If Yellowstone Blows

nice article on it.

aparentely, no, it wouldn't help. and it's not really "over-due" for an eruption, it has ~90,000 years till we can say that, but it could happen.

hell, 1,000 years and we'll probably have off-world colonies. 10,000 and they'll have more population then earth.

Yeah the thing about geology is that time that is supposed to be close or recent is still in thousands of years.

edited 15th Feb '12 7:43:39 PM by diomedes2

It was USGS scientists who came up with the bit in the "Supervolcano" film where the magma chamber under Yellowstone did not fully empty, I think in hope rather than expectation. If they really said what I think they believe it would cause panic. Plus the film wouldn't have been made at all.

They were lucky to get away with the portrayal of the FEMA boss being rock solid incompetent after all...

Or in fifty years we are still on the planet and still killing each other over stupid things.

edited 15th Feb '12 7:46:49 PM by TamH70

Given that the stated evidence suggest we've got several thousand more years before anyone needs to seriously worry about it, I call shenanigans on anything that poses it happening today in any kind of "best case scenario".

Also, incredibly bleak movies have been made where everything went to absolute shit.

Which has little to do with the topic at hand, and thus does not belong in this thread, and also is in a much shorter time frame than that which has been suggested for Yellowstone to blow.

edited 15th Feb '12 7:49:10 PM by AceofSpades

By then the Necrons or the Tyrannids would get us first

Besides, our ancestors survived Tobas with stone-aged knowledge and tech. We can certain survive Yellowstone.

edited 15th Feb '12 7:55:10 PM by IraTheSquire

Ira, that isn't really a valid argument. For one, the hypothesis states that it's going to knock out most of our current tech for large swathes of the surviving population. The Toba situation didn't invalidate their required living skill set; the same thing happening today would do that. People are going to have to re-learn how to farm without a tractor, how to hunt with tools that aren't guns because there's no bullets and no gun manufacturers, no computers or internet with which to communicate. Anyone who survived by necessity have to learn an entirely new skill set to them because their old one would be obsolete in this scenario.

I don't get why everyone assumes all tech would just stop.

yeah, I'm sure with artificial sunlight and indoor gardens and water filtration systems and what-not we could survive. We'd just have to really adapt is all. Some people would die, yes, but I think overall humanity would remain intact. It would probably be somewhere between a class 0 and class 1, probably leaning a bit more toward class 1, maybe, hopefully.

Vulcanology is not an exact science. Yet. It may be in the future. All you are getting at the moment is guesswork from even the best scientists in their field. Who at the top end of their profession are every bit as political as the people who pay them their wages. Do you seriously think any vulcanologist is going to come out and say in public that Yellowstone will blow in their life time? Or their childrens? Even if, and I say again, if, he or she had all the evidence necessary to back up their claim?

The prediction of volcanic eruptions of a much smaller scale than Yellowstone has got geologists and vulcanologists in trouble in the past. No scientist in that field wants to end up being called a fraud or a fool as has happened before. So they will keep their mouths shut.

Telling people that it could be as much as ninety thousand years off means it is not their problem.

I'll agree with that. Whatever happens, there will be issues.

Mostly in killing solar pannals for a while.

Uhm, considering how all the scientists are up in arms about how disastrous and world changing climate change is right now, I don't think a vulcanologist would actually have that much trouble saying "hey, this thing is probably going to blow soon." And I don't find it particularly political to estimate that it won't do anything for another thousand years.

You guys are forgetting the major thing this will do; cut off nearly all power sources. I can only imagine that we will get more dependent on electricity. We can't assume that we'll have the ability to generate power for these indoor gardens. And we'll be especially fucked if we're dependent on solar energy, because this is going to block out the sun for large amounts of time.

Despite my dislike for it, nuclear power would be the go-to source for energy in an event like this. It would provide what we need. Plus, we have tons of nukes just lying around. We could always use them for reactors if need be.

We just need to send Stanley Tucci down into the core. That'll sort it out.

You do know the core is solid, right?

Teach me more, Mr. Nye.

Tech doesn't just include electrical items. A metal knife is a far better option than a stone tool. And that's not including our advances in knowledge. I'm pretty sure scouts today who has to learn how to survive in the wild does it better than our ancestors, who knowledge about plants and animals are restricted to what their fathers and mothers told them (while we have books that recorded decades if not centuries of knowledge. And on top, we have scientific method and logic so that we can find things out easier by experiment without resorting to pure trial and error). People have known to survive in the wild for years without high tech. Also, you've forgotten that with education, people can now learn new things better and easier.

Uh, no I haven't. Learning new things is always education. One, you are assuming that all people are extremely adaptable, which isn't the case. You're also assuming that everyone has access to the knives, or even knows how to use them. You're assuming that everyone can learn to hunt before the starve to death, or learn to farm in the first go. You're assuming that everyone knows everything about plants and animals, apparently, even though a website designer would have no reason to study that in any particular depth. You're assuming that everyone has a scout's level of survival skills right away, which most of us don't.

We will get knocked back to pre-industrial standards. We will lose most of our transportation and communication abilities. And the vast majority of us won't have the skills necessary to survive in such a setting. And at least half the survivors will die because they can't learn quickly enough.

We'd be better off in the immediate short-term, but most of our technology is interlocking and requires many other things to work properly.

In essence, when it comes to this kind of situation, our own advancement would be our undoing, as it's like a deck of cards and it has bred complacency and ineptitude in society as survival has ceased to be a day-to-day task.

I don't think it would make a difference either way, Flyboy.

A more apt reasoning would be to say that overpopulation would migration difficult, canceling out a lot of our contingency plans.

We wouldn't fall back completely. We have people with the needed survival skills, and they will teach others. Many know the basics of how metal working goes, and could figure it out.

It's kind of like, say, nuclear power. Tell a guy from the 1930s to explain it, they have no freakin clue with a few exceptions. Most people have some knowlegde of it today, and could work from there.

Ditto for needed skills post-volcano.

Yup. I'm imagining a lot of death after a few months. after that it'd petter off until we get down to a core of survivalists, well stocked up "crazies" going "Whos laughing now?!" from their fully stocked bunkers, and a few lucky people who managed to scrap together something to live off of.

edited 15th Feb '12 8:48:16 PM by Joesolo

This is true.

As for re-learning survival skills, perhaps. But I'd be damn surprised if the post-eruption world had more than 10% of the pre-eruption population in it.

Scientists are up in arms about global warming because it is fashionable to be so. Those scientists whose opinions do not concur with the thundering herd do not get to appear on talk shows or in the columns of increasingly hysterical newspapers and blogging sites. Even if their evidence is as good or better.

And, news flash, it has always been thus. Scientists have been literally killing each other in the past in arguments over who is right or wrong on relatively trivial issues.

The consequences of a complete emptying of the magma chamber under Yellowstone and the possible sympathetic detonation of volcanoes from every other surrounding geologically active region because of the pressure release (what happens when you empty a balloon? It collapses. Same thing would happen when the magma chamber empties and the ripple effects would be felt for an extremely large area. Look at the size of the Yellowstone caldera today and tell me I am lying) make the possible effects of global warming pale into complete insignificance, and the geologists and vulcanologists know this.

That Icelandic volcano that went boom recently, causing air transport delays across most of Europe and whose name I am not going to try to spell at this time in the morning was feared by a lot of on-site and off-site vulcanologists to cause a chain of sympathetic eruptions of every nearby volcano and they were predicting really bad consequences if they did. Yellowstone dwarfs these. That it didn't happen doesn't invalidate the fact that the likelihood of it happening was high. Sometimes you dodge a bullet.

Worlds like Extinction and Level and Event are not ones they want to throw around because they know the panic it would cause if they did.

You would scientists arguing over a catastrophe that's certain to happen instead of something debateable?

Scientists always argue. It is part of what makes them scientists. They do not like the answers life gives them and they go off to find their own. Sometimes they do and we get the discoveries like how the human circulatory system works (which would have been done a helluva lot quicker if western medical science wasn't still stuck with Aristotlean and Galean preconceptions of what made the human body work, for hundreds upon hundreds of years and at the cost of countless lives), sometimes they don't and we get the debacle of cold fusion. (which would have been cool, if you pardon the pun, if it had ever worked in other laboratory experiments)

Scientists are human. So far anyway. There are no cybernetic organisms running around the Royal Society. Yet.

Do you have a point to make?