Supervolcano!
The recent series of tremors at Yellowstone have raised a lot of fun talk. For anyone who doesn't know, the quakes that have hit don't indicate to vulcanologists any trend towards a gigantic humanity-annihilating eruption. For one thing, they've all been too localized in the Yellowstone Lake region. For another, they've been too small. Also, they're not witnessing and bulging of the earth in the region. If anything, the scientists who know it best expect the Yellowstone caldera to erupt into relatively peaceful lava flows.
My parents bought a time-share in Montana when I was about 12, so I've visited Yellowstone three times in memory, possibly more. It's been neat to watch it recover from the wildfires. I think it would be incredibly cool to see lava flows there. It's been determined that a large pocket of magma is hovering under the Yellowstone Lake area and I have to imagine that even if it doesn't reach the surface there must be some point it could ascend to that would start generating some more spectacular geothermal activity in that area. So I guess I hope some minor volcanic event or another happens in my lifetime.
I do not hope for a violent eruption of the supervolcano, nor do I expect it. But this is just one of many disaster scenarios that are plausible, if not remotely likely to happen in our lifetime. I always think about zombie outbreaks when looking for places to live (how zombie-ready is this apartment?), not because I think zombies are remotely possible, but I think angry mobs and roving gangs definitely are, even if they're extremely unlikely. I think disaster planning has its merits, even in a disaster-free life.
I think humans are far more acutely aware of resource shortages than they recognize, and that awareness most commonly manifests in a preoccupation with disaster. None of us has any clear idea of what oil or food or property markets will do in the next ten years, not precisely enough to make solid predictions anyway, but I think we all know these things are more at risk of running out than they have been for a long time, at least in these parts, and I think that sense of potential scarcity makes the idea of true disaster more compelling. I also think that as the sense of resource scarcity increases, so does the propensity of people to think and act tribally, to favor violence, and ultimately to panic. We really haven't gotten to that point yet.
So anyway, I was thinking about disaster preparedness this morning. It's hard to be ready for every scenario, and I don't want to sacrifice the quality of my normal life for the sake of the 1 in 10,000 chance that I'll need to be ready for a catastrophe. So there's no point to moving out to the country and building a compound. But I think regardless of the nature of the disaster, the major concerns will be food and water, then protection and shelter, and then establishing some kind of sustainable hold on those things. In the worst case scenario of broad societal failure, not being able to count on heat and running water is a big concern. Anyone can stockpile food, but how do you cook it? Having a wood-burning fireplace goes a long way to making a home apocalypse-ready. A well is even better, but unfortunately wells are very hard to find in the city.
Certainly the easiest thing to do is stockpile food. A brief search of the internet found a few accounts of establishing a several-month reserve of food you'll eat anyway, which I think is the way to go. There are other more efficient packages of crisis-ready food, but mostly they're made of powders and flavorings and aren't something you'll use unless you're forced to.
I think there's a big advantage to a store of food in a crisis. When food becomes a problem, the stores will be chaos and the very next thing people will start caring about is guns. Because guns get you food from people who don't have guns. As someone who doesn't want to have a gun in my house, having a stockpile of food means as soon as disaster strikes I can go to the gun store before it becomes a clusterfuck, pay three-times a reasonable value for a shotgun while money is still percieved to have value and be set to hide from the food riots and ward off scavengers. Then the more difficult task of finding a better long-term living place is, well, something I just can't prepare for in any meaningful way, I think. But whatever.
I think it would be fun to make an Oregon-Trail-style game about surviving an asteroid impact or the Yellowstone supervolcano eruption.
In a mostly unrelated note, I've started developing kinfe-sharpening skills.
My parents bought a time-share in Montana when I was about 12, so I've visited Yellowstone three times in memory, possibly more. It's been neat to watch it recover from the wildfires. I think it would be incredibly cool to see lava flows there. It's been determined that a large pocket of magma is hovering under the Yellowstone Lake area and I have to imagine that even if it doesn't reach the surface there must be some point it could ascend to that would start generating some more spectacular geothermal activity in that area. So I guess I hope some minor volcanic event or another happens in my lifetime.
I do not hope for a violent eruption of the supervolcano, nor do I expect it. But this is just one of many disaster scenarios that are plausible, if not remotely likely to happen in our lifetime. I always think about zombie outbreaks when looking for places to live (how zombie-ready is this apartment?), not because I think zombies are remotely possible, but I think angry mobs and roving gangs definitely are, even if they're extremely unlikely. I think disaster planning has its merits, even in a disaster-free life.
I think humans are far more acutely aware of resource shortages than they recognize, and that awareness most commonly manifests in a preoccupation with disaster. None of us has any clear idea of what oil or food or property markets will do in the next ten years, not precisely enough to make solid predictions anyway, but I think we all know these things are more at risk of running out than they have been for a long time, at least in these parts, and I think that sense of potential scarcity makes the idea of true disaster more compelling. I also think that as the sense of resource scarcity increases, so does the propensity of people to think and act tribally, to favor violence, and ultimately to panic. We really haven't gotten to that point yet.
So anyway, I was thinking about disaster preparedness this morning. It's hard to be ready for every scenario, and I don't want to sacrifice the quality of my normal life for the sake of the 1 in 10,000 chance that I'll need to be ready for a catastrophe. So there's no point to moving out to the country and building a compound. But I think regardless of the nature of the disaster, the major concerns will be food and water, then protection and shelter, and then establishing some kind of sustainable hold on those things. In the worst case scenario of broad societal failure, not being able to count on heat and running water is a big concern. Anyone can stockpile food, but how do you cook it? Having a wood-burning fireplace goes a long way to making a home apocalypse-ready. A well is even better, but unfortunately wells are very hard to find in the city.
Certainly the easiest thing to do is stockpile food. A brief search of the internet found a few accounts of establishing a several-month reserve of food you'll eat anyway, which I think is the way to go. There are other more efficient packages of crisis-ready food, but mostly they're made of powders and flavorings and aren't something you'll use unless you're forced to.
I think there's a big advantage to a store of food in a crisis. When food becomes a problem, the stores will be chaos and the very next thing people will start caring about is guns. Because guns get you food from people who don't have guns. As someone who doesn't want to have a gun in my house, having a stockpile of food means as soon as disaster strikes I can go to the gun store before it becomes a clusterfuck, pay three-times a reasonable value for a shotgun while money is still percieved to have value and be set to hide from the food riots and ward off scavengers. Then the more difficult task of finding a better long-term living place is, well, something I just can't prepare for in any meaningful way, I think. But whatever.
I think it would be fun to make an Oregon-Trail-style game about surviving an asteroid impact or the Yellowstone supervolcano eruption.
In a mostly unrelated note, I've started developing kinfe-sharpening skills.