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The Really Big One

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Re: The Really Big One

#181

Post by baudehlo »

rryan wrote: post #101
Sven7 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The financial disaster would be horrendous. Look at the number of companies using google for email.

When the towers went down in 2001, the first business priority of many companies was getting email back online. It's an incredibly important part of a business.

Re: The Really Big One

#183

Post by kragen »

So how can you escape from a 10-meter tsunami, like the 11-meter Tohoku tsunami that wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi, assuming you have years to prepare?

You could build buildings that could withstand the water flowing around them, as the nuclear reactor center itself did; but windows that can survive not just ten meters of water pressure but also cars and trees being dashed against them by the tsunami are going to be less like windows and more like plastic-filled tunnels to the daylight.

You could ensure that all of your buildings are at least 10 meters tall, built to withstand the tsunami without collapsing, and with adequate escape routes to the upper floors, space therein to ensure that everyone can escape, and emergency supplies (e.g. first-aid kits, food, water, insulin) to keep incidental deaths to a minimum. Then you just have to get everyone up four flights of stairs before the tsunami hits. The bottom floors will fill with water, destroying everybody's TV, and then recede. Maybe make it 20 meters, just in case the tsunami is extra huge, like the Kuril Islands tsunami of 2006.

Or you could build your houses a meter underground. You might lose the top 50cm of dirt cover, and if you illuminate with lightpipes, your lightpipes will fill with silt and other mud; but you should be able to keep your subterranean house well enough sealed that the water itself won’t be a problem. Escaping the house after the water recedes, though, may be a problem if you turn out to be in a sediment-deposition zone instead of an erosion zone. Tunneling out, using a door built to open inwards specifically for this purpose, may be your only option.

Other options are possible; Stapledon’s Star Maker suggests taking flight when the water is incoming, but that would seem to require a sufficient population of evacuation helicopters to evacuate the entire population within the few minutes of warning you have. This is probably not possible for biological humans. And if you have boats, especially if you live in boats, you could take them a few hundred meters offshore and be, in all likelihood, perfectly fine.

How can we engineer human civilization to be robust against natural disasters? The Chile and Haïti earthquakes of 2010 showed that there is enormous scope for doing so; how can we do better? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/27/chile-haiti-earthqu...

Re: The Really Big One

#184

Post by pchristensen »

edgyswingset wrote: post #14
sharkweek wrote: post #10

Well this article at least justifies that perhaps we don't need to replace the viaduct after all if everything is going to get destroyed anyways! While my fear of "the big one" doesn't keep me up at night, Seattle is going to be a classic example of "we should have known this was going to happen!" after a sizable earthquake costs substantial life at some point in the future. But this article does seem to stretch itse…

I don't think a tsunami is going to flatten the city. A wave has a lot to go through (peninsulas, narrow straights, etc) before it could reach the city, all of which would likely lessen its impact significantly. Where the area will get hit hard, though, is liquifaction and landslides.

Tsunami inundation maps: http://wa-dnr.s3.amazonaws.com/Publications/ger_tsunami_inun...

For Seattle, it's south of Downtown, Pioneer Square, the Duwamish industrial areas, and Interbay.

But the density of (destroyed) infrastructure and loss of power/water/sewer would be a much bigger problem citywide.

Re: The Really Big One

#185

Post by sevenless »

iamcurious wrote: post #48
kenferry wrote: post #35

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

I like how you think. If we are going to have an earthquake, at the very least we should have an scheduled organized mild one.

We already know through fracking that injecting fluid into subduction zones can trigger quakes.

I wonder about injecting a very strongly non-Newtonian fluid (a super-high tensile version of oobleck, maybe with nanotubes) into subduction zones. At high shear the fluid would be very viscous and might allow gradual release of energy.

Re: The Really Big One

#186

Post by prawn »

waynecochran wrote: post #158
jodrellblank wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like you didn't read the article.

I read the whole thing in gripping detail with Mt St Helens out my office window... I was imagining the horror of not being able to blog about my death as the Tsunami was approaching...

I think the human toll goes without saying (well, until you said it). The technical impact is naturally of interest specifically to HN readers.

Re: The Really Big One

#187

Post by Kluny »

nestlequ1k wrote: post #36
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…

Idea is fascinating. Aside from the political unfeasibility (people won't be convinced an earthquake will ever happen here), I'd be worried about technical execution. Could we really cause an earthquake? How many nukes would it take? How much would the operation cost? What if someone steals a nuke while they are installing it (add some more to security cost)? What if we can't predict how it will react and end up caus…

If I was sitting anywhere other than Victoria, BC, (right in the middle of the danger zone, on an island that is already difficult to get off of) I'd agree.

Re: The Really Big One

#188

Post by shas3 »

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 am really interested to learn how they calculate the probability of 1/3. I think there is a legitimate question here about the methods used. In technical terms: what is the sample space and what set are you looking for within that sample space? How strong is the justification to treat the sequence of earthquakes as a sequence of independent identically distributed random numbers? Leaves me scratching my head. I looked at Professor Goldfinger's papers and couldn't find a reasonable answer. Perhaps it is more fundamental knowledge (e.g. something one would find in geology textbooks)?

Re: The Really Big One

#189

Post by hrktb »

nordsieck wrote: post #177
rfugger wrote: post #167

I was in New Orleans in October 2002, and this guy was on the front page of the main newspaper predicting that within 20 years a category 5 hurricane was likely to whip around Florida and strike the city head on. He said the levies weren't high or strong enough, and that downtown New Orleans would be under 20 feet of water: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-katrina.html I remember reading it with interest…

Lots of people predict lots of catastrophes. The trick is identifying the correct ones ahead of time. This is much more difficult than you are implying.

I think it's still very simple. We can view it through the concept of discount rate [0], basically people don't value a future event as much as a present one.

The world ending in 50 years is not worth making drastic efforts now, at least for most people. If your prediction is too costly on the short term, as accurate as it can be most people won't act on it.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertemporal_choice

Re: The Really Big One

#190

Post by nosuchthing »

rfugger wrote: post #167

I was in New Orleans in October 2002, and this guy was on the front page of the main newspaper predicting that within 20 years a category 5 hurricane was likely to whip around Florida and strike the city head on. He said the levies weren't high or strong enough, and that downtown New Orleans would be under 20 feet of water: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-katrina.html I remember reading it with interest…

An omnious quote from an article on l0phet:

  Wysopal offered this grim precedent: Cities were once 
  vulnerable to disastrous fires, which raged through dense 
  clusters of mostly wooden buildings. It took a giant fire 
  in Chicago to spur government officials into serious 
  reforms, including limits on new wooden structures, a 
  more robust water supply for suppressing blazes and an 
  overhaul to the city’s fire department.


  “The market didn’t solve the problem of cities burning 
  down,” Wysopal said, predicting that Internet security 
  may require a historic disaster to force change. “It 
  seems to me that the market isn’t really going to solve 
  this one on its own.”

  But here’s a frightening fact: The push to create tough 
  new fire-safety standards did not start after the Great 
  Chicago Fire in 1871, which killed hundreds of people and 
  left 100,000 homeless. It took a second fire, nearly 
  three years later in 1874, to get officials in Chicago to 
  finally make real changes.
[via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760164]
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