The cliff's edge

The universe is a dangerous place.

Much of what we've created -- the whole superstructure of civilized life, really -- is built to give us a sense of security.  And it works, or well enough.  During much of human history, we were one bad harvest, one natural disaster, one epidemic from starvation, disease, and death.  Our ancestors were constantly aware that they had no real security -- probably one of the main drivers of the development of religion.

The world is a capricious, dangerous place, but maybe the gods will help me if only I pray hard enough.

When the Enlightenment rolled around in the eighteenth century, science seemed to step in to provide a similar function.  Maybe the world could be tamed if we only understood it better.  Once again, it succeeded -- at least partially.  Industrial agriculture and modern medicine certainly saved millions of lives, and have allowed us to live longer, healthier lives than ever before.  Further reassuring us that it was possible to make the universe a secure, harm-free place for such creatures as us.

And we still have that sense, don't we?  When there's a natural disaster, many people respond, "Why did this happen?"  There's an almost indignant reaction of "the world should be safe, dammit."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons svantassel, Danger Keep Away Sign, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This is why in 2012 a judge in Italy sentenced six geologists to six years in prison and a hefty fines for failing to predict the deadly 2009 L'Aquila earthquake.  There was the sense that if the best experts on the geology of Italy didn't see it coming... well, they should have, shouldn't they?  

That in the present state of our scientific knowledge, it's not possible to predict earthquakes, didn't seem to sway the judge's mind.  "The world is chaotic, dangerous, and incompletely understood" was simply too hard to swallow.  If something happened, and people died, there had to be someone to blame.  (Fortunately, eventually wiser heads prevailed, the charges were thrown out on appeal, and the geologists were released.)

In fact, I started thinking about this because of a study out of the University of California - Riverside that is investigating a technique for predicting earthquake severity based on the direction of propagation of the shock wave front.  This can make a huge difference -- for example, an earthquake on the San Andreas Fault that begins with failure near the Salton Sea and propagates northward will direct more energy toward Los Angeles than one that begins closer in but spreads in the opposite direction.

The scientists are using telltale scratch marks -- scoring left as the rocks slide across each other -- to determine the direction of motion of the quake's shock wave.  "The scratches indicate the direction and origin of a past earthquake, potentially giving us clues about where a future quake might start and where it will go," said Nic Barth, the paper's lead author. " This is key for California, where anticipating the direction of a quake on faults like San Andreas or San Jacinto could mean a more accurate forecast of its impact...  We can now take the techniques and expertise we have developed on the Alpine Fault [in New Zealand] to examine faults in the rest of the world.  Because there is a high probability of a large earthquake occurring in Southern California in the near-term, looking for these curved marks on the San Andreas fault is an obvious goal."

The thing is, this is still short of the ultimate goal of predicting fault failure accurately, and with enough time to warn people to evacuate.  Knowing the timing of earthquakes is something that is still out of reach.

Then there's the study out of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research that found that the Sun and other stars like it are prone to violent flare-ups -- on the average, once every century.  These "superflares" can release an octillion joules of energy in only a few hours.

The once-every-hundred-years estimate was based on a survey of over fifty-six thousand Sun-like stars, and the upshot is that so far, we've lucked out.  The last serious solar storm was the Carrington Event of 1859, and that was the weakest of the known Miyake Events, coronal mass ejections so big that they left traces in tree rings.  (One about fourteen thousand years ago was so powerful that if it occurred today, it would completely fry everything from communications satellites to electrical grids to home computers.)

The problem, once again, is that we still can't predict them; like earthquakes, we can know likelihood but not exactitude.  In the case of a coronal mass ejection, we'd probably have a few hours' notice -- enough time to unplug stuff in our houses, but not enough to protect the satellites and grids and networks.  (If that's even possible.  "An octillion joules" is what is known in scientific circles as "a metric shit tonne of energy.")

"The new data are a stark reminder that even the most extreme solar events are part of the Sun's natural repertoire," said study co-author Natalie Krivova.  "During the Carrington event of 1859, one of the most violent solar storms of the past two hundred years, the telegraph network collapsed in large parts of northern Europe and North America.  According to estimates, the associated flare released only a hundredth of the energy of a superflare.  Today, in addition to the infrastructure on the Earth's surface, especially satellites would be at risk."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to scare you.  In my opinion, the point is to emphasize the fragility of life and of our world, and to encourage you to work toward mitigating what we can.  No matter what we do, we'll still be subject to the vagaries of geology, meteorology, and astrophysics, but right now we are needless adding to our risk by ignoring climate change and pollution, and encouraging the ignorant and ill-founded claims of the anti-vaxxers.  (Just yesterday I saw that RFK Jr., who has been nominated as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is pursuing the de-authorization of the polio vaccine -- an extremely low-risk preventative that has saved millions of lives.)

Life's risky enough without adding to it by listening to reckless short-term profit hogs and dubiously sane conspiracy theorists.

My point here is that the chaotic nature of the universe shouldn't freeze us into despairing immobility; it should galvanize us to protect what we have.  The unpredictable dangers are a fact of life, and for most of our evolutionary history we were unable to do much about any of them.  Now, for the first time, we have figured out how to protect ourselves from many of the risks that our ancestors faced every day.  How foolish do we as a species have to be to add to those risks needlessly, heedlessly, rushing toward the edge of the cliff when we have the capacity simply to stop?

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