How prepared are we for any large scale natural event?
Not prepared at all.
It's costs money to be prepared for things that might not ever happen. No CEO ever got fired for choosing profits, no CEO ever will get fired for choosing profits.
Not prepared at all.
It's costs money to be prepared for things that might not ever happen. No CEO ever got fired for choosing profits, no CEO ever will get fired for choosing profits.
Probably similar to people living in a cave and refusing to leave it out of fear.
Rebuilding after disasters is a tried and true method.
There are many possible disasters. Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact. We don't have enough time and resources to prepare for all possible disasters. So we put more effort into preparing for the most likely ones, and sometimes one of the less likely ones gets us. Note that there are more "less likely" scenarios than there are "more likely" ones.
Also note that, after a disaster has occurred, it suddenly seems very probable, which makes it look like we mis-evaluated which risks were likely. On the other hand, sometimes we really do mis-evaluate or under-prepare. It's hard, in advance, to get the balance right. And even if we did, after a disaster we say "yeah, should have seen that one coming".
This wasn't some unpredictable event. It just wasn't considered sufficiently profitable to prepare.
For some reason if you mop the floor without the "wet" sign, you could be liable, but if you let the whole powergrid collapse twice, you bear no fault
In texas, the cost of that market failure can be measured in preventable deaths, none of which private energy companies needed to account for when managing risk.
In the event of a solar flare knocking out national power for months, the cost could be the collapse of modern civilization.
Doing enough to be prepared and attempt to avoid preventable failures should be built into market players not going to jail or bankruptcy.
Most of the time preparing for most disasters has a few common features to it.
- Food
- Power
- Transportation
- Housing/Shelter
These are common issues with every single possible disaster that can happen. So instead of preparing for "every disaster possible", you need to prepare for the outcome of "every disaster possible."
These four things can reduce lives lost by a significant amount, and as a 21st century society we need to limit our growth to the point where we're keeping up with the potential disaster situation, less we regress a thousand years because we didn't.
So no you're absolutely wrong. You don't need to plan for disasters at this scale. You plan for the outcomes of it.
So, while your "consequences" approach has a lot of merit, what you have to do to handle the consequences still depends significantly on what the cause of the problem was. Which brings you back to preparing for multiple scenarios. (I'll give you this, though: It may be fewer scenarios than a cause-based approach.)
Unless there's extreme weather you don't need to keep the entire grid operational for people to survive, only key infrastructure. So you can cut out those concerns if you have preparations for extreme hot and cold events (with cold being much easier to prepare for)
Any heuristic to make this more tractable (including ones that eschew having to work with probabilities and thus event space sizes, like the consequence-based approach) works in favor of more prep.
Many areas have natural water sources that could be used in a serious emergency, but having some potable water on hand and a way to purify more, is pretty easy and inexpensive.
Would you never screen for cancer because you can use chemotherapy?
Of course nothing will make sure we are 100% prepared, but there can be a lot of value in reevaluating and improving things.
Far better to have to go manually restart a safed transformer than have to replace a destroyed one.
At a high level, there's a tension between efficiency and resiliency. Profit growth necessarily demands an increase in efficiency, and resiliency necessarily drops.
Texas's power grid is a recent good example of this issue. Texas chose to skip many resiliency measures w/r/t cold temperatures even though they suffered this same issue 10 years ago. The expense, for the businesses, may be lower to rebuild after disasters. But these types of catastrophes often cost people their lives.
No one is suggesting that it would make sense to be 100% for all contingencies. But most people wear their seat belts, even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash. So it would seem rational to invest at least as much into preventing Carrington-type events as we invest into car safety.
See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-hum...
That can't be right. Or am I misunderstanding something? Your chances of dying in a car crash are higher than dying in a global extinction level disaster. How likely are car crashes with fatalities? How likely are extinction level disasters?
If there’s a 1% annual chance of a single event where 1% of the population dies all at once, that makes the risk dying of dying in such an event the same as dying in a car crash. If if either of those numbers are higher than 1%, it’s more likely than dying in a car crash. I’m not sure if the comment you responded to is correct about the numbers for this particular risk, just showing how rare extreme events can be important risks.
I think people tend of overrate rare events that only hurt a few people at a time (like shark attacks and lightning strikes) and underrate rare events that hurt a lot of people at once (like pandemics, extreme weather events, or other society-scale disasters).
If, and it's a big if, that came to pass just once in five hundred years then sure, the chances of dying in such an event turn out to be higher than dying in a car crash. Much higher, at that, so the real figures don't need to be anything like this extreme. Low-frequency high-impact risks can lead to that situation and it's one reason why 'the odds' is often too simplistic to be useful in assessing risk. Humans have a general cognitive blind spot when it comes to assessing this kind of thing.
We're generally terrible at predicting how high-impact, low frequency events will impact us and play out and part of that is that our collective reaction is the most unpredictable element, with potential to multiply or mitigate the impacts to a huge degree in either direction. The current pandemic illustrates that quite well, as does Texas. A CME if/when it hits will open us up to a similar opportunity (or risk) of reacting in a way that either minimizes or intensifies the damage.
Wait, do you mean "if you were involved in a car crash you'd be less likely to die than if you were involved in a CME"?
Is that what you and the OP were saying? If so, I could agree with that, rephrased as "the lethality of a CME is higher than that of a car crash".
But what I was thinking is that CMEs are far less likely, so their lethality doesn't matter as much when predicting what you'll die of. I'm far more likely to be involved in a car crash than in a CME, and since fatal car crashes actually occur, I'm far more likely to die in one than in a CME. Simply because the CME is very, very unlikely to happen.
To rephrase it in terms of things that actually happen in our lifetimes more than once: the lethality of plane crashes is very high: you're very unlikely to survive one. Their lethality is higher than that of car crashes. However, if I were to ask you: "is this person, Jane Random, more likely to die of a car crash or a plane crash?", you'd have to bet on the car crash -- simply because plane crashes occur far less often.
(This is purposefully excluding other, likelier causes of death, of course).
Car crashes kill around 35k Americans per year. Whereas let's say a CME would kill 300M Americans. Even if a CME only happens once every 500 years, your chances of dying in a CME would still be vastly greater than your chances of dying in a car crash, because 35,000 * 500 < 300,000,000.
Now granted a CME might not kill 85% of Americans, but they also happen more like every 100 years, rather than every 500. So yeah, the math should actually be pretty terrifying no matter what assumptions you plug in.
I'm not sure where you're getting that. People living in a cave are far less prepared than we are for pretty much any potential large-scale disaster we already know about (never mind the ones we don't know about yet!). Although you oppose it (that's good!), you seem to be making a classic mistake by thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way to prepare for or protect against disasters. But the vital point is that stasis only protects us against the danger posed by new technologies, while almost certainly condemning us against other inevitable dangers like disease, earthquakes, weather disasters, climate change (man-made or otherwise), meteor impacts, supernovae, and probably lots of unknown things we would never learn about until they hit us.
Well put. Regression is a very real danger in all civilizations and it's inevitable. It is the full time job to actively resist decline.
Reminds me of that plan to intercept an earthbound meteor/asteroid. It sounds absurd - until we hit an existential crisis when one such object is in our trajectory and all the bullshit stops. The sad thing is not IF but When. Could be a year or a million years.
There are plenty of mechanisms to handle rare disasters rationally. The insurance industry manages a lot of it.
But of course, Earth doesn't have a CEO. On balance I think that is a very good thing. Though it does cause some coordination problems.