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Comment by gsatic | Hacker News Reader

Hurricanes can't be controlled. You just have to learn to spot when they are emerging and get out of the way.

Would be nice to have social media weather report/farmer almanac for the region, esp if you are planting crops and stuff and don't want entire fields to get wiped out.

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We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a world automatically controlled to the point where we could say, “Six hours less radio in Indonesia next week or there will be a great falling off in literary attention.” Or, “We can program twenty more hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio last week.” Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to know something about maintaining equilibrium in the commercial economies of the world. (p. 28)

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)

What a GD visionary.

I like the approach, but I'm afraid the analogy should be different. It's less like a hurricane, originating from relatively predictable areas and affecting a relatively confined area at any given moment. It's more like an epidemic / pandemic event, an outbreak of a memetic virus, with poorly predictable sources, and with area of effect growing and shrinking fast and in in more chaotic ways.

You can walk away from a hurricane. But to get protection from a pandemic, you rather need to take a vaccine, and also, sadly, limit the breadth of your contacts with strangers. The latter is basically the "social cooling" <https://www.socialcooling.com/>, buttoning-up or severing of social media interactions, visible for like last decade.

Hurricanes can absolutely be controlled we just don’t have the tech yet

... so they can't?

Hurricanes have a lot of energy. In theory we could expend all Earth's currently accessible resources to try controlling them. Barring some impossible to predict breakthroughs we cannot control hurricanes. Just like we (meatbags) cannot travel to other solar systems.

It's probably easier to prevent them from forming in the first place, for example by somehow decreasing the surface water temperature in some areas.

No idea how to actually do that though.

This happens all the time naturally. For example dust from the Saraha reduces the amount of hurricanes. The problem here that's like putting a bandaid on a laceration, the hurricane is the effect of a complex system and not a causation. By blocking it you're allowing that energy to remain in the system and have all kinds of other potentially terrible side effects.

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