If only a few people go, then it isn't a major disaster whatever happens.
If a lot of people go, they will run into difficulty long before they get to the fence with threatening signs. There isn't remotely the infrastructure to support people on a large scale. The roads don't exist, the hotels don't exist, the food and water and gasoline sources don't exist... If a million people decided to go, that doesn't mean they will get there because they can't teleport. And they won't all fail at once in the same spot.
I'm from NY, but I've been to Rachel. No gasoline and total hotel capacity of maybe 15 rooms? I remember seeing a defunct gas station that looked like it had closed in the 1960s.
Burning man has extensive planning and infrastructure, which has been built up over years of adapting to slow growth, and which goes on for months before the event opens.
At burning man, people buy tickets months ahead of time, whose supply is limited, so the number of people in attendance is known. Road markings are put up on the playa to manage the huge volume of traffic entering the city (waiting in the gate line in your vehicle can take multiple hours, sometimes the better part of a day– remember, this is with good organization). Space on the playa for each camp is planned and allotted, and someone shows you to your space. Water trucks continuously spray the streets to keep the dust down.
Burners know what they are responsible for. There is basically not a single piece of litter in the city, because there is a strong and highly unified culture of not-littering and being responsible for your own garbage. Similarly, burners are fully self-reliant for water because there is unified understanding that there is little safety net if you screw up and don't bring enough.
This is a big one: At burning man, thousands of porta-potties are put up and routinely cleaned and pumped multiple times a day. The number of needed toilets is known because of ticket sales, and the ticket sales also pay for the toilets and their servicing.
None of this is true of the coming event, however big or small it is. Experience at burning man makes me more worried about how bad this could be without planning, organization, and a unified culture that strongly emphasizes self-reliance and respect.
Black Rock and Area 51 are not comparable environments, Black Rock is much more forgiving for the unprepared traveller. I've gone off-roading in both regions extensively. Black Rock is a relatively temperate and populated area for Nevada, albeit rural, and Pershing County has decades of experience dealing with thousands of unprepared people. The region around Area 51 is essentially a bone-dry wasteland with a couple mining camps in the area and nothing else.
The carrying capacity for excess population around Area 51 is all but non-existent, and far smaller than in the region around Black Rock.
I don't know first hand, but since it has been consistently tens of thousands of people, it's become really organized, according to what I read. The logistics aren't trivial or spontaneous. The people coming have some idea of how it works, not to mention many of them have a lot of resources.
But burning man provides the infrastructure. This like burning man but with no food, water, gas, place to stay, and folks possibly shooting at you...not exactly a direct comparison.
> This like burning man but with no food, water, gas, place to stay,
so just like Burningman?
> and folks possibly shooting at you
Or Burningman back before '99 when people were still allowed to take firearms? (Anyone else remember the Drive By Shooting Range? Drums of avgas, stuffed toys, tracer rounds, and tequila, all from the back of a moving pickup - what could possibly go wrong?)
> Anyone else remember the Drive By Shooting Range? Drums of avgas, stuffed toys, tracer rounds, and tequila, all from the back of a moving pickup - what could possibly go wrong?
Oh my god that sounds hilarious. Also hilariously dangerous and irresponsible, but still hilarious...
What part of the Constitution would it violate? Is it unconstitutional to ban firearms when boarding a flight? When attending a speech by the President of the United States? When visiting your spouse in jail?
But that person needs the confusion in numbers to get away with "freeing" the teleporter. I guess if someone manages to "free" a time machine in the raid, the paradox will sort itself out.
What about off-road vehicles, tents, campers, bringing in the food with them, etc. Though I know a lot of idiots would not prepare and try to just show up and if they did so they would be stuck in a major traffic jam which I guess would only clear up when everyone decided to give up and turned around and went home starting from the last person to arrive.
There isn't remotely the infrastructure to support people on a large scale.
That is precisely where the potential humanitarian disaster comes from. If large numbers of people show up without the infrastructure to support them, things could go very wrong.
The point the parent is trying to make is that a large amount of people won't be able to just suddenly show up. The poor infrastructure means that the closer people get gradually the more people fail. They won't all fail at once.
So then what? They'll all be congested on a blacktop road somewhere in the middle of the desert, running out of fuel and water? That sounds like a disaster.
* 20,000 people show up
* 2,000 of those try to get though the gates/fence
* Half of those are in vehicles, some offroad
* Some people are armed
* Shots are fired as vehicles refuse to stop
* Dozens end up dead, many more injured, hundreds arrested
So, I was traveling in remote Nevada two weeks ago. camping and rock climbing in the desert.
we took a rest day and went into the nearest medium sized town. i was chatting with the cashier at a diner... she said some out of towners bought out the entire town's supply of rat poison. the poison-stockpilers were asked by another casher what they were going to do with the rat poison, they replied that they were prepping for the area 51 event.
I very clearly understood that the casher wasn't just telling us a story, she was warning us of something she herself was deeply uncomfortable.
>WARNING: At this time we have to warn people against coming to Rachel for the botched Storm Rachel event next weekend. The organizers are suing each other and in the meantime nothing is being done to prepare for the event. We expect riots when those visitors that may show up and paid good money find out that the reality looks nothing like what they were promised. People will get hurt. STAY AWAY FROM RACHEL NEXT WEEKEND!
At least in this situation, they should be able to turn around and drive home. That is, if the last gas stations to that location don't run out. FEMA should already have tankers ready to head out there. More than food; having fuel to make it back to populated areas is probably more important.
Probably because the government thinks you don't deserve to die even if you're stupid. Just like people who get helped even though they stay in the path of hurricanes despite evac orders
Very noble view of the government .. another view is, the government wants order, and desperate people tend to do drastic things, which disturbs order. And with evac orders ... there is also the assumption that not everybody got the order clearly (or understood it) and you would have upset citiciens who complain the government let elder people die ..
These festival though are not organized by delusional people who think the government is behind everything bad that happens to them. IIRC, the pages that organize this event has a million followers. That could easily translate into a thousand clueless people driving all into the desert with zero preparation, fleeing when local authorities try to help them, and blaming the lizardmen in power when some of them die of thirst.
If I were in a position of authority around there I would be far more concerned about the potential consequences than if there was a free drugs and sex open rave happening there.
If I were in a position of authority around there, I'd be working to fuel a conspiracy theory that Storm Area 51 was put together by the federal government to provide an excuse to field test Microwave Area Denial systems on actual crowds.
As if Area 51 is some remote desert area that takes weeks for help to arrive?
There are highways and roads, the desert itself is perfectly drivable with 4WD vehicles, you can land helicopters, planes, there are cities nearby, people have mobile phones to call for assistance easily, they would be altogether anyway, etc...
Is there any reason to think that would go down any worse than the many traffic jams caused by that solar eclipse a few years ago? People encounter traffic and either turn around, or wait it out. I wager no more than a few thousand turn up and the whole thing in retrospect seems massively overblown.
According BBC, any open air party first session was ‘possible humanitarian disaster’.
Most were tiny and not at all well known in their first season. Larger ones are generally put together by teams of people who know what they are doing.
It's not a Humanitarian disaster if someone sponsors themselves to travel to the Nevada desert and take on the US military in response to a Facebook post. It's Darwinism at work.
Yeah this is being compared to Fyre Festival. The difference is Fyre Festival was on an island ill-equipped to handle that many stranded people.
This is going to end up more like your typical Internet meetup, just bigger. Lots of people will roadtrip out there, it'll fizzle out or at least be mildly entertaining, then drive home. Only problem I foresee really is traffic, but that's just boredom, not a humanitarian disaster.
Fyre Festival also involved a significant amount of fraud. I don't think anybody is fraudulently claiming that Area 51 will offer luxury accommodations to visitors.
Exactly the naïve thinking that gets people hurt. A 'few extra jugs of water" gain you a couple of hours in the desert. What about, stuck on a blacktop road in the desert in the mother of all traffic jams for days?
Events as large as this are predicted to be, are not solved by everybody bringing a water bottle from KumNGo.
Looks like Alienstock is on. I'm seeing photos on Twitter that show a stage with bands setting up, a first aid trailer and tent, portapotties, a few booths selling drinks, souvenirs etc. It's hard to tell how many, but people are starting to arrive and set up camp.
So the reports that said there was no preparation at all are false, as are the predictions that no one would show up. Whether there will be a large crowd and whether they are prepared to handle that is a different matter.
If there's still anything remotely serious that goes on there, they should just wrap it up. It's been a source of urban legends long enough that its best role at this point is to be a tourist destination with some cute attractions and a gift shop.
I’d say it’s best role at this point is to continue being one of the preeminent sites for military weapons systems testing, as has been the case for a few decades now. I’m not sure what would lead you to conclude a gift shop would be of better use.
If anything the urban legends about UFOs and little green men add another layer of obfuscation regarding the projects actually being developed there.
Probably, like with most internet events. There are much more people on the internet who say they are doing things and people who say and actually do things. (In lots of cases luckily, though)
I think this is going to be like that "unite the right thing", where a bunch of people talked tough on-line, but couldn't be bothered to get off the couch. I sincerely doubt this will turn into something serious.
Edit: some one pointed out this was a bad analogy because there was violence. I was not referring to the one in Charlottesville, VA; but the one the next year in Washington, D.C. as about twenty-four people showed [0]. I should have been clearer.
Unite the Right is a poor analogy for this, since it was a white-supremacist rally featuring neo-Nazis that included the public murder of a peaceful protestor. It was "serious" whether well-attended or not.
If someone is shot by a US soldier trying to enter Area 51, it will also be serious, even if attendance was low.
My husband and I were thinking of going just to watch the spectacle from a distance. I’m kind of curious to see who’s going to show up, but have no desire to get in the mix.
I know some suicidal people that are thinking it will be fun to go for ending their life. I doubt most people think about how many vulnerable people are going to use this event as their exit. Nevertheless they might just all back out.
Everybody that hasn't realized that the alien space ship actually existed - and was prototyped by Skunk Works - should read through the A12 Oxcart project.
Because the alien space ship sighting was reported exactly when they did the first radar test (14th Sept 1959) with the shiny silver prototype of it far out in the desert.
Lockheed engineers on the project were the best ones, I guess. I mean, 60 years later people still believe it was an alien space ship. That's gotta count for something.
This is not the most popular meme on the internet yet it has been amplified by large media outlets, why? It's not funny, people have died trespassing on that base. Forcible unauthorized access of a military installation is taken deadly seriously. The security force on that base has squeezed (the trigger) on trespassers. Does anyone realize that the base security force already has positions for high causality producing weapons (machine guns), and interlocking fields of fire defined? The stupidity of this astounds me.
Where's the editorial discretion of these news outlets? BBC calling it a "possible" disaster isn't helpful and doesn't absolve them of their sins.
News flash, foreign governments would love access to a number of US military facilities. Trespassers won't be dealt with like Portland deals with ANTIFA.
Two Dutchmen who in all probability expected to be stopped, but seriously underestimated the risk of being made an example because of the coming 'event'.
They are Youtubers with 700,000 and 300,000 subscribers, respectively. They did this for the views obivously, but being only 20 and 21 years old and naive about how seriously trespassing on US military property is treated by the local sheriff's department they probably misjudged the consequences of their actions.
Their timing was on purpose. The buzz generated by the event meant that their videos would have lifted along on the popularity of the topic. But these are kids who are used to nothing more than an occasional stern telling off by cops in Europe.
I think they are being tried this Monday. They were released on bail, so chances are they will get away with just a fine and probably a travel ban to the US, but that seems to depend on whether the judge wants to set an example for the coming weekend or not. As some people knowledgable about the US judicial system noted: they had better get a damn good local lawyer.
Maybe it depends on the country. I know Canada isn't in Europe, but as an American citizen I have casually wandered onto Canadian military bases before without any hassle. Sometimes they have guards at the gate that ask to see your ID then wish you a good day, but other times there is nobody at the gate and you're free to wander around. Incidentally the Royal Canadian Artillery Museum has a superb collection.
This all contrasts sharply with my experiences visiting American military bases, where the impression of security/paranoia is in my experience quite high, even though I was visiting somebody who lived there and he'd told them to expect me.
Depends on the base. Some bases are open to the public because they have a mix of private and public business on them. One of my clients operates out of just such a facility. Others are, shall we say, less friendly.
If a lot of people go, they will run into difficulty long before they get to the fence with threatening signs. There isn't remotely the infrastructure to support people on a large scale. The roads don't exist, the hotels don't exist, the food and water and gasoline sources don't exist... If a million people decided to go, that doesn't mean they will get there because they can't teleport. And they won't all fail at once in the same spot.
I'm from NY, but I've been to Rachel. No gasoline and total hotel capacity of maybe 15 rooms? I remember seeing a defunct gas station that looked like it had closed in the 1960s.