If the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, I'm going to feel stupid that I spent all this effort fixing up the house.
If you don't evacuate in time and your kid comes to rescue you with their kids, you might have to pull a boat through acidic water to save them. Then you don't get to live to see your daughter fall in love with Pierce Brosnan or your grandchildren to grow up.
I'm not currently under much volcanic risk, but my grandmother's people farmed the slopes of Etna and my grandfather's were from Naples. It's possible I have a gene that protects me from lava.
Volcanoes also have weird threats, the story about Pyroclastic flows on the nearby island of Martinique is so scary. A town that thought it was protected from the volcano and then all but 3 people out of 30k died.
Those three may have had genetic protection too.
5: The story of one of the survivors -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludger_Sylbaris
On the night of 7 May 1902, the night before the eruption, Sylbaris got involved in either a bar fight or a street brawl, according to various sources, and was thrown into jail overnight for assault. Some accounts claim that Sylbaris actually killed a man and was thrown into jail for murder,[citation needed] although it is unknown if this is the correct version of events. Many sources indicate Sylbaris was frequently in trouble with the authorities. Some fictional accounts state that he had a precognitive dream and was locked up as a drunk after causing a riot.[4]
Whatever the cause of his arrest, Sylbaris was ordered to be put into solitary confinement and locked in a single-cell, bomb-proof magazine with stone walls that was built partially underground. The cell did not have windows and was ventilated only through a narrow grating in the door facing away from the volcano. His prison was the most sheltered building in the city, and this saved his life. The cell in which he survived still stands today.
At 7:52 AM on May 8, the upper mountainside of Mount Pelée tore open, causing a dense black cloud to shoot out horizontally. A second black cloud rolled upwards as a column of ash and rock, forming a gigantic mushroom plume that darkened the sky within a 50-mile (80 km) radius. The initial speed of both clouds was later calculated at more than 670 km/h (420 mph). The vertical cloud plunged down the western slope of the volcano, raced down at 161 kilometers per hour, and destroyed Saint-Pierre in less than a minute. The area devastated by the pyroclastic flow covered about 21 km2 (8.1 sq mi), with the city of Saint-Pierre taking its full brunt. The cloud consisted of superheated gases and fine debris, with searing temperatures of over 1,000 °C (1,830 °F). All of the city's infrastructure was flattened, and almost the entire population burned or suffocated.
Four days after the eruption, a rescue team heard Sylbaris' cries from the rubble of the prison. Although badly burned, he survived and was able to provide an account of the event. According to his account, at about breakfast time on the day of the eruption, it grew very dark. Hot air mixed with fine ashes entered his cell through the door grating, despite his efforts in urinating on his clothing and stuffing it in the door. The heat lasted only a short moment, enough to cause deep burns on Sylbaris' hands, arms, legs, and back, but his clothes did not ignite, and he avoided breathing the searing hot air.
Another survivor's story
I felt a terrible wind blowing, the earth began to tremble, and the sky suddenly became dark. I turned to go into the house, with great difficulty climbed the three or four steps that separated me from my room, and felt my arms and legs burning, also my body. I dropped upon a table. At this moment four others sought refuge in my room, crying and writhing with pain, although their garments showed no sign of having been touched by flame. At the end of 10 minutes one of these, the young Delavaud girl, aged about 10 years, fell dead; the others left. I got up and went to another room, where I found the father Delavaud, still clothed and lying on the bed, dead. He was purple and inflated, but the clothing was intact. Crazed and almost overcome, I threw myself on a bed, inert and awaiting death. My senses returned to me in perhaps an hour, when I beheld the roof burning. With sufficient strength left, my legs bleeding and covered with burns, I ran to Fonds-Saint-Denis, six kilometres from St. Pierre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on_Comp%C3%A8re-L%C3%A9andre
The third survivor was a young girl, Havivra da Ifrile. Now we just need to track her down and/or her children and grandchildren, and then we will be able to isolate the lava-protecting gene.
7: More from that link:
Rescuers found him and sent him to the town of Fort-de-France, where he was labeled as a madman. Shortly thereafter, he was deputized by the police, given a gun and sent to protect the ruins from looters. After a week of duty, he left the city on May 20, 1902, and started back towards Fort-de-France. He barely escaped a second death cloud. He eventually settled in the village of Morne Rouge, only to have another cloud pour through on August 30, 1902. He was again one of the few who survived.
Dude survived three of these things? Either he was really incredibly lucky or something about this story doesn't add up. (There are actually several things about this story that don't add up, and the Wikipedia article is thinly sourced. Just the initial survival is pretty amazing though.)
Or maybe he really did have the lava-protecting gene.
The gene that can get you arrested if it knows what's coming.
10: And he lived on to become kind of the Jackie Robinson of circus freak shows. Seems like someone should be working on a novel based on his life.
Sylbaris was pardoned for his crimes and later joined Barnum & Bailey's circus, touring America and recounting the horrors of the explosion. He became a minor celebrity in the process, advertised as "the man who lived through Doomsday" or "the Most Marvelous Man in the World". He was the first black man ever to star in Barnum and Bailey's "Greatest Show on Earth", which at the time was a segregated show.[citation needed] He could be seen in a replica of his cell in Saint-Pierre.
12: That's the first guy. The second guy retreated into obscurity after surviving the third death cloud.
14: Oh! Oops again! Thanks!
But my suggestion to the aspiring novelist is to conflate the two.
Note the poster claims that he is "the only living object that survived..."
16: I've looked at clouds from both ways now.
Turns out there is a non-fiction book about Sylbaris, https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Mountain-Peter-Morgan/dp/1843953560
Wikipedia seems to think that the Peter Morgan that wrote this book is the same Peter Morgan that wrote the screenplays for Frost/Nixon and The Queen, but I'm not seeing any reason to believe that's the case.
There's a strong genetic component to having the name "Morgan."
20: Not that strong - it's my sister's last name.
Well, maybe we should study that before we study volcano-resistance. Safer and easier to recruit participants.
8 what I'm hearing is maybe I need to get into more bar fights
Just don't use broken bottles as a weapon. I don't want bars here to ban glass.
I know I'm not genetically immune to broken glass.
Acquired it is, then.
Sylbaris is clearly a Judas goat.
The unwitting herald of some man eating volcano god.
Anyway, the next time a volcano kills 9,999 of every 10,000, you take the survivors, get them to have as many kids as possible, and stack the kids on a volcanic island.
Seems like that might be hard to get through the IRB.
It's really no different than the occasional human sacrifice to the volcano.
I'm not saying IRBs approve of human sacrifice. Just that it's not their area to be asked.