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Comment by _uhtu | Hacker News Reader

Just so everyone knows, the whole "Yellowstone is a supervolcano that could erupt any minute and cause cataclysmic effects on the planet" is just not true. It was made up for TV "documentaries". Yellowstone does not pose any real threat to society at large. Volcanologists are practically unanimous in that belief. See this video for more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypn3Fe_PLts

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why did what we would presume are fairly professional level engineers and scientists at JPL (at least not working for TV "documentaries") write a whole paper called "DEFENDING HUMAN CIVILIZATION FROM SUPERVOLCANIC ERUPTIONS" which has all of its emphasis on Yellowstone?

https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file...

Kinda weird to just go for an argument of authority huh? I'd recommend watching the video for a non-authority based series of arguments based on multiple sources and a lot of data.

Anyway, the reason they wrote that paper is probably because they are talking about extreme hypotheticals themselves. Notice how their comparison is that it's twice as likely as a 2km asteroid impact, which are once in every few million year events. So we're still dealing with something extremely unlikely to occur in our lifetimes.

Posing an extremely large threat at 1/1000000 odds still seems like something.

I watched it and sure it makes sense but I'm an idiot, and so do climate change denial videos if I don't look up counterarguments.

That's what I didn't get about that video, all these laypeople are like "great!". Like sure, a once in a 600k year event, and maybe not even that, great . Doesn't mean some generation of humans or otherwise arent going to get whacked someday

> why

Because that's what they got their grant money for and what they want more grant money for.

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