Storm Area 51: The joke that became a ‘possible humanitarian disaster’
bbc.com
bbc.com
If a lot of people go, they will run into difficulty long before they get to the fence with threatening signs. There isn't remotely the infrastructure to support people on a large scale. The roads don't exist, the hotels don't exist, the food and water and gasoline sources don't exist... If a million people decided to go, that doesn't mean they will get there because they can't teleport. And they won't all fail at once in the same spot.
I'm from NY, but I've been to Rachel. No gasoline and total hotel capacity of maybe 15 rooms? I remember seeing a defunct gas station that looked like it had closed in the 1960s.
This hasn't stopped the Burning Man crowd in BRC
so just like Burningman?
> and folks possibly shooting at you
Or Burningman back before '99 when people were still allowed to take firearms? (Anyone else remember the Drive By Shooting Range? Drums of avgas, stuffed toys, tracer rounds, and tequila, all from the back of a moving pickup - what could possibly go wrong?)
Oh my god that sounds hilarious. Also hilariously dangerous and irresponsible, but still hilarious...
The carrying capacity for excess population around Area 51 is all but non-existent, and far smaller than in the region around Black Rock.
At burning man, people buy tickets months ahead of time, whose supply is limited, so the number of people in attendance is known. Road markings are put up on the playa to manage the huge volume of traffic entering the city (waiting in the gate line in your vehicle can take multiple hours, sometimes the better part of a day– remember, this is with good organization). Space on the playa for each camp is planned and allotted, and someone shows you to your space. Water trucks continuously spray the streets to keep the dust down.
Burners know what they are responsible for. There is basically not a single piece of litter in the city, because there is a strong and highly unified culture of not-littering and being responsible for your own garbage. Similarly, burners are fully self-reliant for water because there is unified understanding that there is little safety net if you screw up and don't bring enough.
This is a big one: At burning man, thousands of porta-potties are put up and routinely cleaned and pumped multiple times a day. The number of needed toilets is known because of ticket sales, and the ticket sales also pay for the toilets and their servicing.
None of this is true of the coming event, however big or small it is. Experience at burning man makes me more worried about how bad this could be without planning, organization, and a unified culture that strongly emphasizes self-reliance and respect.
Only one person needs to get the teleportation device, though!
That is precisely where the potential humanitarian disaster comes from. If large numbers of people show up without the infrastructure to support them, things could go very wrong.
* 20,000 people show up
* 2,000 of those try to get though the gates/fence
* Half of those are in vehicles, some offroad
* Some people are armed
* Shots are fired as vehicles refuse to stop
* Dozens end up dead, many more injured, hundreds arrestedAww man, wrong site.
This is literally what the article (which you read, right?) is about...
we took a rest day and went into the nearest medium sized town. i was chatting with the cashier at a diner... she said some out of towners bought out the entire town's supply of rat poison. the poison-stockpilers were asked by another casher what they were going to do with the rat poison, they replied that they were prepping for the area 51 event.
I very clearly understood that the casher wasn't just telling us a story, she was warning us of something she herself was deeply uncomfortable.
This is some sort of recursion.
At least in this situation, they should be able to turn around and drive home. That is, if the last gas stations to that location don't run out. FEMA should already have tankers ready to head out there. More than food; having fuel to make it back to populated areas is probably more important.
'FEMA is not a first responder'.
According BBC, any open air party first session was ‘possible humanitarian disaster’.
None of more than 30 sessions of Burning Man[0] (since 1986) resulted as ‘humanitarian disaster’.
There are highways and roads, the desert itself is perfectly drivable with 4WD vehicles, you can land helicopters, planes, there are cities nearby, people have mobile phones to call for assistance easily, they would be altogether anyway, etc...
If I were in a position of authority around there I would be far more concerned about the potential consequences than if there was a free drugs and sex open rave happening there.
Most were tiny and not at all well known in their first season. Larger ones are generally put together by teams of people who know what they are doing.
This is going to end up more like your typical Internet meetup, just bigger. Lots of people will roadtrip out there, it'll fizzle out or at least be mildly entertaining, then drive home. Only problem I foresee really is traffic, but that's just boredom, not a humanitarian disaster.
Events as large as this are predicted to be, are not solved by everybody bringing a water bottle from KumNGo.
I mean seriously, if you're going to do something stupid that day, why not play a video game?
So the reports that said there was no preparation at all are false, as are the predictions that no one would show up. Whether there will be a large crowd and whether they are prepared to handle that is a different matter.
If anything the urban legends about UFOs and little green men add another layer of obfuscation regarding the projects actually being developed there.
Edit: some one pointed out this was a bad analogy because there was violence. I was not referring to the one in Charlottesville, VA; but the one the next year in Washington, D.C. as about twenty-four people showed [0]. I should have been clearer.
[0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gy3kb9/unite-the-right-ra...
If someone is shot by a US soldier trying to enter Area 51, it will also be serious, even if attendance was low.
Because the alien space ship sighting was reported exactly when they did the first radar test (14th Sept 1959) with the shiny silver prototype of it far out in the desert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12
Lockheed engineers on the project were the best ones, I guess. I mean, 60 years later people still believe it was an alien space ship. That's gotta count for something.
Where's the editorial discretion of these news outlets? BBC calling it a "possible" disaster isn't helpful and doesn't absolve them of their sins.
News flash, foreign governments would love access to a number of US military facilities. Trespassers won't be dealt with like Portland deals with ANTIFA.
Humor is subjective; a lot of people are laughing.
https://themindunleashed.com/2019/09/people-getting-arrested...
They are Youtubers with 700,000 and 300,000 subscribers, respectively. They did this for the views obivously, but being only 20 and 21 years old and naive about how seriously trespassing on US military property is treated by the local sheriff's department they probably misjudged the consequences of their actions.
Their timing was on purpose. The buzz generated by the event meant that their videos would have lifted along on the popularity of the topic. But these are kids who are used to nothing more than an occasional stern telling off by cops in Europe.
I think they are being tried this Monday. They were released on bail, so chances are they will get away with just a fine and probably a travel ban to the US, but that seems to depend on whether the judge wants to set an example for the coming weekend or not. As some people knowledgable about the US judicial system noted: they had better get a damn good local lawyer.
I can assure you that trespassing on a military base in Europe does not result in just a stern warning.
This all contrasts sharply with my experiences visiting American military bases, where the impression of security/paranoia is in my experience quite high, even though I was visiting somebody who lived there and he'd told them to expect me.