Summary: super volcanoes can go from dormant to erupting in a human lifetime; previous estimates were it took much longer.
Outlook not so good.
There are already engineering plans to relieve the eruption. NASA has commented that a Super Volcano are a bigger threat than asteroids.
> But if more of the heat could be extracted, then the supervolcano would never erupt. Nasa estimates that if a 35% increase in heat transfer could be achieved from its magma chamber, Yellowstone would no longer pose a threat. The only question is how?
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-pla...
http://maps.unomaha.edu/peterson/geog1000/maplinks/namerica/...
Of course, then one has to wonder if that sort of interference in major geological processes will have some other bad side-effects in the future.
Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of a trip there. I don't remember much else about the trip but can still picture the amazing kaleidoscope of color and recall the smell of sulfur.
Endless free energy?
I guess you could transfer enough energy out from the borders of the chamber without affecting the rest of the place too much.
If a volcanic (or nuclear) winter occurs due to a massive eruption, the most straightforward technological solution to food production is to use methanotrophs to convert natural gas efficiently into food calories.
This is already done for animal feed by a company called Calysta, and in an emergency can be used for direct human consumption as well:
In cooperation with Cargill, Calysta is building a 200,000 tons per year methane-to-feed facility in the US. To feed 300 million people in an emergency, it'd take at least 300 of those facilities.
I believe the energy efficiency of methane (and ammonia) to food calories is approximately 50%. I will use a more conservative 30% efficiency to account for processing.
Human metabolism is ~100 Watts (2000kcal/day = 98W). US produces about 25 trillion cubic feet of gas per year (as of 2012), or about 850GW_thermal of gas. At 30% efficiency, that's equivalent to an ability to feed 2.5 billion people a 2000kcal/day diet. Global production works to 12 billion people at 2000kcal/day. We can do more by increasing natural gas production or using coal-to-gas technology (China would likely do that, in which case it could provide for its own population just fine) or harnessing methane clathrates, use nuclear power to produce methane and ammonia, etc.
People would likely have to live in better insulated and smaller (perhaps shared) houses due to colder weather, but using methanotrophic bacteria for fermentation-based food production would solve the food production problem, especially in a rich country like the United States that already has a lot of natural gas production.
So if we had a 10 year warning, the US could definitely prepare food production capable of working in deep volcanic winter. (The US is the greatest producer of natural gas with about 21% of global gas production, followed by Russia at 18%... the next highest is Iran at just 5%.)
Soylent Green is...Dinosaur Farts!!!
People with in the blast radius will be escaping to somewhere.
You'd want breathing masks, just like is already used in places that see regular eruptions. And crop failure in the Midwest is the major concern. Methanotrophs solve that.
The US has plenty of room.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/20714-yellowstone-supervolcano-e...
~1/100,000 years seems slow, but that's ~650 of them post dinosaurs.
Which is how many people Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos would have to get to Mars or the Moon to create a genetically stable population.
We also have slow reproductive rates which make it harder to weed out genetic issues. Wild mice on the other hand can have stable populations from a very small number of random individuals.
But, again this just comes back to extinction, and super volcanoes don't kill off most species. Even though it may be a really bad time for the survivors.
Can I ask, what is the intended communicative payload of the scare-quotes around 'mass'?
Put another way, when 99.9% of species survive it's not a mass extinction. Remember, even if 99% of individual organisms die that's not necessarily fatal at the species level.
PS: The big 5 killed of ~70-98% of all species and even large ~17-57% of all families of species. That's hard to picture, but think not just all domestic cats, but also all tigers, lions, Jaguar, Leopard, Ocelot, lynx, Bobcat, Cheetah, Leopard, etc aka anything cat like as just one family.
Globally, the problem is volcanic winter - ash in the upper atmosphere blocking out light and causing major cooling. The estimates I've seen suggest ~2 years of nonstop winter, followed by a gradual recovery.
But regionally, the problem is settling ash, which travels much further than larger debris. That blankets plants and kills them, as well as causing lung damage and suffocation sufficient to kill or sicken most animals in the area.
It's one of the reasons Yellowstone is particularly threatening - we can expect that the volcanic winter would start with the death of crops and livestock in one of the highest-export farming regions on the planet.
First: the last major Yellowstone eruption involved 240 cubic miles of debris. Even if that's only 1% ash, that's a basically prohibitive amount of volume to remove from the upper atmosphere.
Second: ash distribution is rapid and extensive. There's not enough ash in any one place to make cleanup runs effective overall, and distribution is too fast to clean a region persistently.
Third: volcanic ash is some of the nastiest, most machinery-hostile stuff nature produces. I would expect it to jam and corrode basically any moving πarts we can build, while also blocking out enough light to prohibit any kind of sustained solar flight.
Frankly, I don't think there is a good answer at the moment; the sheer volume of the stuff is beyond any sort of geoengineering we've seriously considered.
I've got this bazooka bubblegum
This sounds very much like the beginning pages of seveneves[1] by Neal Stephenson.
It's a novel about what happens to people when an unexpected deadline is imposed upon them. Highly recommended.