Your food resilience work is great: fascinating and really important! Indeed, I first heard of your supervolcano paper via your interview with Rob Wiblin which was primarily about feeding humanity after a catastrophe. In the grand scheme of things, that’s rightly higher priority, but the supervolcano stuff also caught my interest.
I happen to know a couple of volcanologists, so I asked them about your paper. They weren’t familiar with it, but independently stressed that something quite tractable that would benefit from more resources is better monitoring of volcanoes and prediction of eruptions.
The typical application of forecasting eruptions is evacuation. But that’s sociologically tricky when you inevitably have probabilities far from 1 and uncertain timelines, since an evacuation that ends up appearing unnecessary will lead to low compliance later (the volcanologists “cried wolf”). With interventions to prevent an eruption, that’s much less of an issue. Say you had a forecast that a certain supervolcano has a probability of 20% of erupting in the next century, so many orders of magnitude above base rate. That’s still realistically pretty useless from the point of view of evacuation, but would make your kind of interventions very attractive (if they work in that case).
So if it could shown that these interventions are likely tractable even when a potential near term eruption has been detected, then that would justify increased investment both in detection/forecasting and developing these approaches.
Your food resilience work is great: fascinating and really important! Indeed, I first heard of your supervolcano paper via your interview with Rob Wiblin which was primarily about feeding humanity after a catastrophe. In the grand scheme of things, that’s rightly higher priority, but the supervolcano stuff also caught my interest.
I happen to know a couple of volcanologists, so I asked them about your paper. They weren’t familiar with it, but independently stressed that something quite tractable that would benefit from more resources is better monitoring of volcanoes and prediction of eruptions.
The typical application of forecasting eruptions is evacuation. But that’s sociologically tricky when you inevitably have probabilities far from 1 and uncertain timelines, since an evacuation that ends up appearing unnecessary will lead to low compliance later (the volcanologists “cried wolf”). With interventions to prevent an eruption, that’s much less of an issue. Say you had a forecast that a certain supervolcano has a probability of 20% of erupting in the next century, so many orders of magnitude above base rate. That’s still realistically pretty useless from the point of view of evacuation, but would make your kind of interventions very attractive (if they work in that case).
So if it could shown that these interventions are likely tractable even when a potential near term eruption has been detected, then that would justify increased investment both in detection/forecasting and developing these approaches.