KingsGambit said:
Now it comes down to each individual making a decision of risk vs reward. What are the benefits of living here vs the risk of living here? People live in Japan and San Francisco, both earthquake prone areas. I don't live there and yet even I know about their geographic issues. So when an earthquake hits one of those places, should there be sympathy for the victims? Should we be surprised and sad for losses suffered when a hurricane hits Florida or Louisiana, flooding hits Louisiana or Missouri and so on?
Yes.
Our planet hates us and no matter where you live, something might happen. Like, my country, Slovenia, last week and the week before, it was literally encased in ice. Thanks to the temperature swinging right about zero Celsius, rain froze overnight, and a few days of that, most stuff was under 3-4 inches of ice. It destroyed trees, it snapped power lines, it made life quite unbearable, and the damage it did to our forests is in hundreds of millions, and that will affect our already troubled economy.
I was lucky, living in Ljubljana, so I was inconvenienced at worst but people living in other parts of the country took the brunt of it, were cut off from power, water and even means to get anywhere. 75% of schools were closed for damn near a week.
It was also not something that's happened in at least 50 years (and I assume massive earthquakes in San Francisco that kill people are rarer than that). But hey, it's their own fault, right?
Of course there's also the issue that just picking up and moving somewhere else costs resources, resources a rather significant part of the population, even in the first world,
simply doesn't have.
Still, for the sake of the argument: Do you know of any location on our planet where one could be considered "safe" from the whims of nature?
Or rather, how would you suggest the population should be distributed around the planet?