This hasn't stopped the Burning Man crowd in BRC
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.
The carrying capacity for excess population around Area 51 is all but non-existent, and far smaller than in the region around Black Rock.
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?)
Oh my god that sounds hilarious. Also hilariously dangerous and irresponsible, but still hilarious...
Only one person needs to get the teleportation device, though!
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.
* 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 arrestedAww man, wrong site.
This is literally what the article (which you read, right?) is about...
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.