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Monday, January 21, 2013

Disasters You Should Not Build A Bunker For

December 31st, 1999. All around the world people spent the early part of the night partying because it was literally 1999 and Prince had mercifully been irrelevant for almost a decade. In my house streams of tears dropped into empty champagne glasses.......in the movie I was watching. I really had no reason to be sad even though I was 21 years old and had nothing better to do on New Years Eve except watch TV by myself. After all my situation was positively joyous compared to the scene about three miles away where a dear friend of mine spent the night dealing with an aunt who was convinced that Y2K was about unleash the end of things. She had spent an incredible amount of money to fortify their garage into a survival bunker.

Well Y2K turned out to be a whole lotta nothing thanks to a combination of prudent work to fix computer code and the fact that most computer networks cannot just launch a nuclear missile the second they don't know exactly what day it is.

But the experience of my friend was my first view into the strange world of doomsday bunker enthusiasts. People who spend loads of time and money preparing for events that largely never happen.

Now disasters do happen of course. Trust me I know as I grew up in California which is essentially a natural disaster test zone that just happens to have nearly 40 million people living there. But it seems that the bunker people never prepare for disasters that actually happen or actually worth preparing for. Here are four disasters commonly prepared for that just aren't worth it.

Pole Shifts



There are two types of pole shifts and are lumped together as they are often confused even though they are fundamentally different things. In the first the position of the axis of rotation stays the same relative to the mass of Earth but moves in relation to the Sun In the second the rotation of axis moves relative to the mass of Earth.

In the first type Earth has its poles move so that they no longer point roughly perpendicular to the solar plane. In our own Solar System this has happened with Uranus which rotates around an axis that pretty much points right at the Sun.

In the second type the axis roughly stays the same while the land of the Earth itself moves. In this scenario we would suddenly have two new poles at two new locations on Earth antipodal of each other (for example if the new North Pole was in Spain the new South Pole would be in New Zealand).

Now both of those types of shifts occur in a way. Clearly the first one happened to Uranus and plate tectonics makes it so that Earth's poles are never exactly the same with respect to the continents for long. That doesn't mean that you need a doomsday bunker though.

Consider this, the second type of shift happens slowly, geologically slow. As in it takes millions of years to even tell it is happening. As for the first, well it takes one hell of an event to make it happen. An extremely unlikely one. Earth has a mass of 5.9736×1024 kg and overcoming the inertia of all that mass requires an enormous amount of energy. Using this website I kept trying to get an impactor that was large enough to noticeably change Earth's axis. I got up to an object of 11,000 kilometers in diameter which only moved the axis by about 5 degrees. Anything larger than that turns Earth into a new asteroid belt.

Now keep that in mind when you find out that most of the people prepping for surviving this disaster think it will be caused not by a giant planetoid but by a highly distant object (usually a black hole in the center of the galaxy) with effectively no impact on Earth at all.

Magnetic Pole Reversal

Now magnetic reversal. It most certainly is real. The issue here is that it isn't anything to worry about.

In a magnetic reversal the polarity of Earth's electro-magnetic dynamo suddenly shift until they are inverted. Thus after a reversal the magnetic North Pole would now be somewhere in Antarctica.

That has no noticeable physical effect that would warrant a bunker. The biggest impact on humanity would be the temporary loss of the magnetic field's protection from UV rays while the reversal happens. But in the short term this would be mitigated by the substantial atmosphere of Earth. By the time the atmosphere would no longer offer protection the reversal would be over.

Hundreds of magnetic reversals have taken place over Earth's history with no correlation to any extinction event. It will make your compass go weird. If you think you really need a bunker for that go right ahead and indulge yourself. 


EMP burst

Ah yes. The dreaded EMP burst. Usually from a high altitude nuclear blast.

Now an EMP burst is real. But who would use them? The technical sophistication needed to get a nuclear device into position to be useful as an EMP burst is so far along the ballistic trajectory towards its target that it might as well continue on and detonate the old fashioned way.

And while you might think a rogue party can get their hands on one and use it well, keep in mind these things are line of sight. One burst would only effect a limited area. Society as it would exist outside that area would be able to gather its resources and help out.

So, again, a bunker is just not needed for this.


Dirty Bomb

As with the EMP burst you have to understand that few of these things would likely be used. A state with a respectful nuclear arsenal is just going to straight up nuke you and not bother with the unnecessary contrivance of a dirty bomb.

Furthermore a dirty bomb is even more geographically limited than an EMP burst. It really sounds a lot scarier than it actually is.

Zombies!

Well there are two types of zombies. The first is the classic Hollywood version: reanimated dead people. The second is a person who is not dead but somehow no longer in control of their own faculties. A puppet of sorts.

The first is just absurd. I have yet to have anyone explain to me a plausible mechanism for reanimating dead flesh. What is the metabolic mechanism? How are nerve impulses transmitted?

That is just not happening and most people seem to know that.

The second almost seems plausible. It sort of fits right in with the idea of a supervirus. In that an infectious agent somehow turns a person into a lurching brain hungry drone.

However I have my doubts that any evolutionary pressures could create such a pathogen. If someone thinks of something let me know. In the meantime I would advise to build a bunker for something like an earthquake.

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