, that number will rise to 85 percent."

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/node/13426

Re: The Really Big One

#110

Post by cossatot »

nkoren wrote: post #27

I used to live in Portland, and thought about this impending catastrophe a lot. Once -- under the influence of intoxicants, most likely -- I came up with a way of dramatically reducing its impact. It's a batshit crazy solution which will never actually happen -- but even when I'm sober, I still think it would work. Here's what I'm thinking: the major problem with a disaster like this is the uncertainty surrounding it…

From a technical perspective, it's useful to keep in mind that the closest humanity has come to drilling to the appropriate depths offshore is... Deepwater Horizon.
Post reply on HN