Thanks! Those are good questions. I have not put any more effort into it because resilient foods are likely lower cost to prepare for and protect against multiple catastrophes including super-volcanic eruptions. However, if we can get a few hundred million dollars for resilient foods, maybe working on preventing super-volcanic eruptions will be next on the listā¦
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, thatās 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 werenāt 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 thatās 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 ācried wolfā). With interventions to prevent an eruption, thatās 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. Thatās 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/āforecasting and developing these approaches.
Thanks! Those are good questions. I have not put any more effort into it because resilient foods are likely lower cost to prepare for and protect against multiple catastrophes including super-volcanic eruptions. However, if we can get a few hundred million dollars for resilient foods, maybe working on preventing super-volcanic eruptions will be next on the listā¦
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, thatās 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 werenāt 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 thatās 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 ācried wolfā). With interventions to prevent an eruption, thatās 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. Thatās 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/āforecasting and developing these approaches.