Post Game October 18, 2017

In Post Game - On Demand by Gigi Manukyan51 Comments

Cenk & Ana talk about what they would do if Yellowstone’s “supervolcano” erupted.


Comments

  1. If anyone is interested in disaster fiction, the YA series Ashfall deals with the supervolcano eruption and folks surviving afterwards. I enjoyed it quite a bit :)

  2. George Carlin said we’re(mankind) a flea on a horses ass…any day now it’s gonna flick its tail….

  3. I was thinking Cenk move to Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China; where His Wife(Hans Chinese) + Him(Turk) could raise Turkic Hans children with Uyghurs. Cenk could learn more Mandarin & learn his Turkic Origins. afterall Turks come from China!?

    or Uruguay is also great location if Cartels dont see you a threat.?! I probably move to Korea or Japan. If it had to be Muslim country; Iran or Bangladesh, trust me western propaganda about Iran is horse crap. Iran would be great. Never know i maybe able to get a Political job with my insight?!

    1. look at the book ‘Forbidden Archaeology’
      there’s a homo sapiens foot print in volcanic material long before
      ‘academic taught timelines’

    1. Ditto. I’m completely with Anna on this. I was like, “I’m not goin’ anywhere. Gonna chill for the next 10 years and hey, there’ll be a LOT less traffic around and people. Then when the eruption comes, I toast and say, ‘Well, my life wasn’t so bad at all. Better than many. Would’ve been nice if we’d gotten our shit together but…what’re ya gonna do? It is what it is.” And her point about The Walking Dead was EXACTLY right. I said in season one I would’ve been with Andrea at the CDC, only I wouldn’t have left (see what good that did her). When they found out there’s no scientific cure or way out of this, relax and hit that self destruct button, dude. What’s crazy is that even with that being my attitude toward it, I stuck with the series for 6 seasons and then said, “OK, no thanks. End of THIS.”

  4. So wait Cenk and Ana think that if scientists develop a pretty good idea of when Yellowstone will erupt, people will believe it and take the time and effort to prepare for it? What planet do they think we are on?

    1. I’m not sure the general public would even be informed. They would want to prevent panic. There’s no way a calm coordinated effort would happen for the entire US. Only the most privileged people would have the opportunity to re-locate.

  5. What I’ve heard is that everyone west of the Mississippi dies very quickly. The midwest would be mostly dead after a short time. The East Coast would be in trouble, but it would be survivable. The rest of the world would also be in trouble, but not in great shape either. Massive famines and freezes would devastate the global food supply and there would be a massive shortage of shelter.

    In short, it would be pretty bad. It is expected to happen somewhere in the next million years, give or take. All of human history is only about 10,000 years. It is not something to panic about. It erupted 6 million years ago, then not again for 1.5 million years. Then not again for 2.4 million years. Then not again for 1.8 million years. And that was only 640,000 years ago. It isn’t that reliable, but we’re probably good for a while. You could increase the history of our civilization by an order of magnitude and the odds would still be pretty good we’d never see Yellowstone erupt.

    There have been 2 supervolcanoes that erupted since humans evolved, though in our prehistory. However neither occurred in a location where humans lived, one in New Zealand 26,000 years ago and one in Indonesia 74,000 years ago. The Indoneisian eruption is the largest in the last 25,000,000 years and one theory (though not widely believed) suggests that it caused a bottle neck in the human population even though we were in Africa with jet streams sending most of the ash East. It definitely destroyed much of Asia though (and possibly other hominids who might have been there at the time?), and might have had an effect on our ancestors as well.

    Yellowstone last erupted 640,000 years ago. The biggest volcanoes people have ever seen were an order of magnitude smaller than these things and those have been pretty devastating.

    1. “All of human history is only about 10,000 years.”

      I’ve never face palmed as hard reading a TYT comment. You can’t be serious. We have recorded cave painting older than 40000 years.

      1. You are talking about pre-history. History is generally considered to be a formal written record. I think sfieldman has is right. He mentions history and then pre-history when humans were around 26,000 and 74,000 years ago.

  6. Well, really, if Yellowstone erupted it wouldn’t actually kill everyone in the United States. It would kill some people in the immediate area, yes, but the biggest impact for the US would be the ash fall and potential loss of communications for a while. If you live really close to Yellowstone, you could very well die in the initial eruption, but for most of the US what you would need would be to have supplies and a plan in place considering potential loss of communications and some services for a while. My mother is actually really into being a survivalist and has lots of survival supplies, food stores, emergency medications, etc. set up for just such an occasion.

    It would still be devastating for sure, but it’s not like it would erupt and the whole of the United States would blow up. You can have a plan for this – don’t give up yet, Ana!

  7. Uruguay is probably the most underrated country in the Americas, maybe even in the world. I’m not sure how far you’d have to be from Yellowstone to be safe, but there’s some chance not even Uruguay would be totally safe. Plus, it’s not that big of a country; Montevideo is really the only big city. Also, habla Cenk español?

    My prediction is that Australia would be the main destination for most of the American refugees. It’s physically very spacious, it has relatively low population density (so it’s physically possible for them to accommodate many more people), it’s one of the countries farthest away from the US geographically, and it’s an English speaking country. Most Americans could not adjust to living in a country that is culturally very different from America, and most likely they would have no interest in trying anyway.

  8. Lets Get to the point!

    Ana, is it true you are running for senate, against Feinstein??

    It would be awesome :-)

  9. I did a report on the super volcano last year for school (technical writing class @ community college), and after a few interviews I learned that if and when it does erupt, it will likely be far less intense than people are expecting. There have been several small quakes in the region and that is scaring people (making it newsworthy and scaring more people), but the truth is that those quakes are a good thing because they are allowing the area to release built-up pressure. If you look at the history and timeline of past Yellowstone eruptions, each one gets smaller and smaller. You’ll also find that frequency of quakes has been increasing yet their intensity has been decreasing. This suggests that the first blast will forever be the worst, with each subsequent blast being of lesser intensity. The eruption would still be huge, but not an extinction level event and not everyone in the US would die. There would still be darkness and ash, but again, not nearly as much as people are expecting (because people are basing their numbers off of the worst case scenario, a.k.a. the first blast, even though the experts claim that it’s highly unlikely). The west coast might even be fine (as fine as one could be anyway), but it’s also possible that the eruption could set off a chain reaction of quakes on the west coast too, but that’s a whole separate catastrophe to deal with.

  10. Isn’t Hawaii far enough away to survive? I mean they are Americans, too. I say that the fire gods of the mountain demand blood to be appeased! We need to toss Trump, Pence, Ivanka, and Jerod, Eric, and Donald Jr. in there in order to appease Pele! Tiffany and Melania can be spared, as they have suffered enough. Who’s with me?

    PS- I hope Cenk remembers that he must not ever cross the streams!

  11. It’s time again to say how much I love Cenk and Ana and how much I also love when they are on together. They were my introduction to TYT and why I joined even though I live in Australia.
    I also loved their discussion about what they would do if Yellowstone erupted and laughed my head off. It puts things into perspective
    And if Trump continues to gain support from the American voter no matter what terrible terrible things he continues to do then bring on the eruption and put us all out of our misery I say! Here in Oz we have crazy anti intellectual haters in parliament who seem to be against anything good and progressive and their popularity is rising also. I just don’t get it. I try to understand but there’s a fundamental difference in how I see the world that I creates a bit of a chasm that is hard to overcome.

  12. Cenk, just come to Canada man. We’re super nice, progressive, we have TONS OF SPACE and the most fresh water on earth.

  13. Watch “On the Beach.” The original movie, or the made-for-t.v. series. Personally, I’d do whatever to survive, but when it was inevitable? Someone, please hand me something to make me sleep because I don’t do pain.

  14. A quick scan of a few sources on the internet indicates there is very unlikely to be a major eruption at Yellowstone any time soon. The Google search did not turn up a recent technical article, though I did not do an extensive search. Wikipedia’s article does not reflect recent updates in its sources. I did not look at the USGS monitoring program, but the summaries I have seen indicate no significant deviation from past behavior that suggests a runaway eruption.

    A reliable source of info on the Yellowstone supervolcano for the general public is the magazine Science News, whose news articles and shorts are written for the general public by science reporters who each writes only in their area of expertise, attend scientific conferences, and get input from other scientists with relevant work in a particular topic but who are not participants in the studies reported. They (originally Science Service, now Society for Science and the Public) have published Science News (originally Science News Letter) since the 1920’s, set up and promoted the science fairs, and set a high standard of science reporting over a broad spectrum. They also include links to the original articles and past articles and the commentary of readers often contains useful information as many readers have relevant backgrounds. However, it is written for the general public rather than scientists and articles are brief except for a few feature articles of two to four pages each in each biweekly issue. If TYT does not already have a subscription, you should get one. It would greatly support your scientific understanding. I recommend it for your general membership also. I have been a subscriber since 1964, when I first encountered it doing class reports for 9th grade biology.

    The articles I suggest are given below. If not a subscriber, I suggest visiting a library:

    https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-tectonic-plate-blocks-magma-plume-yellowstone-simulation-shows – a Feb 3, 2016 article online by Thomas Sumner.

    older articles are:
    T. Sumner. Massive magma pool found deep below Yellowstone. Science News. Vol. 187, May 16, 2015, p. 16

    T. Sumner. Studying a volcano in a war zone. Science News. Vol. 186, December 13, 2014, p. 26.

    T. Sumner. Supervolcano blast would blanket U.S. in ash. Science News. Vol. 186, October 4, 2014, p. 32.

    T. Sumner. Merging magma can set off supervolcanoes in less than 10,000 years. Science News. Vol. 186, August 23, 2014, p. 14.

    A. Witze. Supervolcanoes evolve superquickly. Science News. Vol. 181, June 30, 2012, p. 7.

    A technical article not in Science News is:
    T. Leonard and L. Liu. The role of a mantle plume on the formation of Yellowstone volcanism.Geophysical Research Letters, in press, 2016. doi: 10.1002/2015GL067131.

  15. This reminded me of a recurring nightmare I used to have when my kids were little. It was a zombie outbreak (30 days later kind) and I was hiding with them in the attic and trying to keep them from crying so that the zombies wouldn’t find us. The worst.

  16. Don’t worry about the volcano, Jim Bakker has tasty food buckets. Enough to keep us all alive. Being a loving christian I’m sure he will freely give away food to everyone, except those who insulted him.

    1. A quick glance at my saved historical maps indicates the euroasian paleolithic cultures went to about 12,000 years before present (ybp), neolithic to about 5300 ybp, bronze age to about 3200 ybp, and iron age after that. Your 3000 years would be about right for the beginning of the iron age. These maps are mostly screen captures from The Teaching Company history courses. I can’t give you a quick timeline for the Americas or Africa.

  17. Love your post games guys. Best ones are with Cenk and Ana. I’m with you Ana. Just live a good 10 years and then go out all mellow yellow.

    1. But there won’t be any good life as you know it anymore once the countdown starts and the panic happens. People won’t be around to man the bars and taco stands.

      1. Not many bugs in the desert (just flies mostly). It’s the tropics and the north-east coast that are covered in spiders. Don’t worry, I’m sure post-volcano ash storms will kill them too (fingers crossed!)

        1. Could you imagine Cenk take on Australian versions of the US Looney Right….

          Would be the clash of titans…. Uygur tearing apart the (the magic shrinking) George Christensen…

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