The amazing ordinariness of the disaster. I wonder if the residents of settlements around the Gulf of Naples also normalized the smoke over Vesuvius after Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed? „Is it the big one?“
There's nothing ordinary about any disasters or upcoming disasters especially earthquakes . The early signs are there but we need to look into them very carefully and not taking anything for granted. The largest and most lethal Tokyo earthquake happened exactly 100 years ago reportedly killing more than 10K residents, namely the Great Kantō earthquake back in 1923 [1]. Imagine if similar disaster now with the huge number of current Tokyo population. That's probably the reason the Tokyo residents are paranoid now, and righly so.
At the moment we have good results for predicting earthquakes (not forecasting) that should be able to warn the residents a few days before the impending major earthquake. The results are consistent based on offline data of the recent Turkeys, New Zealand, Indonesia and Philippines earthquakes. Hopefully we can reliably repeat the early detection capability with the real-time data, if fundings are available. If anyone know how to approach Japan government (or Turkish, NZ, etc) for funding the system please let me know in the comments.
I’m not saying disasters are ordinary in general. If you are living with a continuous expectation of something terrible to happen, if this expectation becomes a part of your ordinary life, that is the feeling I’m talking about.