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It would only be in the United States. Models of meteorologists have revealed that aerosols released into the air could spread globally if the eruption occurred during the summer. In the short term, the toxic cloud blocking sunlight, average global temperatures could drop significantly and not return to normal for several years. The rain would be greatly reduced. This could be enough to trigger the end of tropical forests. Agriculture would collapse, starting with the Midwest. While a group of researchers was writing to the European Science Foundation in a 2015 report on extreme geographical hazards, it would be "the biggest disaster since the dawn of civilization".
Supervolcans such as Yellowstone represent so-called existential risks: ultra-disasters that could cause global devastation and even the extinction of the human race. They can be natural, such as boosts or the impact of a large asteroid of the same size that helped eliminate the dinosaurs, or be caused by humans, such as a nuclear war or a designed virus. By definition, they are worse than all the worst situations in humanity, but they are not common and it is a challenge, both psychologically and politically.
Although asteroids are usually in the headlines of Michael Bay's newspapers and films, existential risk experts generally agree that the supervolcans (there are twenty of them on the entire planet) are the threat natural that the greatest probability of extinction of the human being. However, this does not mean that the probability is high, as the probability of a Yellowstone overturn occurring in a given year is one in 730,000.
However, extremely improbable does not mean impossible even when human nature mixes the two terms. What distinguishes existential risks from the dangers of everyday life is not the probability that they will occur, but their consequences.
Suppose, as scientific models calculate, that an overturn can kill ten percent of the world's population. Even though these eruptions occur more or less every 714 000 years (at the bottom of the frequency range), the total number of deaths caused by this disaster equals an expected loss of more than a thousand people every year, if we take a annual average for the period between this year and the time the supervolcan finally bursts. If they happen approximately every 45,000 years (at the top end of the frequency range), the total number of expected deaths per year will rise to around 17,000.
At this point, a comparison is helpful: plane crashes in different parts of the world have been behind 556 deaths in 2018. The Federal Aviation Administration is investing more than $ 7 billion a year in the aviation safety. However, the United States invests only about $ 22 million a year in its volcanic risk programs, although long-term supervolcans kill more people than aircraft accidents.
Of course, the difference is that aviation is a relatively constant and known risk. There will probably never be a year in which no one dies of a plane crash, but there will never be a year in which 10% of the world's population will die in a single accident airline. This could only happen with the eruption of a supervolcan, the crash of an asteroid or a nuclear war.
It is possible to reduce the existential risks. NASA has allocated an annual budget of $ 150 million to the global defense and could invest in space telescopes that can detect asteroids that are now escaping us. It would cost about $ 370 million a year for the rest of the world to have the same level of volcanic surveillance as the United States, which would reduce the risk of being surprised by super-corruption and the number of deaths potential. Of course, it is in our hands to avoid the existential risks created by the human being, such as a nuclear war or even artificial intelligence. Our species faces greater existential dangers than ever before, but unlike most of our lives, we now have the ability to protect ourselves.
What has already happened can happen again and so it will be a day … However, since we live confined in the short time horizon of our own experience, we consider it unreal. In doing so, our vulnerability is exposed to what we can not imagine.
Bryan Walsh is the author of The End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World. @bryanrwalsh
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