Did you miss the bit where I mentioned the making of documentary where they wheeled out the real life USGS scientist that the Hero Vulcanologist was based on, and the FEMA guy who didn't seem as half as idiotic as his female equivalent in the film, and the research materials shown throughout by them and other scientists, including the one Brit vulcanologist who isn't the one who is on the telly on BBC 4 almost every month doing programmes on rocks and plants and stuff, but just gets on with studying the effects of mega eruptions? They set the drama doc in the future, and used some fancy holographic effects in the show to depict what the magma chamber looked like and what would happen if we were lucky and it did not empty, but the making of documentary was in the present (when the film was made back in 2005, anyway) and they did as I said give a good job of inspiring hope and trying to reassure us that we weren't all going to die in the inevitable eruption.
I am sorry if I didn't make it clear that the film wasn't complete fiction. It was just dramatised and in my view sanitized a bit too much, yet the underlying scientific basis for the film was as accurate as they dared show on television.
Problem I have with documentaries like that is that the drama before has already swayed the viewer to a certain point of view emotionally, which makes it even more persuasive when there are (relatively) short interviews with scientists at the end, so it becomes a lot harder to see whether that view is right critically, especially when the view is already shocked by the events in the drama, and so will not be able to see if there are any problems when the real scientists come up and (appears to) confirm that the events are based on fact, even when the scientists are actually confirming some parts of it are factual it will still appear that they are confirming everything within the drama.
Edit: I re-read your post. The fact that they only showed the "real life" behind the "documentary" makes it even more suspicious, since most "making of"s that I know of already have a hidden agenda at the beginning: to show that whatever the "making of" is is good. In the case of a making of a documentary, what makes a good documentary is its scientific authenticity and the making of will be clipping, cutting, editing the interviews in order to make that so. This is why I don't trust tv popular documentaries in scientific research, because there's no one there to review if what they are showing is unbiased.
edited 14th Feb '12 6:44:50 PM by IraTheSquire
Yup, I agree with you. Like I said, I didn't buy all the stuff they were saying in the drama doc or on the surface of the making of doc. The stuff they didn't say was what scared the carp out of me enough to go wiki walking. And footnoting and so on.
However, here's the imdb page for the Making of Documentary. A pretty substantial two-parter one at that.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0770200/
Just look at the amount of high end geologists appearing in it. It must have cost a fortune to get them involved in teh first place.
and here is the imdb page for the actual "Yellowstone goes boom everyone dies" two part film.
Yeah, I did do a bit wiki walking myself, which is why I agree with most of your points. There's going to be a "nuclear" winter. It's going to be bad enough to change everything about the world. However, what I'm not quite sold on is that the effects are going to be just as detrimental to everywhere around the world and there's going to be enough ash to land on every single inch of land in the world for it to destroy every single tech we have in the entire world, or that we are not better equipped than our ancestors to survive it (forget about electrical equipment at the moment, just the fact that we have books and better knowledge of hunting etc already gives us an advantage over our ancestors).
I have never been hunting. I don't know many folks near me who have. I do not want to demean your point in any way, I am just saying that if by some miracle or really bad luck the eruption happens when I am still relatively young and Britain doesn't get immediately scrubbed from the face of the earth, I will have to learn pretty damned quickly how to be a successful hunter if I am to survive. I am a cracking scavenger though, always have been.
To survive long term, however, all of us throughout the planet will have to become S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s and no, I am not trying to be funny. If you break down the acronym, all those skills will be needed. Even if there are no Burers and stuff to kill us, there will be bandits and folks like them.
This reminds me of watching Life After People and how depressing they make it to show that nearly all of our accomplishments would be eroded away.
Anyway, wouldn't the volcanic ash eventually fertilize the soil in the midwest like Vesuvius did to the region around Pompeii.
I think that humanity could also survive around the east coast, except that life would suck. There is irony in the fact that in getting all this tech we have basically screwed ourselves in living without it in the nonsterile environment.
Also known as Achillesforever6 of Lordkat.com fameThe soil would be fertilized like Pompeii, yes... Eventually.
It could be as short as 100 years to as long as 1000 before such a thing would occur, though. It would, primarily, depend on whether or not Yellowstone just erupted the once, and then sat silent "forever" again, or if it took a while for the caldera to "calm down"...
The probability of a Yellowstone eruption, if you look on a long enough timeline, rises to a certainty. And there has already been one best selling book dealing with some terrorist group or other stealing a nuclear tipped cruise missile firing capable SSN and plotting to fire one of those nuclear tipped cruise missiles at Yellowstone, Ira. Not going to name the group because I don't feel like giving the idiots they are based on in real life any ideas.
What was shocking is that it could work. Doesn't matter how you blow the lid off of the magma chamber, what matters is what happens when you do.
I live in Jersey, I don't think volcanic ash would make it much worse.
edited 15th Feb '12 3:17:02 PM by Joesolo
I'm baaaaaaack

...
So basically you think that a "documentary" that is basically a dramatisation of what might happen without giving any interviews with serious scientists or showing any evidence to prove or disprove their thesis is scientific and is to be taken seriously. Right.
I have nothing more to say.
edited 14th Feb '12 6:26:35 PM by IraTheSquire