Simulation of tsunami from dinosaur-killing asteroid that brought 2.5 mile waves

Post by random314 » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 10:26 AM UTC

Idiot_in_Vain wrote: post #73

jacquesm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would save quite a few ocean going ships if this was more appreciated. Those once-in-a-thousand-year-rogue-waves are much more frequent than once in a thousand years. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/jul/26/uknews But we're still designing ships as though they only happen once every thousand years because the cargo and the ship are insured and the crews are considered expendable.

Because a few ships a year are expendable for the global economy. Not worth it to try to make every ship less sinkable - e.g. it may decrease the number of annual losses by 50% at the cost of making an average ship 10% more expensive - obviously a bad trade. Some ships will still sink, because of stuff like human errors.

Post by calderknight » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 10:31 AM UTC

Someone wrote: post #68

echelon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Research at Imperial College, London, shows that far from being rare events, rogue waves can emerge frequently, and may be responsible for some of the 200 supertankers and container ships longer than 200m that have sunk in poor weather conditions in the past two decades. The loss of ten ships a year seems incredible to me. Surely "weather", if it were to blame, could be avoided. This amount of loss is steep. Is it…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1326758/number-of-oil-ta... : There were 8,883 oil tankers worldwide in 2021. If those are all ocean-going, ten a year is about 1.1%. Depending on how expensive it would be to prevent this, that may not be bad for ship owners, but it is very bad for those seeking a career in working on those ships.

Post by baq » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 10:36 AM UTC

Idiot_in_Vain wrote: post #76

fritzo wrote: post #26

> 30,000 times more initial energy than any recorded events As a statistician: this is why heavy-tailed modeling matters. Schools teach the finite-variance version of the Central Limit Theorem and students believe they live in a normal world. The real Central Limit Theorem [1] predicts large rare events following Lévy α-stable distributions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distribution#A_generali...

Heavy-tailed modeling doesn't reallly matter. There are very few enterprices where preparing for extremely rare events is worth the effort - nuclear power plants, weapons of mass destruction, bio labs working with dangerous organisms, big chemical plants, maybe AI research and big particle accelerators.

Post by Idiot_in_Vain » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 10:47 AM UTC

random314 wrote: post #81

Idiot_in_Vain wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a few ships a year are expendable for the global economy. Not worth it to try to make every ship less sinkable - e.g. it may decrease the number of annual losses by 50% at the cost of making an average ship 10% more expensive - obviously a bad trade. Some ships will still sink, because of stuff like human errors.

You know that ships have crew in it?

Post by Someone » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 10:55 AM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #60

GalenErso wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have long said that if I was given the chance to go back in time just once, and come back, I would return 66 million years ago to witness the meteor impact from the safety of a space shuttle. And now I have an idea for Elon Musk: interplanetary disaster tourism. Purposefully crash asteroids on remote areas of Mars and charge for front row seats. This would have the added benefit of bringing valuable metal ores to b…

LEO may not even be safe, would it? Afaik a large part of the damage was the heating of the atmosphere from enormous amounts of secondary impacts due to the debris - many of these small rocks probably flung up into LEO, though it would be interesting to know how risky a stay in LEO would be during such an impact. If you want a SciFi story touching many such topics I highly recommend "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson.