Hey folks, it's Quinn. Since we recorded this conversation, we've renamed the podcast. It used to be called important, not important, which is what you'll hear in the episode, and it's still the name of the company. But now the podcast is called, the most important question.
That is, what can I do? It's the question we get the most from all of you, and it turns out it's the question I've really been asking guests for almost 200 episodes now. So here we are, the most important question. Please enjoy this old conversation.
Thanks for listening, and thanks for giving us shit. Welcome to important, not important. My name is Quinn Emmett, and I'm Brian Colberg Kennedy. Teddy is not joining us today.
He declined to come to work. So, it's a big thing. We're not paying for this, right? I think it's more like a personal mental health day.
That's fine. That's fine. You need to. This is episode 23 with Josh Basham, and we asked a question, assuming it hasn't happened by the time this publishes, which it's fucking entirely possible.
Can we predict the next big earthquake, Brian? Well, you'll have to listen to find out, because his answer was actually very interesting. It's a little more complicated than we thought, right? Yeah, yeah.
I like the part we told us, we're gonna be roasted like marshmallows. He did, he said it a couple times. Also the phrase, question death was said a lot. As if that's a specific, I guess it is probably specific terminology.
That's just so terrible. It's so spectacular. But yeah, elevators, you know, here's the thing. Take the stairs, great for your heart, so great for your legs.
You're not stuck in a box with your farting coworkers. Yeah. You're also not stuck in a box being roasted like a marshmallow. You're melting coworkers.
Could save your life in an earthquake in so many ways. Yeah. I honestly take the stairs all the time, unless I'm going somewhere very, very tall, I really choose it. Mm-hmm.
I can see that from your athletic fitness. Thank you very much. This is a really good one. Very good one.
I hope so, because it might have been our last one. Might have been our last one. Okay. This is our last one together before I split to these coasts, which is how we did our first view, right?
That is true. Which I've never listened to those. No, they were fine. Anyways, I want to see you for a couple months.
A couple months here. It happens every year. Won't see Teddy. And I hate it.
It makes me feel a little unhinged. But hey, your life's good. Everything's fine. Come on, you're gonna have a great time.
It'll be good. We'll Skype. We'll Google Hangout. I just wanna see your face.
I can Skype. Hey, by the time this comes out, we're probably well past the primaries in California. Yes. Number of scientists, Jess Phoenix, and doctors and others, possibly, we're possibly still running for office.
In California's weird election system. Man, sending good vibes away, hopefully some of them left. Seriously. We were talking about the future, but hopefully.
All the best vibes. Speaking of elections and earthquakes, and places to live. Uh huh, I know where this is going. It's a great segue.
One positive of living on Asgardia, in Asgardia, undefined, wherever that might end up. Both, on and in work. Well, no earthquakes. No earthquakes, impossible.
Well, that's what I mean by hasn't been defined. I mean, on a space station, sure, you're straight. If you guys settle on some sort of moon or planet, who fucking knows? Absolutely, but the Asgardia is an orbiting satellite vote.
That's 100% established. Yeah, although Jack. I would always check on that. And where is it orbiting?
What planet's area body? Well, currently at the beginning stages is orbiting Earth. Uh huh, beginning theoretical stages. It's not that.
But once complete, Asgardia will never be landing anywhere. It will be in space. There are no plates smashing into each other under the ground. We have to watch out for alien attacks.
Right, I was gonna say other threats, go. Certainly, I would say number one is, well, number one is probably just like collapse of the society that was probably poorly constructed. Sure, maybe something to do with their fabled monetary system. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
That's gonna be a tough one. And then sort of more excitingly is alien attacks for sure, I would imagine. But we're gonna have some sort of anti-alien defense system with lasers and. Maybe build a wall.
And they'll be with some walls. Yeah, they'll be. Come on, man. I'm gonna look at the website and I'm not sure what's up.
This is sounding basic. I think it's season four battle star. I think you're just describing what happened. Got it, got it.
That's great. I'll keep you guys depressed. Thank you, thank you. Hey, folks, we're doing pretty well, man.
We are somehow a fucking Top 100 podcast. Someone's seeing. It's crazy. We're top 10 science medicine.
We don't like to do it on a horn, if it helps more people find us. And we can send some more action and activate it, folks. Like you on the world. Fuck yeah, man.
We are bootstrapped here. We don't have a big or any. Or any advertising budget. We should get Teddy like a t-shirt for when we walk him.
That'd be so great. You ever tried to put like a shirt or a sweater or something on a dog? First of all, don't, because it's dumb. Seems like a terrible idea.
Second of all, a lot of times they just stand there because they don't know what to do. I was gonna say, yeah, my experience is with cats, but it's the same thing. They just don't move. As if somehow they are, all their limbs are, yeah, unmovable.
Right? Is if all cats were immovable. Such a monster for saying that. Anyways, we are growing entirely because listeners like you are sharing us with your friends.
Not in a sexual way. I would have remembered that. I would have remembered that. Yeah.
Share with your friends. Forcefully if you have to. Take their phones out of their hands. Take them right out.
You can click right on Apple Podcast. Nothing is weird or, yes, side note. Even like my wife. You take someone else's phone and you are confronted by their home screen and how they've arranged their app.
And your first thought is always like, this is madness. Is this specifically for you though, because you are the most OCD person I know. Oh, it's not good. I would do this.
I saw yours today and I was blown away. It's too much. No, no, no. It's organized in a very systematic way.
Anyways, here's the key though, which most people don't do. They fucking flip through the screens. They dig into a folder, pull down or cut the left. Search box.
Podcasts or if you use Castbox or PocketCast or Stitcher or whatever the fuck. Search important on port everywhere. Just click on subscribe and to be clear, just remember, you still were still talking about you holding your friends phone. Maybe they went to the bathroom or something else.
And then Ryan was like, hey, what are you doing my phone? It was a security update for your safety. Hey, Dave, you're welcome. You're welcome.
Stop being such a dick, Dave. You're welcome. It's a security update. I'm trying to protect you because Russia.
It's always Dave. I always think you're doing weird shit with this shit. We're just hoping. I'm trying to take care of you.
Right? But seriously, do that. That would be so great. Anyways, I can feel bad about it.
It works every time. Every time. Okay. So speaking of feeling both really good about yourself, he's so positive.
Yeah, he really was. He's trying to make a really good change in the world. Yeah. Okay.
Let's go talk to Josh. Smash him. Yeah, let's go. Our guest today is Josh Basham and together we're going to ask kind of a crazy question about earthquakes.
Assuming she doesn't come like right now, are we maybe going to be able to predict the big one? Josh, welcome. Hey, thanks for having me, Quinn. We appreciate it.
Very glad to have you. Josh, tell us real quick who you are and what you do. Sure. So I'm founder at early morning labs and principal investigator on our official partnership with the US Geological Survey, which is part of the Department of Interior.
Awesome. Very cool, man. And how did you come on that? What made you go like Earthwakes, man?
Yeah, that's a great question. It really comes from my passion in disaster preparedness and emergency management. I was involved as a volunteer for over seven years teaching a curriculum called the Community Emergency Response Team through FEMA and then later the Citizen Corps. So it was through the federal government.
It was a federal program where we actually train and qualify volunteer search and rescue teams to become federal assets in the event of disasters. And I just learned so much about disaster preparedness and mitigation and morbidly, you know, where to find bodies and earthquakes and things like that. I realized the value of being able to know that an earthquake is about to happen, even if it's just a minute or so. Sure, sure.
Yeah. And it makes you, I assume, go like, well, wait a minute. Could we crack this thing? Yeah, shouldn't we be fine?
Exactly. Exactly. And we were very fortunate to be introduced to the smartest minds in earthquakes, the US Geological Survey, Caltech and UC Berkeley. They had been working for almost 30 years to try to find a way to implement an earthquake warning system here in America.
And we just happened to get in touch with them right as they were ready to commercialize it. That's awesome. And well, we're going to dig into that for sure. Yeah.
Yeah. Let's get it going here. Let's set up our conversation for today. Our listeners are action oriented people.
They get shit done. And so we want to make sure that we're asking questions that aren't just super interesting, but also provoke action. And we'll do that throughout the whole conversation today so that we can build to some specific steps that they can take the stop earthquakes with their hands. Because that's what you do.
From what I understood, that's what we're going on. I assume that's what we'll get the answer to at the end of this. So Josh, we start with one important question. It's at the heart of why you're here today.
So instead of saying, tell us your life story, like everybody else, we make things difficult on ourselves and a little bit on you. And we like to ask, Josh, why are you vital to the survival of the species? In the next big earthquake, that's a big one. Right.
Anywhere from 10 to 20,000 people could die. And there could be 50,000 injuries. With earthquake really wanting properly implemented, we can prevent roughly half of that. Wow.
If in this career, I save just one life and make one less person that our first responders would have volunteered professional, have to rescue or save, then it's worth it. Wow. That continues the streak of people on the podcast that are better people than us. Way better.
Jesus. I mean, come on. We got to stop asking this question. One time I'm just going to ask Brian and see what happens.
Oh man. That was deep. It was very deep. You know, we don't want to put you on the...
You know, it's funny, man. We've gotten a lot of really awesome constructive criticism and input from some real people. We do a great conversationalist in America, which is we feel honored and lucky to have. And you know, they vary on how to build your questions and when to ask them and what kind to ask when and how to how to ease a guest in versus kind of jumpstarting things.
And this is one I just feel like we've had some fun with. We've had answers ranging from like, I'm not. You're an idiot to one like that, which is so composed and makes me feel like, yeah, yeah, look at the man in the mirror and makes changes. Well, what's the biggest challenges that we have right now is public education.
Right. And we can have discussions like this on, you know, whether it's a news story or a podcast. I mean, you're doing a big part of getting people just familiarized and know that this technology is there so they can actually do something with it. Right.
So it's you're an integral part of this and I appreciate that. All right. You're not going to mirror. Give yourself a big thumbs up.
There's a reason Josh asked if this was a visual podcast video. I was like, good God. Nobody wants to see the video of me just going to town on this croissant over here right now. All right.
So as described before we get going, we're going to set up some context for this question. That means it's time for a segment because we're not original. We've titled Context 101 with Professor Brian. This one of you, sometimes they're super factual or historic or really nerdy.
Sometimes they're a little more philosophical. Today's earthquakes. I look forward to being proven wrong. I can only assume most of Brian's earthquake research is based on repeated viewings of Christopher Reeve flying around the world in the original Superman movie.
It's still the best comic book movie to be clear. Incredible. However wrong the science may have been. Doesn't matter.
You know, it's fantasy. Easy. Okay. Okay.
Here we go. I mean, earthquakes. They're the worst. Fuck them.
Right. Just. Sure. Good start.
Next time hurricanes, fires, tsunamis, volcanoes, tornadoes, we have some sort of warning and it totally varies. You know, hurricanes a week to a day depending on how they change course down to tornadoes, which just come up almost out of nowhere and bail right down the goddamn block. But like, there's a little bit of, there's a few minutes at least and there are horrible and a ton of people. Right.
It sounds like your whole thing is just a caveat so far, which is, and I'll jump on, which is yes, there are nine years and many of them are getting much more frequent and worse. But earthquakes, man. I mean, first of all, they come from from in the earth inside the earth. This is, this is like expert level seventh grade science class.
Doesn't that like give you a primal fear? Yeah. Yes. I mean, look, anything that comes from inside the earth or I guess from the sky or from space, like Armageddon's still my favorite movie, but it's complicated.
There's a lot going on there, you know, but other things that give me primal fear, like peeing on a moving vehicle, like a plane or I don't, you know, I don't mean on it, but like in a bathroom when you're on it. Right. So so many strangers. Anyways, I feel.
I'm sorry. Is he presenting a diorama as well? Just like in seventh grade? Like I said, it's not good that we're so lucky this is working on the visual aspect.
We're working on the visual aspect. Can't hear this. All right. So, yeah, I'm going to be so small.
Yeah. So, all right. Here we go. Here's how an earthquake work as far as I can tell.
Okay. This is going to be good. So there's like these giant plates. They're sitting on top of earth's mantle and they're constantly moving around super slow.
Super slow. Josh, like I heard once it was like speed of fingernails growing or something. Right. Well, right.
Yeah, you know, they varied in general. Yeah, that's a good benchmark. Okay. That is insane.
How is that possible? That's what we want you to explain, right? Okay. Okay.
All right. Okay. So anyway, they're either pushing against each other really slow or sometimes away from each other, and that's how I made my third baby. But you love them so much.
I do sometimes even the most of all of them. No, you. All right. So earthquakes and also happen on fault lines, right?
Like the San Andreas, which I'm like 10,000% sure is right under our feet here. You remember we had there as quick during the one podcast and Teddy, the wonder dog didn't even fucking wake up. It's so weird and scary. Very scary.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Anyways, it's I don't think it's right under us.
I think it's all further up the mountains. But regardless, your fucking motorcycle is going to drop right down in that baby. Thanks. Anyways, continue.
Yeah. Very helpful. The Californians worry about it all the time, but are they everywhere? Yeah.
Well, you know, they're listen, it depends on where you are, right? Not everybody's worried about earthquakes. Thank God. Okay.
So like the worst area is the Ring of Fire, which is like Chile up through South America to the West Coast under our feet sort of out to Japan, Alaska, etc. Not cool. And then number two is from Indonesia, the Hava Island. And it goes like the Himalayas with the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
Right. I mean, I think the plates pressing together is actually the causes mountains and such too, right? Like the Himalayas, that's why they're so big. That's how mountains are made.
All right. So anyway, so then there's a third major one in the middle Atlantic range, that's kind of explanatory. And you know, so anyway, point is earthquakes, they're the things of nightmares, you know, and we need to be prepared. People when coming get under a desk or something, don't go outside.
Right. Or what is? Ah, right. What if we knew they were coming?
Okay. That's the question, right? The game changer. I mean, I know how it would feel a lot better.
All right. So with that for some context, I cannot wait to hear Josh just destroy that whole thing. Yeah. Let's double down on and dig into our question of the week, which is Josh, man, is there a chance we can predict the big one?
Have we, I guess you, not we specifically, Brian, Brian didn't job interview fail. Have we cracked these things? So there's a copy out there, right? So I wanted to find prediction.
Yeah. Prediction, we can't predict earthquakes. Okay. Really what we are doing is this early detection.
So similar, but different right? Prediction implies that we know that it's going to happen before it happens. Really what we are doing is detecting these earthquakes so fast that we can actually outrun them. So that's, that's what we've been able to figure out and technology has allowed us to be able to detect these earthquakes.
So it is, it's post earthquake pre-shaking. So just like you see lightning before you hear thunder. This is, this is the same theory. We're actually detecting these sound waves and before, right, we're detecting them at the speed of light.
Okay. They're moving the speed of sound. So if we can detect these earthquakes at the speed of light and we can send that warning ahead of the earthquake faster than it's propagating, that's early warning. And that's actually exactly what we're doing.
That's amazing. And you were already doing the thing that we tried to do, which is again, I always used to use the word dumb it down for our audience and for Brian. Sorry, but more take it down to its basis level so we can start with again, the context of what these things are. And you said important thing.
You said there's the earthquake and then the shaking because like lightning and thunder. So again, using the Superman analogy or the rock flying around in his helicopter in St. Andreas, because he's a pilot too. The earthquake is not what is splitting open under our feet or is it?
So the earthquake is actually, so we're talking about the slow creep of these faults and that's what the San Andreas is doing. But the earthquake is the plates are moving, but where they're actually touching, they're not moving. So it's building up this resistance like in a rubber band and finally all of a sudden it releases and it's unzipping California. So it's theoretical.
With no bark, with no happy ending. Oh, wow. I like that. Well done.
Wow. Okay. All right. What you joked about, you know, your dog just being lazy and not knowing anything, but you know, we hear about animals and dogs in particular go and just freakin nuts.
Right. And what's funny is they're actually hearing these P waves. They're sensing these P waves. That's what the sensors, the 900 or so sensors we have on the West Coast right now are listening for the same thing.
So theoretically dogs and animals to some degree have been doing earthquake early warning their own lives. Teddy clearly has been you think maybe some cats and cats probably cats and cats. There. Mmm.
Well, all right. And why haven't we been able to not predict but early detect these things before? What makes earthquakes so different if the root of the causes of moving so slow? I mean, obviously there again to caveat, we realize they're inside the earth.
So unlike hurricanes, we can't see them either with our eyes when they're coming or with satellites. Again, asking the dumbest question. Why don't we have something like radar under the cross and the cross? I'm not trying to sound stupid, but I want to dial it down to understand how far you've come.
Yeah. Well, it's, you know, it's cost prohibitive. There's only so much that they can spend and only so many resources that the federal government has allocated and the universities and also private funding, the Gordon Beddingmore Foundation, were huge, a huge piece of building the preliminary proof of concept system that we had running like seven years ago. So ultimately it's both funding and just the general resources and the support behind the network.
So let's take it back even further. So you talk about it. They can only put so much in. Brian and I have been discussing one of my biggest peeps and reading about how much the US has spent in natural disaster damage funding over the past 18 months versus what we spend proactively.
But at the same time, we'll get that back up. Tell us exactly how the system works, literally to what is in the ground and where is it sending a signal? How does it send it? How do we react it?
How does it get to your system? Sure. So when an earthquake happens, right, that happens at the epicenter. That can be close to the surface.
It can be super deep. At the epicenter, that's measured as magnitude. We always hear that. We always hear 4.7.
It was a 6.7. It's Northridge. It's an 8.0. Something like that.
That's what people are very familiar with and how we measure the size of an earthquake at its source. Now when that earthquake happens, we talked a little bit about this. It releases the P waves and the S waves. They're traveling roughly the speed of sound.
P waves are faster than the S waves. So those P waves are emitted first and those reach the sensors first. So those 900 or so sensors on the West Coast are actively listening for those P waves. We have those sensors that have to detect those P waves.
With that, they can estimate the size of the earthquake. They can estimate how bad the shaking is going to be. Those S waves that are following the P waves, how bad those are going to be. They can triangulate where the earthquake is.
They can roughly say how deep it is. With that data, that in itself is the earthquake early detection piece. That's then shared with early warning labs with us. We actually model out how bad the shaking is going to be.
Not at the epicenter. We care about where our users are. So whether it's our app users or commercial users, the buildings, the high rises we have this installed in. We can tell them exactly how bad the shaking is going to be.
Those seismic waves reach their location. We can tell them within a second or two how long they have until those strike the location. Now, I mentioned magnitude before because I wanted to bring up intensity. Some modified Mercale intensity scale, MMI is a scale of 1 to 10.
That's the number that is how bad the shaking is going to be estimated at the end user's location. That's the number we always hear about. Sorry, the magnitude is what you hear. MMI is the new earthquake early warning number that you would see and you can set thresholds at.
That's a scale of 1 to 10. Oh, interesting. Well, you guys are in Studio City. Let's say there could be 8.0 down by the salt and sea.
And you guys could get, say, 40, 50 seconds of warning. But your intensity could be anywhere from who knows, five, six, seven. And it's unrelated to the to the. Oh, is that going to be confusing for folks since they've grown up their whole lives here and like, oh, anything above a six or seven is going to be pretty decent above a nine and we're all toast below a five and get out of bed.
That's a great question. And the answer to that is we've dumped it down as much as possible. So with the modified Mercale scale, it actually has a verbal description. For each level.
So it goes from weak to strong to violent to extreme. So people can get sort of a general sense of how that shaking is going to be. So is that when you send out an alert? Does it just have the numbers that have both of those things?
Has the number as that as the countdown? Gotcha. That's great. Okay.
That's really interesting. So what has you talked about funding, of course, allows for all of these things? What has changed technology wise? What has changed?
Because I don't know the time frame technology wise for how this has evolved to be able to develop a system like this for someone to finally say like, we could start to roll this kind of thing out and have it actually work. The past few administrations, the funding for these programs has been roughly the same. For currently there was an ask for a significant amount. It was proposed to actually completely cut the system.
However, we had the representative support and the proof of concepts and the implementation to show the success of the system. And to date, actually with the omnibus bill that was passed, the funding for the shakler, the earthquake early warning system, it's actually doubled from last year. And now we have state and local cities and states, forking over millions, if not tens of millions of dollars to support and sort of match the federal funds. So we've really been building up momentum the last sort of three years on the government side to continue to expand this network across the rest of the United States and continue to increase the sensor saturation up in the Pacific Northwest.
And of course, that Alaska, Hawaii, the next states to come on board. So it's been kind of in this sort of slow burn consistent development over seven years or so. Now it's production ready and it's in its groups like us, partners with the USGS are actually making this commercially available to hospitals, high-rise buildings, schools, things of that nature. So you have a public-private partnership, which is always, I think, helpful.
There's so many people that are like, NASA should do everything and there's people like SpaceX, NASA's dad's SpaceX should do and don't realize how much it depends on each other. And how much that will continue to be the case going forward because private companies can have a lot of more, I mean SpaceX is a public company that's different than a public partnership where it's a state or federal government or local where in most cases, when the big numbers come about, it's really only a federal government that can pony up that kind of cash. But, so I'm curious, let's just say, let's start here and then I do want to shift because it's important to do so. But what is your number?
What is the funding number to blanket the West Coast for you to not sit back? Because it sure doesn't sound like your trying to get your sits back and rest on this fucking world. But to go like, all right, West Coast, cover. What kind of funding number are we talking about?
So I realize it's probably a more complicated question, but I'm just super curious. So we're at $20 million for the next year, right? That's double of what was hoped for, which is great. It's still short of the total amount that we want to have the Rolls Royce of this system, right?
So let's just say we're getting the brand new 4-F-150, okay? Which is going to get the job done and it's going to work really well. The build out, I mean, it's a big process and it's a long process. But the good news is we have really good sensor density in the populated areas, so we can actually have some really good success with the earthquake early morning.
So the solid number is something that the USGS is managing and dealing with and doing a great job. And I think they're happy with the funding that they have. It could always be more. But thank gosh, it's not less.
So we're in a really good spot. Okay, that's interesting. But again, if you would your brothers and you can say this to the NIH to anybody, if you were like, look, we could roll this out if we had the dough to do it. We can make all those people with the New York article.
New York article was that two years ago now. You'll just a little bit better. What kind of funding are we truly talking about to really roll that out? The specific number, I don't know offhand, to be completely honest.
I know roughly $57 million to have the ideal rollout. Okay. I mean, like I just for myself, part-time super nerd and our listeners, we just didn't have any context. So that's just important for folks when they're looking and thinking about how they can activate and ask their congress people for these type of things.
Yeah, 100%. Interesting. 57 million. So here's where I want to pivot a little bit.
So we've got listeners in 64 country. Not everywhere can afford a system like that. America hasn't even put forth the money to do it. Yes, it's all newish, of course.
And there's so many competing venues for that money and very legitimate needs. But I mean, unlike a satellite, right, for a hurricane, that can turn a couple degrees and look at a different part of the planet. These systems need local, regional build out, right? And that's often where they need the most.
So China, Indonesia, these are all very different countries, but the point is they're not a wealthy country like this. I mean, China doesn't have some respect in some ways, not at all. China, Indonesia, Syria, I mean, good lord, Haiti, Iran, Pakistan, Peru, some of those deadly earthquakes with little resources, if any, to build a system like this. And aside from Haiti and Indonesia, those are basically where the worst disasters have been body count wise.
Most of those go pretty far back though. But at the same time, aside from Haiti and Indonesia, obviously, which are both in the past, I guess, Indonesia's with 2004, so 15 years or so. But even since then, populations have exploded. Body count only theoretically rise.
So if it costs almost $60 million to recover the West Coast, which is a large landmass, how do we, I don't even know the question to ask. What is the method for looking at these countries and finding a proactive way to build them out there? Is there international funding and appetite for this sort of thing? So yeah, that's a great question.
So we've been involved with the United Nations, the UNI-SDR and UNESCO. We've participated, we've spoken at some of their global events, and they have an earthquake early warning, I'm sorry, a hazard early warning working group. And we've been sharing this, you know, the concept and the information together with Mexico and Japan, there are other two of the major countries that have some sort of an earthquake early warning system. So we've been working on kind of spreading that message and helping people understand how it can be implemented on the global scale.
UC Berkeley has done some very cool research and development with Deutsche Telekom, where they've actually created a cool application which can do crowdsourced earthquake early warning using the accelerometers on phones. Oh, God. I mean, it went from look at this cool game where you can pick out the differences in the pictures. Do you like a car doing all-time with tests and crowdsourcing earthquake advance notices?
Amazing. Yeah. And we're very fortunate to have Berkeley as one of the collaborative universities, right? So the US can afford to have $20,000, $30,000 sensor sites in each location.
That can be as expensive as that. How much ground is it? I'm sorry to interrupt again. So fascinating.
How much? Again, to paint a picture. How much ground is the sensor cover? What kind of area are we talking about?
So that's a good question. I don't know the answer to that question. That would be something that I have to ask Caltech and the scientists that are 10 times smarter than I am. Easy.
Easy. And again, that's another great part about the public private partnership, right? We came into it with the software, the technical, the hardware, the commercialization expertise, the tech expertise that theoretically, you know, they didn't have, but they have the smartest scientists, which we would never be able to get. That's one of the really true things about this public private partnership that you kind of talked about earlier.
But in general with the seismometers, they need to be spread out along the fault lines, right? They need to be within proximity to detect the earthquake soon enough. You get an early warning to the populated areas. So typically you'll see more sensor density in the populated areas.
And then as you kind of get out, just strategically placed by the faults to be able to pick up those P waves. So distances can really vary, right? You can have sensors. We have sensors in the US that pick up earthquakes in Mexico, right?
I mean, what do we... How big are... I'm trying to picture one of these sensors. Is it a pencil in the ground?
Is it a cell phone tower? What does this thing look like? It's funny, we're actually just looking at some decommissioned ones this morning. They can be anywhere from the size of...
At least they don't. A large... A washer. And if it could be shaped by that.
I'd say much smaller than that, right? A size of like a can of soup to the size of a football. God, okay. So you're not really running into like eminent domain issues with these things necessarily.
You're not like the cell phone towers where people going like, I should sell service and people going, but you're not putting it in my backyard. You're like, can I put this kind of soup and save your life? Well, that's... I wish we could just say it was just unfortunately we have to have all the telemetry, the power, the IP.
We have to have a small culvert. It has to be somewhat underground to be shielded from just surface like trucks driving by and people plowing their fields and stuff like that. So a big portion of the expense is just getting it underground in a good spot with the right telemetry. Getting it in basements of buildings and things like that is great.
But one of the biggest challenges that we've learned is... Even if it's just on federal land is a lot of the environmental approvals that need to happen to be able to get this. And even the USGS has some challenges with that. So that's a hurdle.
I mean, it's an actual liable. It's a measurable hurdle that they have to deal with. Even as part of the Department of Interior, they still have to deal with a lot of regulations just to get this life saving tuck into the ground. Hey guys, it's Quinn.
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And now it can be your go to for podcasts too. Sure. Now I'm going to use a buzzword because that's annoying. Because one of the ways that we've been told autonomous cars are going to be so much more reliable and safe in the future is that they are networked together and constantly learning.
So if your car breaks short, every other test on the range, on the network is going to apply that situation and store it in its bank. It can only learn. I mean, that's how machine learning works. You train it on a series of images and it learns from the mic and applies.
Is there anything like that going on with these systems at all? Are they smart at all? Is there anything that they can be learning along the way that can constantly be improving itself? Or are they relatively, I want to say dumb because clearly not.
But you understand what I mean, like not network, not necessarily learning. You know, in a way, they're doing that right. They have algorithms that are processing the seismic data, the waveform data. It's fairly standard.
They'll test it back over all sorts of waveform data and see, okay, that was an explosion or that was seismicity from an earthquake across the Earth that has actually traveled through the center of the Earth and they can identify those types of waveforms and are able to filter that out. So from my understanding, I don't think there's any machine learning type processing that's happening right now. But as with other technologies, I mean, I could see that being applicable to earthquake early warning and hopefully in the near future. Wow.
Let's go. So just send the world these my way once we get all that. So exactly. From where we are now, how much can we realistically expect a system like this to continue to improve, you know, in response time in the next five, 10, 20 years and so on?
Yeah, great question. So there is a scientific limit to where we can get this. Right. There's a top end of warning time that just physically we can't, we can't exceed because the earthquake is happening and we can only detect it so fast.
We can only send an early warning so fast. So there's a top end there. Right. Room for us to improve this right with with more sensors, a little bit faster telemetry, faster computing.
The computing on our end is about as fast as it's going to get. I mean, maybe we can shave off 10th of seconds, but which really isn't a measure. I mean, there's no benefit to having, you know, 20 seconds or 20.01 seconds. Right.
So there's no way to really like you said, it happens and then we can send a signal, you can compute it and run that algorithm and send the signals fast as it can. But there's no way to keep stepping back from before it happens. Like you said, because it's a build up in the rubber band, there's no way to start encroaching on that tension. Is there to say like, it's where, you know, where there always like, oh, the big one in Los Angeles San Francisco is way overdue to make that much more specific as it builds up.
There's not like sort of rates of tension where we could be like, it is definitely coming in the next 12 years type of thing. Yeah. And they've tried, they've tried to figure out ways to do that. A couple of years ago, I remember there was an earthquake warning issued because of some increased seismic activity.
And there was a lot of debate about that as to whether that was, you know, a legitimate warning to have. The only reason that that went out was because there was a slightly higher likelihood that we were going to have a big earthquake due to some seismicity and that's factual, right? If we have a big earthquake, there is a higher risk of having that possibly being a foreshock, right? But as time goes by, it's like days, the chance of that just drops drastically.
So there's kind of some correlation there. That being able to predict it just still hasn't been a feasible science. The consensus is that it's impossible, at least right now. And maybe, you know, maybe that could, like machine learning could, it could be applicable there to try to see if there's a way where we can somehow predict it.
Right. It's something that we just, and again, this is, this is a really, really shitty, lazy application of machine learning where everyone did it goes, Oh, deep learning. It'll fix everything. That's not how it works.
It can play, it can play go and it cannot drive a car. It can drive a car. That one cannot play go like these things do not cross balance. That's why we don't have general AI.
And we may never not. Whoops, that's a double negative coffee. But at the same time, you do look at this and go, but there is data in this. And there is, even if there isn't an earthquake or a big one at any point, that pension is there.
And one of the benefits of machine learning, as far as we can understand, is it is built to train itself on reams of data that we as just beyond our ability, our bandwidth and our comprehension. And sometimes that gets to, you know, as it is with the mind and go to black box, that is where we don't know why or how it did that, just that it did. And we like the answer. I am just curious if there's some way to just to gather that and apply it in some way to almost, you know, back data before these things happen.
Right, big data, you know, looking at the seismicity before, you know, our last couple of big earthquakes, so I try to process that and look at, you know, maybe some similarities and things like that, even just backlogger data. If there's anything, even if it's text three seconds on it, it's like, it's three seconds, man. That's a baby out of the crib. You know, I'm just curious.
It's almost like health records where you've got, I mean, they're their own nightmare because doctors handwriting and like, standardization and things like that. Earthquakes, but you know, the analogy is that you've got, you've got 50 years of health records and the idea is assuming they were all legible and standardized. You push those into machine learning and then you're also taking, so it's learning everything that's ever come out in every medical journal. And then so you can find, you know, the patterns there, but you're also giving it the live data.
Everybody that's coming into a hospital any given time, every new journal article so that it can cross reference all of those things to say like, you've got cancer. And this works with your genetic makeup in this part of country that's been exposed to these environmental environmental impacts. And yeah, I just, I don't know, it's, it's hope it's putting too much faith in technology, which is always not a mistake, but it's, it's an easier to pan see. But I'm just curious.
Yeah. And it's possible. That's absolutely possible until we try. We just really don't know.
Sure. But again, that requires a lot of resources and it's entirely theoretical. So yeah, gotta happen. You're clearly doing your part.
Yes. Just a little bit. Are there like, what are things these other countries that you know, don't have tremendous resources like ours need to be doing in the meantime? Is it housing, education?
Are there these countries? Right. Got fashions. Earth, wake, retrofitting.
Can we clone you? Actually, these guys learn from their disasters on like us. So I'll unpack that question a little bit, right? It's like, what can they do if they don't have the resources and kind of what are they, what are they doing?
So Dr. Lucie Jones, super brilliant, way smarter than I am. She's part of the USGS. She's kind of coined the earthquake lady.
She's moved on and she's doing some other fantastic things with her, with her foundation. Is she a different lady and not earthquake lady? Well, how many monsters does she have? Hello, I think so she's just, it's too much.
She's people. Very smart. I couldn't play a musical instrument to save my life. But she brought up some really good points when she was speaking on behalf of the USGS and as she still talks about what kind of earthquake hazards today.
These other countries that have some semblance of an earthquake early warning system, they actually built them and invested it to them because they had a shit ton of people die in an earthquake. And the United States is the first place that's actually being proactive in building the system without losing hundreds if not tens of thousands of people's lives. So we're very fortunate about that Mexico, they lost a lot of lives in some big earthquakes and that's why they created their system, same with Japan. Building codes are also very, very important.
Something very interesting about the codes at least in California. They're not really designed to protect injuries and crushing deaths per se from falling building stuff inside. The stuff is a very technical term if you have a notice. The building codes are actually designed to just prevent a collapse of the building.