I don’t think this is a good analogy.

andrewflnr 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think the real problem is that you don't know whether it's a good analogy in your situation. You don't know whether you're lowering the anvil or just fraying the rope. It depends on a lot of hard-to-measure things about your whole geologic situation.

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Terr_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It makes sense to me, if you consider that a "damaged rope" is a bit more elastic, so it stretches more, and allows the anvil to come to rest at a marginally lower position above your head. But only marginally.

In other words, it'd probably a terrible tradeoff to reduce the impact of some disaster by 0.0001% at the expense of making it 0.1% more likely/frequent to occur.

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jjk166 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you have an ~~anvil hanging over your head~~ ton of compressed rock under you, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the ~~anvil~~ potential energy of the rock makes sense. Damaging the ~~rope holding the anvil~~ rock containing the energy doesn't.

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ryanisnan 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, I mean, I understand the words you wrote. I don't think it's a good analogy.

It is entirely feasible that the same amount of potential energy, delivered either in small, successive amounts, but spaced out, proves to be tolerable, while a single large amount would be fatal.

	▲	vasco 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's what they said about slowly lowering potential energy.

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wongarsu 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But setting off small earthquakes doesn't just damage the rope, it also lowers the anvil. Also the anvil in our analogy is constantly getting heavier, so the chances of our rope holding forever are very low