Hacker News Reader

Comment by takk309 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds a lot like destroy the ecosystem for short-term gains to me. The geothermal features were exploited early on in the history of Yellowstone and that exploitation resulted in impacts to the geyser basins that can still be seen today. Why we as humans seem to think that life can't possibly continue without us has always boggled my mind.

Edit: Here is some backup to my claim about messing with the geysers: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yellowstone-geysers-tr...

2nd Edit: Here is an article about tapping into the geothermal waters around Yellowstone. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/17/us/feud-over-geothermal-wa...

View on HN

Terrestrial life can't possibly continue without us is the only logical conclusion I can come to, knowing what we know.

A super-volcano won't end life on Earth, but unless some other life-form evolves which can carry life to another planet, we are the only guarantee that life can continue beyond whatever timeline the solar/galactic system has in store for us... which we know definitely means our star exterminates all life on this planet at some point in the future.

Honestly, I don't see we can see ourselves as anything but Life's only hope of continuing.

Sure, we're doing a shitty job right now, we should do better, but honestly, if we fuck up, life will find a way too... that super-volcano is going to erupt and destroy way more species and ecosystem than a couple holes and geothermal plants will. If we can help delay/prevent that, I think it'll be a step toward making up for at least some of the damage we've done.

I have to agree with you on the point that life will find a way regardless of our meddling or not. However, I feel like the Yellowstone super volcano bogeyman is not worth the effort. It is like worrying about an asteroid hitting the planet, there is nothing we can do about it so why worry?

The volcano erupts every 600,000 years or so. It has been 600,000 years or so since the last eruption. I don't think there's any evidence that it will happen in our lifetime, but it is due to happen soon on the geological timescale

I live near a few volcanoes on the Pacific rim and I have visited a few more. I’m yet to visit any that aren’t classed as overdue for an eruption. The continual stating of ‘disaster is around the corner’ immunises rather than galvanises most people.

Every 600,000 years on average. Might be 300,000 years and then 900,000 years. We are talking about big and unpredictable timescales, after all.

Good point, it's potentially extremely overdue, making it a greater cause for worry.

there is nothing we can do about it so why worry?

Well, we could run a geothermal plant to cool it down and prevent eruption...

I don't think that it would. How much energy would we have to extract to make sure it is not a threat? The article states that 6GW of heat is already leaking from Yellowstone. How much impact can we really have pulling another 6GW? The article may be to brief and I need to do more research into the topic but is there some amount of energy that must be extracted to put the chance of an explosion into an acceptable range?

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?

From the original BBC article:

> Yellowstone currently leaks about 60-70% of the heat coming up from below into the atmosphere, via water which seeps into the magma chamber through cracks. The remainder builds up inside the magma, enabling it to dissolve more and more volatile gases and surrounding rocks. Once this heat reaches a certain threshold, then an explosive eruption is inevitable.

> 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?

So, two or three GW of heat loss should be sufficient to keep the magma chamber from heating any further if NASA's estimates are accurate.

As the other replies to this comment state, these things were very clearly stated in the article itself. On what basis do you disagree with the assessments there? What value is there in stating your disagreement without addressing the contradiction with the article, or presenting any evidence?

I would say that we can do something about it... we can hedge our bets and we can be smarter about how we direct our efforts in the time we have.

I have recently started to evangelize panbioticism and project which seek to seed the solar system/galaxy with terrestrial life.

Even if humans can't become self-sustaining outside of Earth before we get wiped out by something, I believe that we can give our genetic family a chance by sending out clusters of small probes of primitive AI and primitive organisms which can maybe evolve elsewhere. Also by storing a vault of our knowledge and storage for embryos for ourselves and as many diverse species as possible. We could build that and land it on a moon outside of the radius of an expanded sun with a beacon to help it be found.

Any of these things is absolutely feasible and would give life a better shot in the future. Here is Dr. Michael Mautners website for the Society for Life in Space (SOLIS)

http://www.panspermia-society.com/

I like that idea, seed the universe.

We may not be able to save humanity, but we will give life a fighting chance.

I'm already with you. I think the initial effort lies with exploiting extremophile bacteria and encysting or spore-forming organisms, though. Not to say that a K-strategy solution won't work eventually, but right now, r-strategy seems best. Get as many Earth-origin organisms to as many different celestial bodies as possible, and hope that 0.0001% of them land in a good spot.

> It is like worrying about an asteroid hitting the planet, there is nothing we can do about it so why worry?

It is very much like an asteroid in that there are lots of things we can do.

Excerpt from the article:

“When people first considered the idea of defending the Earth from an asteroid impact, they reacted in a similar way to the supervolcano threat,” Wilcox says. “People thought, ‘As puny as we are, how can humans possibly prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth.’ Well, it turns out if you engineer something which pushes very slightly for a very long time, you can make the asteroid miss the Earth. So the problem turns out to be easier than people think. In both cases it requires the scientific community to invest brain power and you have to start early. But Yellowstone explodes roughly every 600,000 years, and it is about 600,000 years since it last exploded, which should cause us to sit up and take notice.”

The linked article doesn't say anything about messing with the geysers. As far as I can see, it's talking about drilling separate shafts down into the Earth and harvesting heat energy via pumped water.

> Why we as humans seem to think that life can't possibly continue without us has always boggled my mind.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with this comment. Care to clarify? If you're suggesting that any attempts to prevent an eruption would be too disruptive to the ecosystem, imagine how disruptive 8 ft. of volcanic ash would be if it were to blanket most of the western United States. That's not even mentioning the millions of tons that would end up in the atmosphere for years, blocking out the sun, and killing off a substantial amount of plant and animal life world wide.

Life will go on if the volcano erupts. It may not be human life, but it will still be life. The Yellowstone volcano is just another bogeyman that is not worth stressing over. It will happen or it won't and realistically there is nothing we can do about it.

What I don't understand.. the continuation of non-human life is an asterisk that is of no importance to us, right?

I happen to prefer that our species not go extinct. We spend a lot of effort on much less important things, we can afford to spend some here.

We spend a lot of effort on much less important things <-- someone (not me, but someone) might argue that's exactly why our species should go extinct ;-)

Following that logic, every single species on Earth should go extinct. As bad as we are, we are still the best. Simply because we have the most advanced brain.

So it turns out there is something we can do about it, and someone wrote an article about that. It's pretty cool, you should read it.

There is a lot less ecosystem destruction than not doing it.

First, you need to consider that, in the long run, that thing is going to explode and will certainly destroy a lot of ecosystems around the world.

Second, the only ecosystem that depends on the heat are the archea on the geysers and hot vents. But the heat loss along years would be so small that their ecosystem can endure for a lot more centuries.

Third, it is very hard to find a way to generate so much energy without increasing carbon footprint and generating even more ecosystems destruction.

On what terms? Sure many trees, plants, animals, and humans will die in a super volcano eruption. But the resulting ash will help enrich the soil for a decent fraction of the entire country. There will be a huge carbon sink as entire forests are buried in ash, soil will receive additional minerals, and a light loamy soil will result. California for instance has excellent soil (class A good enough for even more challenging crops like strawberries) because of a large previous eruption.

So sure in the short term (years) no eruption is good. But in the long term there will be poorer soil, or a huge amount of energy/chemicals consumed to keep the soil usable.

It's far from clear that it's better for the ecosystem to stop a volcano (or supervolcano). What's next stopping earthquakes? Keep plates from moving? Stopping erosion? Preventing rivers from migrating?

Mucking with nature to prevent the natural cycle of life has gone pretty poorly so far. Floods are getting worse, rivers are moving faster, coastal cities are losing their marshes, cities on rivers are at a higher risk than ever of flooding.

Check out the updates on Mt Saint Helens area in the post eruption documentary. It's quite vibrant and recovered much faster than scientist expected.

There are 2 big flaws in your argumentation:

1) Tell humans their suffering doesn't matter.

2) A super-volcano eruption is several orders of magnitude worse than St. Helens, a scale that human history has not seen yet. It would affect the whole planet and wreck ecosystems in the whole planet, far beyond North America. We're talking about likely end of civilization. You don't have logic against that.

The ejecta volume from Yellowstone supervolcano erupting would be three orders of magnitude greater than Mount St. Helens (~1,000km^3 compared to ~1k^3). The force of its first and largest eruption was about ~2,000 times greater as well. They're not comparable in any sense of the word. Recovery for much of the US's ecosystem would be measured in centuries, or more likely, millennia.

As for the comparison to climate change, it's flawed on its face. Climate change wasn't exactly planned. There's a difference between that sort of change and a focused, targeted effort to change a particular element of nature (in this case, cooling a supervolcano) and an unintentional consequence of industrialization.

In any case, any effort to roll back the effects of climate change is going to involve some form of climate engineering. That could include anything from artificial carbon sequestration to a massive solar dust shade at L1 blocking a small fraction of solar radiation to give us the time needed to implement those sequestration systems. Or any number of other proposals. Should we just accept higher temperatures instead, even if we manage to slow or even halt the progression? We muck with nature all the time, and we're going to have to continue to do so in order to protect it.

Do you understand that tens of millions of people will probably starve to death in the volcanic winter following a Yellowstone eruption?

That is possibly even a rather low estimate. The sheer amount of ejecta and ash will quite literally blanket the Earth.

It would make for a good story premise for a movie/TV show/video game, but not so much fun to actually live through.

Soil world wide is decreasing in quality. Wasteful farming practices, slash and burn farming, erosion, monoculture farming, heavy pesticide use, making pesticide resistant crops so you can use more pesticide, etc.

Seems far from sure that a world wide cloud of ash might well do more benefit (better soil, cooler temperatures, helping dead zones in the ocean) than harm.... assuming we plan for it.

The answer to starvation is is to store food now. Seems kinda silly to have huge strategic oil reserves, and not food reserves.

After all there are many potential causes of food shortages and the risks are getting worse with each year because of additional pollution, global warming, and increased population.

I don't want anyone to die, but does seem short sighted to depend on soil enriched by previous eruptions, then to prevent future ones.

> The answer to starvation is is to store food now.

Or, maybe, we could prevent it all from happening in the first place.

I don't understand why you're so stuck on not preventing mass death. Did you not think this through before commenting and now your ego won't let you back down? Or are you just trolling?

Why we as humans seem to think that life can't possibly continue without us

It's obviously not about protecting nature from herself, it would be about protecting us from nature.

Why? We are only a little blip on the time scales that nature works in. Why are we so arrogant as to think that we are the only life in the universe? It is very likely that we are not and even if we are, there is always a chance that life will arise again.

Because like all life, we have a survival instinct?

I am a nihilist and don't really think that this will affect my life. I suppose that is most of my reasoning in not worrying about things like this. Edit: Messing with it now will affect my life due to the proximity in which I live to Yellowstone. If the park gets messed up and tourism declines, my local economy will take a huge hit. That is something that can happen in my lifetime.

If you're a nihilist, then why do you care enough to even comment here on this matter?

You live near the park, then? If you don't think getting buried under 10 feet of molten ash will affect your life, I really don't know what else to say to you.

>Why

Never thought of it that way.

Shedding all survival instinct nao /s

This is basically a genocidal comment and totally shocking to me. As far as I’m concerned speech like this is advocating for the destruction of humanity and is evil. It boggles my mind someone would hate humanity so much they wouldn’t want to do everything in our power to preserve it.

> It boggles my mind someone would hate humanity so much they wouldn’t want to do everything in our power to preserve it.

Not arguing in favor of OC; but it's not that they hate humanity so much they wouldn’t want to do everything in our power to preserve it; but instead, they don't love humanity enough to do everything in our power to preserve it. There is a difference.

We might not be able to have it both ways. The geysers and other unique features of Yellowstone are epiphenomena of the supervolcano they overlie. It may be that a method exists by which we can both preserve those epiphenomena, and prevent catastrophic damage to ecologies across the continent or even the world. But if we can only do one of those, then I know which one I'd choose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com