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And in many cases, though not all, people living in areas threatened by severe natural hazards do so by choice. If a risk has not been imposed on us, we take it much less seriously. Though Schulz’s piece certainly made a splash online, it is hard to imagine a mass exodus of Portlanders and Seattleites in response. Hey, they like it there.

They don’t have much to compare the future earthquake to. After all, there hasn’t been an earthquake or tsunami like it there since roughly 1700. Schulz poeticizes this problem, calling out humans for their “ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.” Once again, this confounds our emotional connection to the risk.

The belief that an unlikely event won’t happen again for a while is called a gambler’s fallacy. Probability doesn’t work like that. The odds are the same with every roll of the dice.

But our “temporal parochialism,” as Schulz calls it, also undoes our grasp on probability. “We think probability happens with some sort of regularity or pattern,” says Ropeik. “If an earthquake is projected to hit within 50 years, when there hasn’t been one for centuries, we don’t think it’s going to happen.” Illogical thinking works in reverse, too: “If a minor earthquake just happened in Seattle, we think we’re safe.”

For individuals and government alike, addressing every point of concern requires a cost-benefit analysis. When kids barely have pencils and paper in schools that already exist, how much is appropriate to invest in earthquake preparedness? Even when that earthquake will kill thousands, displace millions, and cripple a region’s economy for decades to come—as Cascadia is projected to—the answer is complicated. “You immediately run into competing issues,” says Slovic. “When you’re putting resources into earthquake protection that has to be taken away from current social needs—that is a very difficult sell.”​

There are things people can do to combat our innate irrationality. The first is obvious: education. California has a seismic safety commission whose job is to publicize the risks of earthquakes and advocate for preparedness at household and state policy levels.

Another idea is similar to food safety ratings in the windows of some cities’ restaurants. Schulz reports that some 75 percent of Oregon’s structures aren’t designed to hold up to a really big Cascadia quake. “These buildings could have their risk and safety score publicly posted,” says Slovic. “That would motivate people to retrofit or mitigate those risks, particularly if they are schools.”

science points to a hard truth. Humans are simply inclined to be more concerned about what’s immediately in front of us: Snakes, fast-moving cars, unfamiliar chemical compounds in our breakfast cereal and the like will always elicit a quicker response than an abstract, far-off hazard.