We want PROPHETS. And Seers. And Revelators.
On April 6, 2009, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake devastated the small town of L’Aquila in central Italy. It was caused by movement on a northwest-southeast fault in a region long known for tectonic activity and volcanism (there is a reason for Vesuvius and all those Alps). Over 300 people died.
There were a number of fore-shocks, something not unusual for an earthquake-prone region, called fore-shocks only because a big shock followed. These were sufficiently strong that local officials asked for advice from six seismologists and a government official. A week before the main event, these individuals gathered as a panel to review the data, and afterwards at a press conference assured the public that they were in no danger. Their reasoning: that any potential accumulated fault energy was already being dissipated by these small shocks. But then the monster quake hit a week later.
In May 2011, an Italian judge gave the go-ahead for a trial for these individuals. The charge: manslaughter. In 2012 they were all found guilty – and jailed.
What’s happening here? Seven individuals were charged in court for failing to predict correctly the devastation that was about to happen. They could spend up to 12 years in jail.
Is this right? Can you throw people in jail for failure to prophesy correctly? Italian jurisprudence certainly seemed to think so. At last check, the original draconian sentence was thrown out, then reinstated, and then thrown out again by higher courts. Stay tuned.
The consequences of this trial are being felt far and wide in the scientific community. There have been impassioned letters sent to the Italian judge by European scientific societies, and many other science entities including the American Geophysical Union.
The US Geological Survey felt sufficiently moved by this decision to host a two-hour-long, web-based briefing for USGS scientists about legal liability for doing their science under United States law.
The bottom line for USGS scientists: if you do your job in good faith, you are not culpable because of several protective federal laws, and you are untouchable by any state or municipal government because of the Supremacy Clause in the US Constitution. That translates to relief for American seismologists – sort of.
A volcanic eruption can be fairly well forecast: the timing approximately, but the extent of damage and duration less so. Some eruptions can be predicted five months out; for others there may be as little as 15 minutes warning from the onset of the first unusual rock-breaking seismicity to an explosive eruption. The short warning usually correlates with the fact that the particular volcano was poorly instrumented, if at all. The geophysicists couldn’t see any evidence that anything was happening until an eruption was just coming to life, because they didn’t have data from close-in instruments.
A hurricane can be forecast in a narrower window of time, but again, the extent of damage can only be estimated ahead of time very imprecisely.
Earthquakes cannot be predicted (Hough, 2009), though they can be roughly forecast. The Dow Jones Industrial average cannot be predicted, though amoral people are constantly trying to game the system to gain an unfair information advantage.
In these two cases – earthquakes and the Dow Jones – you can make some statistical forecasts based on past history, but they assume history will be repeated. Most people would consider a statement like “There is a 31 percent chance that the Hayward Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area will rupture in the next 50 years”... to be close to useless for them personally. “So, what am I supposed to do about it?” But this information is not totally useless: you can use this number to appeal for more funds to retrofit buildings and strengthen building codes. Or you could also move to the Mid-West and have a go at tornado-dodging.
The FACT of your death can be predicted, in the sense that it will happen. Forecasting the TIMING of your death is less predictable: your lifestyle and parents’ longevity weakly correlate with how long you can expect to live, but that’s about all that science can say. Statistically, Mormons live longer and also live healthier lives, but an LDS Church friend, a chef, died several years ago of lung cancer from who-knows-what fumes in his restaurant grill.
Scientists are not prophets, nor seers, nor revelators… though these roles are something that we as a society implicitly demand of politicians and leaders. Some of our readers will be surprised to hear that there actually are “prophets, seers, and revelators” around these days. We had these in ancient times, and we have had them again now for nearly two centuries. We personally know people “saved” by having a food storage system in place in obedience to the recommendations of a modern prophet. One of us has lived longer than his maternal grandmother did, in large part because of a set of prophetic instructions he has followed, called the Word of Wisdom, given in 1835.
We all make bargains, in terms of what we will accept as risk in our chosen professions. Field ecology and research geophysics are moderately dangerous fields as a career choice. One of us has nearly been killed by Shigella in the Venezuelan jungle, by a sand cobra in Mauritania, by a hunter taking a “sound shot” at him in the Sierra Nevadas of California, by an incompetent helicopter pilot in Venezuela, and even by the frigid sea in Alaska. As professions, ecology and geophysics are both less dangerous than being a fireman or police officer. One of us once worked as a wildland firefighter during three summers while in college, when large-scale forest fires in southern California nearly caught him twice in fast-moving fire-storms. This job is still far less dangerous than working as a Barents Sea crab fisherman, who statistically die in Alaska at truly startling rates. And we wouldn’t give up our research jobs easily because they are just so darn much fun.
This is the bargain many people have struck with their life: we choose research and learning, but they’re balanced with the excitement (and danger) that goes along with them (see our Faust chapter).
As a friend once put it, we make our bed where we choose – but then we must sleep in it, too.