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[rarborman]

Hire the pied piper... the city will dance itself empty... and probably into the nearest river.

[lemon10]

I guess you'd need to implement some kind of riot police type crowd control weapon over the entire city. Loud noises, really bright flashing lights, make everything smell really bad. Something to make people uncomfortable enough to forget about their homes for the time being without harming them.

I don't know how well that would work. It would have to be REALLY unpleasant to even make people who are willing to stay in there house through a hurricane/alien invasion/meteor strike consider leaving and would drain vital organization resources, not to mention the logistical difficulty of distributing it all over the city in such a time of crisis.
Not to mention that we don't have any even remotely reasonable way to do this, and won't for quite a while.

If they really feel like dying, there isn't really much you can do to stop them.

[JoshuaFH]

I guess you'd need to implement some kind of riot police type crowd control weapon over the entire city. Loud noises, really bright flashing lights, make everything smell really bad. Something to make people uncomfortable enough to forget about their homes for the time being without harming them.

I don't know how well that would work. It would have to be REALLY unpleasant to even make people who are willing to stay in there house through a hurricane/alien invasion/meteor strike consider leaving and would drain vital organization resources, not to mention the logistical difficulty of distributing it all over the city in such a time of crisis.
Not to mention that we don't have any even remotely reasonable way to do this, and won't for quite a while.

If they really feel like dying, there isn't really much you can do to stop them.

Well, the way I see it, even if it were possible the only logical conclusion would be mass hysteria as opposed to a voluntary mass evacuation. It's only natural to assume that people would respond to the incredible assault on their senses by panicking, flying into a rage, crying and curling up to wait to die, and the city would be quickly purged of every person with epilepsy.

[Sus]

Wot, no Chernobyl? --m(^U^)m--

[kaenneth]

A virus that causes fear and panic, biologically that is, not being afraid of the virus, you get terrified and flee no matter if you know you have it or not.

[TheBronzePickle]

It might be easier and safer to just conjure up a scent/pheromone that got that reaction out of people. Smell has the closest connection to emotion of any of the senses, and pheromones and scents are pretty unlikely to accidentally change into something potentially dangerous assuming you're not using reactive chemicals.
If you really had to clear out an entire city and didn't have the tech to make a pheromone and you have to deal with people already used to horrid smells, I'd imagine that an effective secondary solution is to blanket the area in a slowly-but-not-too-slowly-encroaching cloud of gas that makes it hard to breathe like tear gas. Breathing is one of those things that trigger reflexes and an effectively automatic fear response, and unless the denizens have ready access to gas masks, they're going to be running for the hills before they can start thinking (ir)rationally.

[Lightning4]

Other disasters might have little time for evacuation, asteroid impacts, nuclear war, volcano eruptions, tsunamis or whatever.

Well, I think if we're lucky, we could see a small asteroid coming. Although the problem with asteroids is, it seems like it's a pretty fine line between one capable of simply wiping out a city, and one capable of wiping out several cities and causing enough environmental damage that you're going to have a hard time living even if the impact missed you.
The size vs damage ratio is... pretty frightening.

So basically we'd have to have a small enough asteroid heading for earth, be able to detect it in advance, and fine tune the impact area enough to say that a single city (or at least a few cities in a small area) are going to see some serious problems. I doubt this is impossible, but hopefully we won't have to put our methods to test.


I guess you could make a case for volcanos too, in some rare circumstances. Though I think our prediction of those are starting to get better as time goes on.

[JoshuaFH]

It might be easier and safer to just conjure up a scent/pheromone that got that reaction out of people. Smell has the closest connection to emotion of any of the senses, and pheromones and scents are pretty unlikely to accidentally change into something potentially dangerous assuming you're not using reactive chemicals.
If you really had to clear out an entire city and didn't have the tech to make a pheromone and you have to deal with people already used to horrid smells, I'd imagine that an effective secondary solution is to blanket the area in a slowly-but-not-too-slowly-encroaching cloud of gas that makes it hard to breathe like tear gas. Breathing is one of those things that trigger reflexes and an effectively automatic fear response, and unless the denizens have ready access to gas masks, they're going to be running for the hills before they can start thinking (ir)rationally.

I don't know, you seem to keep making the assumption that every citizen has powerful self-preservation instincts, such that they'd naturally flee from a suffocating gas.

The stubborn, as always, are doomed to die, while the mentally ill that have holed themselves in their homes will most likely just ignore the gas and die in their sleep.