Something else to think about
Just in case you didn’t have enough to worry about, there’s Yellowstone:
A new University of Utah study reports discovery of a huge magma reservoir beneath Yellowstone’s previously known magma chamber.
…The new report fills in a missing link of the system. It describes a large reservoir of hot rock, mostly solid but with some melted rock in the mix, that lies beneath a shallow, already-documented magma chamber. The newly discovered reservoir is 4.5 times larger than the chamber above it. There’s enough magma there to fill the Grand Canyon.
…This is a volcano that can erupt either in a big way or a truly colossal and catastrophic way. The big eruptions can send lava flowing over a big portion of the park; the really huge ones can form a giant crater, or caldera. The last time Yellowstone had a calderic eruption was 640,000 years ago, and the misshapen hole it created was about 25 miles by 37 miles across. This caldera has since been filled in by lava flows and natural erosion, and Yellowstone Lake covers a portion of the area. The main visual evidence of the old caldera is the striking absence of mountains at the heart of the park: They were literally blown away in the last eruption.
Risk assessment is tricky for low-probability, high-consequence events like volcanic eruptions. The big Yellowstone eruptions occur on time scales of many hundreds of thousands of years. Smith said the repeat time for a caldera explosion at Yellowstone is roughly 700,000 years. But the smaller eruptions, with lava flowing over the surface, are more frequent. There have been at least 50 such smaller eruptions since the caldera exploded 640,000 years ago. The most recent was about 70,000 years ago.
Okay, maybe we don’t have to worry all that much. But I was struck by those dimensions: a caldera 25 by 37 miles. Awesome in the original sense of the word.
This is old news resurected as new news…
Previously they referred to it as yellowstones supervolcano
Yellowstone Eruption (Super-Volcano Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsGJaa3M6ww
The Yellowstone Caldera is the volcanic caldera and supervolcano located in Yellowstone National Park in the United States, sometimes referred to as the Yellowstone Supervolcano. The caldera and most of the park are located in the northwest corner of Wyoming. The major features of the caldera measure about 34 by 45 miles (55 by 72 km).
Supervolcano is a science docufiction disaster television film that originally aired on 13 March 2005 on BBC One, and released by the BBC on 10 April 2005 on the Discovery Channel. It is centered on the speculated and potential eruption of the volcanic caldera of Yellowstone National Park. Its tagline is “Scientists know it as the deadliest volcano on Earth. You know it…as Yellowstone.”
the orignal crisis 9 years ago, didnt stick
so now they have you helping them make it stick
ie. keep throwing the underwear at the wall till it sticks
sigh…
the fearmongering is to gigantic proportions
the reason?
it makes women charged up to act, as women fear more than men (to the point that women who have never in their lives been attacked fear being attacked more than men who have been attacked, this despite that women are the victims of such thing at a much much lower rate than men!!!!!)
An eruption of the Yellowstone caldera would be a disaster of apocalyptic proportions, thus it is featured in many apocalyptic works of fiction. Fearing events of this magnitude is pointless as no one in its path of destruction survives.
The last super volcano to erupt was Toba — and it dang near wiped humanity clean off this planet.
The tempo of super volcanoes in the Indonesian belt is so great that it’s far more likely that another Toba blast will come before Yellowstone blows.
Either one is a viable extinction event… In which case it’s time to party.
One ought not worry about events that are entirely outside of human control.
more amazing than the caldera that size..
is that we think we control the weather…
that our fracking is making earthquakes
(the fraking god will make the ground shake)
its 10 kilometers in size
it occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon’s Blue Mountains
would encompass 1,665 football fields
or cover four square miles.
what is it?
the largest singe living thing… a fungus
can you imagine a creature that size?
i could sit all day and spout out amazing natural things that given peoples lack of real world knowlege, would be amazing..
Armillaria ostoyae is what it is..
Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, which would earn it a place among the oldest living organisms as well.
in sciencefiction books, it might be god… 🙂
the second largest impact crater on the planet is…
The previous record holder was the Vredefort crater in South Africa, clocking in at a diameter of 380 kilometers (236 miles.) The Vredefort impact structure remains the oldest known crater in the world, forming about 2,023 million years ago.
the largest is
A 400 kilometre-wide impact zone from a huge meteorite that broke in two moments before it slammed into the Earth has been found in Central Australia
“It’s a mystery – we can’t find an extinction event that matches these collisions. I have a suspicion the impact could be older than 300 million years,”
“There are two huge deep domes in the crust, formed by the Earth’s crust rebounding after the huge impacts, and bringing up rock from the mantle below,” Dr Glikson said.
The two impact zones total more than 400 kilometres across, in the Warburton Basin in Central Australia. They extend through the Earth’s crust, which is about 30 kilometres thick in this area.
the largest thing we have ever found so far
Large Quasar Group (LQG)
the epic size of this group of 73 quasars is sitting about 9 billion light-years away… It has a minimum diameter of 1.4 billion light-years, but over 4 billion light-years at its widest point
and the single largest structure ever in the universe, and the only sign of it is nothing — just empty space 1.8 billion light years across. That’s 18,000 times larger than our entire galaxy / the star VY Canis Majoris is about 1800 and 2100 times the radius of our Sun. With this size it would reach nearly to the orbit of Saturn if placed in our solar system
most people dont know much about the real universe or world they live in, this makes the hoaxes and games the left plays easy comparatively.
for instance.. the world has too many people…
7,000,000,000 coming soon…
the surface area of the land on earth is 153,295,000 km2 / if you distributed people evenly… you could put 45 people in every square kilometer. everyone gets 5 acres
however, obviously the people dont cover the land to that point… tokyo, the largest city on a tiny island has 37 million people…
that means you can fit the whole worlds population in 200 cities the size of tokyo, and the rest of the world would be empty.
yeah..
reality what a concept
an amazing place, but few bother to visit
most are too busy lving in their heads someplace else!!
blert Says: The tempo of super volcanoes in the Indonesian belt is so great that it’s far more likely that another Toba blast will come before Yellowstone blows.
not likely… krakatoa was the last and it was completely destroyed leaving nothing much left (and was heard in europe)… son of krakatoa is growing nicely…
those volcanoes RARELY blow… the longer lived ones in the US are more likely.. the point being that the ones in indonesia, hawaii, japans, etc… never stop long enough to create a clogged top… that is, krakatoa was exceptional as most volcanoes there let their pressure out all the time.
i have been near mt marapi… (i would not climb it)
i took my son to bromo mountain… it killed two people a year or so before us.. i told him that its as safe as an active vocano can be. if neo allowed i would have put up pictures… (it has a beautiful buddist temple in the caldera, and once you cross it in the morning to see the sunrise, your standing at the edge of a vent, with a cinder cone near you… sometimes the wind shifts and its hard to breath… if it burbs, your dead..)
ive been to many more…
i wanted to go before they said you cant go, you might get killed… yeah i might get killed, i accept that, but i also mught survive, and then what? 🙂
the volcanos of the american northwest, and near itally are a lot more dangerous to man as they sit dormant for a long long time, and the dirt and other things erode and cap off the caldera… (some of them with huge lakes)… this insures that over time, the gas pressure builds and builds and builds…
then boom…
more than likely yellowstone will not blow…
the most likely thing is that over time, the plume underneath will shift… this is what made the hawaiian islands, and parts of indonesia… the tectonic plates move over the plume, and so the old caldera ends up remaining hot and large and soft for millinea, but is no longer being fed from below… below, a new area is starting up and will take a few hundred million years to build pressure and blow and show the caldera.
yellowstone is actually so close to the surface that way before it goes big boom, it will go little booms and relieve the pressure.
the earth is colder than it ever was in time, and so, its volcanic action is way way down compared to its earlier days
🙂
Old Native American legend: Magma cum loud!
Super volcanoes are NOT extinction level events.
Nor is nuclear war.
IMO there are only two phenomena that can reach a full, rather than partial, extinction level event.
Very large (5+ mile dia.) asteroid impacts are one phenomena that can reach the extinction level.
The other phenomena that could reach the extinction level is;
“A nearby gamma-ray burst (less than 6000 light years away) would be powerful enough to destroy the Earth’s ozone layer, leaving organisms vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation from the sun.[73] Gamma ray bursts are fairly rare, occurring only a few times in a given galaxy per million years.[74] It has been suggested that a supernova or gamma ray burst caused the End-Ordovician extinction”
GB,
I don’t see the Yellowstone caldera erupting or full fledged nuclear war as world wide extinction events; rather I think of such events, should they occur in the digital age, to be events the 1st world populations could not cope with simply because these populations are for the most part lacking the skills or preperations to deal with life in the 18th century. Me and mine are ready for the 18th century as long as we can rally at our well prepared sanctuary in northern MN.
Your and others circumstances may vary.
If it blows, it blows.
Just last month a Russian analyst (of some sort) was calling on
his Gov to nuke the yellowstone caldera to physically destroy the USA !!! ( Looks like *they* are looking at any potential target that will do us in ) Open season on America !
The guy can t be too bright if he cant figure out that the
World will be affected not just the USA .
Oh yeah his name is Konstantin Sivkov
Neo, thank you for pointing out the original meaning of the word “awesome.”
I lived overseas for many years when I was younger and had something sort of like culture shock when I returned; one of the things that shocked me was the overuse of the word “awesome.”
Overhearing someone at a pizza joint say things like “wow, this pizza is awesome!” would just drive me crazy. I wanted to scream “no, this pizza isn’t awesome. A lot of modern medical cures are awesome, the Grand Canyon is awesome, the universe is awesome; but, this pizza is not “awesome” no matter how delicious it is.
However, I do agree that this news of what lies beneath Yellowstone is truly awesome!
parker,
I agree. My circumstances are different but I am making what preparations I can.
Molly NH,
The Russian ‘analyst’ is a fool and an attention seeking blowhard. If Putin did listen to him and nuke the Yellowstone caldera and it did erupt destroying large swaths of the West, (though not the coasts) what does he think the US Military would do in response? It would trigger a nuclear war and Putin is not going to get into a nuclear war with America. Putin’s a thug not an idiot.
As blert said, the Toba supervolcano that erupted around 73,000 years ago may have been a near-extinction event. There seems to be evidence for a “genetic bottleneck” about the same time, where the total world population of humans may have dropped to 10,000 or fewer.
But at that time, the total human population might have only been a few million to begin with, so Geoffrey Britain is probably right that a similar supervolcano eruption today, with a population of several billion, would not be an extinction-level event. It could still wipe out a few billion people, though, which is nothing to sneeze at.
I agree with him that many if not most extinction events in Earth’s history can probably be attributed to asteroid or comet impacts. In the case of the Cretaceous/Tertiary extinction of 65 million years ago, there is now overwhelming evidence of a major impact in the Yucatan Peninsula.
But on the other hand, there was an even greater extinction at the end of the Permian, about 250 million years ago. So far no evidence of an impact has been found. The leading culprit is a vast episode of vulcanism known as the “Siberian Traps”. But what could have set that off? My guess would have been an impact large enough to punch a hole through the Earth’s crust and expose the mantle, but so far no evidence of that has been found.
When the science of geology was being born in the 18th century, the traditional explanation of observed phenomena was Noah’s Flood. But geologists pointed towards explanations such as volcanism, erosion, sedimentation, and uplift of the crust, which were slow processes that took eons. The debate was described as “catastrophism vs. gradualism”. As the evidence accumulated, the gradualists won the day, and modern geology was born.
But during the 20th century, as the Space Age got under way and we studied the Moon and other bodies in the Solar System, it became apparent that impacts also played an important role.
Due to the history of geology, I think that geologists have an inherent revulsion to explanations based on cosmic impacts. Those are inherently catastrophic in nature, and resemble nothing so much as the hand of an angry God. They fly in the face of everything geologists have been taught.
Yet to an astronomer, impacts are gradualism. Looking at the solar system as a whole, they are just a form of erosion. Every day Earth is bombarded by dust and sand-sized particles which we see as “shooting stars”. They are completely harmless. But every so often, we get something like the Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013, which injured 1000 people, mostly by broken glass. That meteor exploded with greater force than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and the people of that city are very, very lucky that it detonated at a high altitude. If it had stayed intact a few seconds longer, it would have obliterated the city and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
And then there was Comet Hyakutake from 1996. That was the most spectacular comet that I have personally seen. For about three nights it was high overhead and dominated the sky. It was a fairly small comet, only a mile or two in diameter, but it passed close to Earth. And that was the thing. It was discovered only two months before its closest approach. It missed Earth by 10 million miles. That’s a pretty comfortable miss, but it was discovered around the orbit of Saturn, so it was headed almost straight for us.
The significance of that is that a comet could be found to be on a collision course with Earth, and we could have as little as two months’ warning.
rickl…
I suspect a cosmic impact for the Permian break…
I also think that that impact has been the primary source for platinum and platinum group compounds — particularly those discovered as placers — the ORIGINAL source of platinum was from just such deposits in Siberia.
It’s also quite obvious that other than the high latitudes, platinum is just about never found in gold placer deposits. (!)
The closer one gets to the magic spot, the more the platinum pops up in the placer recoveries.
The other platinum source is southern Africa — famously the primary locus of kimberlite ‘pipes.’
These are universally mistaken for vulcanism — when in fact they are the direct consequence of pre-archean meteor strikes — so far back in time that the Earth had no atmosphere.
This permitted impacts to drive straight through the VERY thin crust and plunge into the mantle – – thence to vent ultra deep magma which refluxed back up at hyper-sonic speed.
The weird nature of the kimberlite pipes is ONLY consistent with super speed and super cooling — in vacuo.
This particular zone of bombardment may well have been due to a single broken up impact that came down like automatic gunfire.
In which case it was likely the true source of the original source rock for the Witwatersrand hyper-massive gold deposits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_I59K3wu70
Jump to 35 minutes to get a snap shot of how this unique monster gold strata was deposited in multiple phases.
The hyper-deep kimberlite impacts stirred up the mantle and began the gold mineralization process. It took gold that was in mantle solution and brought it up into a chilled, crustal layer, thence to be operated upon in the manner now presumed to be the source of most conventional deposits.
The pre-archean geological record is otherwise totally obliterated from this Earth. The kimberlite pipes are the ONLY structures that stand as geological fossils from that era.
The linkage between the kimberlite pipes and the gold fields has never been posited in the technical journals. As simple as the concept is, it’s too far out there to publish.
The idea that kimberlite pipes are simply rapid volcano pipes is totally absurd on the face of it.
Keep in mind, when the kimberlite reflux starts — the mantle is punching into a total vacuum — that of outer space. This is the only mechanism that permits the mantle to rise so quickly.
As for diamond formation: it’s ENTIRELY a pressure limited process, with the heat being secondary. At the time of the impacts, the heat required is everywhere to hand.
The pressure wave created by the impact is PLENTY enough to cause diamonds to form in micro-seconds. Such impacts would entail millions of atmospheres of pressure — throughout the shocked zone of the mantle/ magma impact.
The time window for this sequence had to be between the arrival of an atmosphere and yet after the crust had begun to harden at least somewhat.
All of the worlds oceans — and the water inside us — HAD to come to Earth AFTER the crust had largely cooled — by way of yet more impacts.
Since the Moon was still fragmented, and its creation is likely tied into the period immediately preceding the kimberlite phase, the tides that far back would’ve been epic by any measure.
Back calculations indicate that the tides would’ve reached miles high at first — with the Moon so close, and the oceans so empty.
Bush did it 🙂
I am currently much, much more worried about an Iranian EMP attack.
Besides if Hillary is elected as a Goddess she will be able to halt any explosion in its tracks.
The documentaries I’ve seen on the subject indicate it’s not going to be an event most of the inhabitants of the US willsurvive, assuming it’s based on the last several eruptions. Ash and debris are found in California and the East coast from them, and in significant quantities. The global impact of ash injected into the atmosphere is projected to impact crop production for decades. A lot of people will starve, most of them here. The blast area is also pretty impressive.
Since 2004, portions of Yellowstone have been rising at astonishing rates – about 3 inches per year. In geological terms, that a lot of movement for 10000 years, in 1 year that’s going at warp speed.
Yellowstone lake has been draining for decades as its floor rises; previously sunken objects are now visible – not from drought. It’s a massive upheaval. Water draining from the lake is how the caldera was first discovered; a geologist working for the government was camping on the lake, with the task of surveying the park, and noticed watar flowing OUT of the lake instead of into it – along what used to be a tributary to the lake.
There was an interesting documentary on the Science or History channel, can’t remember which, showing how the blast craters have moved to the east for millions of years. Previous craters are more than a thousand miles to the east of Yellowstone; they have satellite photograpy showing the locations and separation of the earlier formed craters.
What’s happened is the tektonic plate of the continental US has moved eastward over millons of years, while the source of the magma chamber has remained in the same relative position, blasting out a crater every 600,000 years or so. It’s a fascinating subject, but hopefully none of us will be around to argue about what will happen. By all accounts, it will devaste a large part of the US, and the remaining population will struggle to survive the after effects as our entire farming base is wiped out for possibly centureies..
On the bright side, there’s always the hurricane party approach – “get blown away” – that is have a drinking party as the shit hits the fan. There’ nothing anyone can do about it when it happens, so you might as well enjoy a good scotch while your home is buried in hot ash. 🙂
Sooner or later another large asteroid/comet is going to strike the earth… unless we get into space and set up a defensive sphere around earth. The inherent problem with that is the ability of any such arrangement to be used against the earth as well as to protect it. Though encrypted software could be used to make that very difficult.
The defensive sphere that I envision would be to place twelve very large solar-powered, super-capacitor discharged, remote controlled, electromagnetic railguns* in geosynchronus orbits around the earth in a dodecahedron arrangement. This would allow a minimum of five railgun platforms to be targeted upon any near earth object on a collison course with earth, regardless of approach trajectory. Current technology and mathematical calculations would determine the railgun capability, which as technology advanced could be upgraded.
Besides the ‘evil that men do’ problem, the main technological barrier to near earth mastery is the enormous amount of energy it takes to get out of the earth’s ‘gravity well’. In time, that will yield to technological advancement.
In addition to protection from massive impacts upon the earth, there is literally an astronomical amount of mineral wealth awaiting us in the asteroid belt. The moon is covered with HE3 which could power nuclear fusion** reactors for tens of thousands of years.
We have profound reasons to master space travel and every day that we delay is literally playing Russian roulette with our fate.
* the US Navy just placed their first rail-gun aboard a naval vessel
**unlike our current nuclear fission, nuclear fusion is environmentally safe.
GB…
I don’t know quite how that fusion >> fission argument ever got started — environmental impact wise — as fusion is drastically worse than fission.
Why?
The He fusion reactions — all of the variants/ combos are staggering neutron emitters. Each fusion reaction produces far more troublesome daughter radio nuclides than a uranium fission chain.
They are a pain because they activate EVERY other element in the periodic table into radio active decay isotopes.
And they do so with neutrons that have far, far, far more energy than those of a fission reaction.
So, after a fusion reactor has been running for any decent run — it’s as ‘hot’ / radio active as any fission reactor.
Worse: the primary throttle on weapons production is the scarcity of neutrons.
Once fusion reactors are in business, neutrons will be a glut on the market — able to promote thorium up to uranium (U233) at a profound tempo.
U233 is the ultimate nuclear explosive. It has all of the advantages of U235 and Pu239 combined.
Hence, the so-called thorium reactors [ a TOTAL mis-statement of what’s being burnt: uranium ] are the single WORST proliferation design to hit the drafting table.
[ U233 lends itself to back-pack nukes — uniquely so. Yiikes! ]
&&&&&&&&
Up until now the primary reactor design that has enabled nuclear proliferation has been the CANDU reactor — and its derivatives. (Heavy water moderator, un-enriched uranium fuel)
Thanks for everything, Canada.
[ BTW, Canada has entirely stopped exporting/ licensing their design for just the above reason. ]
Both the USSR and USA abandoned the thorium cycle for the dual reasons of technical impracticality and proliferation risk.
blert,
This is the first that I have heard that, “fusion is drastically worse than fission”. On the other hand, I have seen dozens of articles that claim that fusion is an inherently clean process. I have to wonder how “The He fusion reactions – all of the variants/ combos are staggering neutron emitters.” could have somehow escaped researchers.
Nor is it my understanding that thorium reactors must inherently be fusion reactors.
IMO successful, economically sound fusion reactors are a pipe dream., at least over the near term (50 yrs minimum). I disagree with blert about thorium salt reactors. From everything I have read, they do not create an abundance of fissile by products unlike uranium fueled reactors. I spent 31 years as a radtech supervisor in the commercial power reactor field. IMO, thorium is the future.
1) Thorium can’t fission to release energy.
2) It’s STRICTLY a promotable fuel that becomes burnable AFTER it has absorbed a neutron — and decayed (upward) into U233.
3) U233 has better explosive metrics than either u235 or Pu239. It was skipped past because it was a slower route to the A bomb.
4) It’s been tested.
5) Since it MUST create U233 to get any power out of the ‘thorium’ cycle — the fission decay products are of the same chain probabilities as U235 and Pu239 — allowing for radio nuclide differences.
GB…
The fact that ALL He fusion reactions are massive high energy neutron emitters has been at the forefront of design headaches from the first.
http://www.polywellnuclearfusion.com/PolywellReactor/PolywellReactor.html
The Polywell fusion scheme is the only one that has any practical viability — and it has been starved of funding.
It’s notable that the Polywell design has moved towards viability at about twenty-times the speed of the other schemes — for one-thousandth of the cost.
It should be obvious to even the retarded, by this date, that absolutely no-one has a solution for ultra high energy neutron emissions. Being neutrons, they are entirely beyond the influence of electromagnatism.
And they start out with energies drastically higher than those in a fission reactor. Meaning that you’ll have to use containments — in layers — to exceed anything yet used in fission designs.
Never forget: it’s the neutrons that are making all of the components radio-active. What they don’t irradiate — they pulverize.
&&&&&
Polywell reactors figure to be viable for deep space propulsion. They simply don’t require massive shielding.
The only issues for them are the unknowns and the unknown unknowns.
&&&&
It is a fact that all prior government funded fusion research has proved to be dual use: for directed weapons.
It was from this very field that American engineers discovered that the Soviets were actively pursuing beam weapons — that when perfected — could’ve taken out American space assets in the blink of an eye.
This eventually morphed into Reagan’s SDI, after he was shown where the Soviets were tossing their priority monies.
Yes, the USSR was going after their own Star Wars at least ten-years before Reagan’s big speech.
When you’re at the edge of technical knowledge, progress can be quite slow. This goes double for small, tight, crews working on highly speculative, highly classified, weapons schemes.
&&&&&&
There really is no such thing as a “Thorium Reactor” — it’s a uranium 233 reactor — that gets its start by burning Pu239 to kick it off.
It’s also known as a THERMAL BREEDER REACTOR. For the grand design is to so conserve neutrons that most of the energy comes from converted (bred) thorium instead of the launch fuel — which is virtually always pitched as some plutonium 239.
For the last fifteen years, the “Thorium Reactor” has been only five years away from fruition.
It will stay that way for another fifty-years.
&&&&&
When the USSR and USA were throwing mega monies at the thorium cycle, they could NEVER get ANYTHING, and they tried everything in the periodic table, to survive the ‘hot’ fluorine atoms created by U233 fission.
ALL thorium reactor designs turn on a brew of fluorides — with a touch of oxides, — maybe.
So when the uranium splits, fluorine atoms are cut loose — with a portion of the fission reaction’s energy. These simply destroy every substance in the periodic table. Nothing in nature can stand up to them.
In all conventional designs this destruction of the container is solved by pellets that are sacrificed and removed — in the fuel rod assemblies.
Consequently, the rest of the reactor can survive — and power on for decades.
In all molten salt schemes, there can be no pelletizing — and the ‘hot’ fluorine is in direct contact with the reactor’s main containment.
THIS has proved to be THE crippling design flaw that no-one has ever been able to get around.
At the end of the day, the entire corpus has to be entombed.
For by then, the whole dang thing is ‘hot’ — and ruined.
Reprocessing such a huge block of nasty radio nuclides is not even dreamed of.
We’d need Yucca’s beyond measure if the scheme is adopted and scaled up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
Th 232 ==>> U233
Forgive the typical Wiki errors…
And do note that no-one addresses the consequences of atomic fission on the containment — especially at the boundary layer.
Wiki heads off into Lotus Eater land — with concerns about what the radio nuclides would look like in the out-centuries.
( These angels-on-a-pinhead discussions are wrapped into the justifications for the thorium cycle. What they really want is a life time of research funding. Doh!)
Something else to think about.
Think about it … candle light reading, horse buggies, flies swatting … manure. The good old days will be here again!
Another thing to worry about besides the earthquake here in the Bay Area! I heard about this a couple of years ago in Colorado and it is pretty terrifying. Hope it takes another 70 thousand years to transpire and that we are prepared — whatever that means!