Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2022 September 6

= September 6 =

European prosperity
Does one have to consider it rather a coincidence or not that Europe as the still by far most prosperous continent for centuries, at least in relative terms, at the same time is the continent with the least rate and probability of severe natural disasters (such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, tornados, floods) in comparison to other continents? Hildeoc (talk) 13:16, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

(PS: Please do let me know if there's any grammatical flaw in the wording of this question, so I can improve my feel for language. Thanks in advance!--Hildeoc (talk) 13:24, 6 September 2022 (UTC))
 * I think "the lowest rate" is better. Also, since in this context "probability" can only be interpreted as frequentist probability, which is directly related to the rate of occurrence, the words "and probability" are superfluous. IMO it is better to leave them out. --Lambiam 19:12, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
 * A minor improvement to readability would be to hyphenate the term still-by-far in this particular grammatical context. (I won't try to define it because grammatical analysis has radically changed since my 1970's schooling). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.73.43 (talk) 22:39, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
 * You ask a very complex and subjective question, friend. Is Europe the most prosperous? In recent years, leading European economies have been struggling, whereby China has become a leading economic power in the world. Natural disasters? Every Spring can bring flooding in central Europe, and we can get severe weather in the Winter and Summer (this year was no different), however, there are no tectonic plate boundaries or large bodies of water that could lead to earthquakes or tornadoes or the like; however, Iceland has some volcanoes that can be pretty troublesome (like in 2010), but otherwise it's not that bad. It's a geographic coincidence really, but Your question is really quite general and subjective, as I said. I have taken the liberty to close Your small text with the appropriate flag (is that called a flag? command? word?) so the rest does not come out small as well. --Ouro (blah blah) 14:38, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot for your comment and fixing my formatting negligence (I guess they call that a tag, by the way). If you don't mind, I would first like to wait for some more replies before going into your arguments. Best, Hildeoc (talk) 14:51, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Australia has the highest GDP per capita and the most first worlders (percent), Europe has the most first worlders (millions), North America has the richest billionaires, Asia has the most billionaires, most GDP, most high-tech looking cities and the first first world country (though it is poor now), Africa has the first first world area if all areas in the same league as the most prosperous are considered first world. For we were once all in Africa and relative prosperity differences are smaller the further back in human prehistory you go. It also has Ancient Egypt which had the world's grandest architecture for a very long time. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:54, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
 * More people died in Europe in human-made disasters (both WWI and WWII) than in any continent as a consequence of natural disasters. That by itself suggests any correlation is coincidental. European earthquakes can be severe, examples being the 365 Crete earthquake, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (see also the BBC special "The earthquake that changed history"), the 1761 Lisbon earthquake and the 1816 North Atlantic earthquake (hitting Lisbon again), the 1908 Messina earthquake, the 1963 Skopje earthquake and the 1977 Vrancea earthquake. They tend to be indeed relatively rare. But civilization blossomed in the earthquake-prone Middle East well before it took hold in Western Europe. Before the industrial revolution took off, Europe was not particularly prosperous; the initial industrialization was financed with the proceeds of the Atlantic slave trade. I see no plausible way of relating this to the relative rareness of natural disasters. --Lambiam 21:53, 6 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Have you seen Guns, Germs and Steel? manya (talk) 04:29, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
 * A society can survive without being prosperous. Diamond's notion of success is that of survival, of not collapsing; his books on the topic do not deal with causes of prosperity. --Lambiam 09:52, 7 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Part of the reason why Europe seems less affected by natural disasters is that it uses its wealth to limit the effects of such disasters. Devastating floods are prevented (or made less devastating) with extensive flood protection works (Zuiderzee Works, Delta Works, Thames Barrier, Venice flood barrier, the systems of dikes and pumping stations along many large rivers), which couldn't be built in places like Pakistan or Mozambique for lack of money or political will and determination to built such defences. In the same way, Japan and Chile are much less affected by earthquakes than Afghanistan or Iran, which suffer similar earthquakes, as those rich countries can afford buildings that can withstand them. If there's a connection, it's that being rich makes natural disasters less devastating. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:55, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
 * It has the wealth to do so though. It's not like other places had the same wealth and squandered it through bad choices.  There is a saying in the U.S. "Being born on third base and thinking you hit a home run", indicating that one attributes one's success (reaching home plate and scoring in a baseball game) with one's own actions (the hitting a home run), when in fact it has more to do with the advantages one had which one had nothing to do with (being born on third base).  Europe was in a similar position.  Europe (for whatever reason) had a head start in technology, and that head start was largely used to add to its own power by leveraging the potential from other cultures and preventing them from advancing themselves.  Europe basically used its advantage to extract (largely labor and raw materials) from other areas of the world, and then simultaneously prevented those areas from using those resources to those area's own benefits.  When we ask "Why did Europe have that advantage", there is a real danger in extrapolating any answer we get to "Europe was then justified to using that advantage in the way it did" or even "Europeans should not be held to account for the way they used their advantage" or "Europe shouldn't be held accountable for the harm they caused others if natural happenstance gave them advantages other cultures didn't have".  If you doubt that is where such questions are going, you haven't been paying attention to the historiography of European history for the past several thousand years.  It's not just China that has the mandate of heaven philosophy regarding the right to power... -- Jayron 32 11:59, 8 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Just last night on the PBS show NOVA, there was a discussion of literacy, in particular how the European development of printing enabled Europe to leap ahead of other cultures which lacked it. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:10, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Well, borrowing or adopting of printing. Again, the western perspective is often "until a thing is discovered by European people, it doesn't exist".  Literally every part of Gutenberg's press, except its use of Latin text, had been in existence for hundreds of years in other parts of the world.  Both the printing press itself, and Movable type, both often erroneously attributed to Gutenberg, had been in existence in China since the 700s AD (printing press) and 1000s AD (movable type).  Both Chinese and Arabic peoples had been using the technology for quite a while before Gutenberg.  There were some innovations Gutenberg did add, mostly due to the specific design of the press (such as the way the movable blocks were held in place, and the specific type of metal used), but these are incremental improvements on a centuries-old technology.  -- Jayron 32 13:16, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I read somewhere that olde style movable type is more of a pain to use in Chinese or Japanese than say Latin or Greek with only 24 letters (or German with a few more and you can even write äöü as ae or ue or make the umlaut it's own piece of metal). There's 2-3 times fewer characters per sentence but in Latin you could have a 5x5 tray of metal letters in Chinese you'd need a huge tray with many dividers. Even Korean (which also had printing) and Arabic have somewhat bigger alphabets than most European ones (And Arabic has vowel points and consonants able to change shape at the beginning and end of a word and letters joined together, maybe early Arabic printing invented/should've invented consonant metal pieces with holes around them to stick rods into to ink the vowels) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:57, 8 September 2022 (UTC)


 * All this should probably be moved to WP:RD/H, as the question has little to do with science and lots to do with history. Tigraan Click here for my talk page ("private" contact) 15:25, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm going to be fair to the OP, however, in that (and I am most at fault for this) the question was more scientific than historical, which was to do with what was it about the geology/physical geography/meteorology/etc. about Europe; which is a fine question for the science desk. The conundrum is in the answers.  The question presumes a scientific basis, but the answer is actual humanities-based, which is my contention: most of the advancement Europe made further than other parts of the world was not due primarily to any advantage it had due to the science behind its location, rather it had to do with the way it used that advantage.  And the way it used that advantage was largely to be an asshole towards the rest of the world.  So the question did have a proper scientific presumption, it's fine to ask it here with that presumption.  The answer is more nuanced, though.  And I will admit, we still haven't answered the question really which is "what were those geologic/meteorological/whatever" advantages that Europe had.  If I had to put my money on it, the Jared Diamond answer, ala Guns, Germs, and Steel is a good start to understanding the complexities of the issue.  Alfred W. Crosby provides a similar but subtly different perspective, in works such as The Columbian Exchange and the like.  YouTuber CGP Grey has a series of videos about the role of domestication of animals and exposure to plague-type pathogens that is a well-researched and interesting perspective, Part 1 and Part 2.  Another great, accessible and pop-science (but well researched pop-science) view on the matter is in the series of books by  Charles C. Mann titled 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created which really takes into account more recent discoveries that hold that cultures from the "not Europe" part of the world were really more technologically and socially advanced than traditional scholarship gives them credit for, and that the Europeans that came to colonize these places were not particularly more advanced, and that the advantage they gained was more due to other factors, see the aforementioned plague problems in the CGP Gray videos.  I hope that makes up for my tangent I went on earlier.  The OP's question is answerable as asked, and there are good reading and viewing on the answers; and it isn't necessarily "Europe had less earthquakes and hurricanes"... -- Jayron 32 15:46, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Developmen in monkeypox management
The latest decisions to prevent complications — Preceding unsigned comment added by Howard thanduxolo dube (talk • contribs) 17:21, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
 * It might be better to ask at Talk:Monkeypox, but the CDC suggests patients at risk be given tecovirimat.  Abductive  (reasoning) 02:27, 7 September 2022 (UTC)