Nasty, unpleasant things. Make you late for dinner. Kill in the thousands.
Hurricanes can at least replenish the water table. What are earthquakes good for?!
They are an unavoidable consequence of our planet’s hot, liquid iron core without which there would be no one to complain about earthquakes. Probably no life whatsoever, in fact. When we stop having them altogether is when you really want to start worrying.
They help to promote urban renewal? And provide work for building contractors and structural emgineers.
Earthquakes are an integral part of plate tectonics. I’ve heard a theory that, if it weren’t for plate tectonics, the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere would combine with rocks in the crust. Eventually, this might be enough to thin out our atmosphere, so Earth would be more like Mars. So no earthquakes means no breathable atmosphere.
It’s also possible that Earth would be frozen if it weren’t for plate tectonics. There’s a hypothesis that the Earth was completely frozen 600 million years ago, called the Snowball Earth theory. It’s thought that the Earth finally managed to break out of the snowball state because of greenhouse gases emitted by volcanoes. You can have volcanoes without plate tectonics, but you don’t have nearly as many of them, so it would take much longer to get out of a snowball state. A snowball Earth is, obviously, not terribly friendly to complex life.
What does the Earth think it is? Moving about like that!
Yeah, but aside from ensuring life on Earth, ending a full-Earth ice age, and breaking up Pangaea, what have the earthquakes ever done for us?
Heh. No beating Gaia at her game – if you live/work in buildings of wood, the hurricane/tornado gets ya. If you live/work in buildings of stone/brick, the earthquake gets ya. Oh, and watch out for that bacterium over there.
Mother Earth is one mean tough-lovin’ mother.
Sez you! Bring on the sheep’s bladders!
It’s pretty rare for an earthquake to actually kill someone. It’s usually the faulty engineering that gets you.
And if you’re in Michigan the skeeters get you so bad you’re praying for an earthquake to shake all the still water up.
Or those pesky tsunamis that they generate.
Give you the chance to use the punchline “did the earth move for you, too?” if you happen to be lucky enough to be caught in flagrante delicto during the quake. 
“Dude, you know that feeling when you take a huge dump? Awesome.”
This one is amateur hour. Check out the ones on this list.
Another thing about hurricanes: You can see them coming. With modern satellite technology, as much as a week in advance. Plenty of time to stockpile bottled water or get to shelters.
Earthquakes sneak up on you.
Getting rid of the horrible bric-a-brac of my Mother’s shelf. Now I’ve got 30 lbs less of shit to throw away after shes dead.
My father told me that when he was a Boy Scout he did some camping in Michigan. He said one night he heard two skeeters talking.
Skeeter #1 Should we eat him here, or should we take him back to the swamp?
Skeeter #2 We’d better eat him here. If we take him back to the swamp, the big guys will take him away from us.
:eek:
That’s about the size of it. When they get you, you think you’re being attack by an Apache helicopter from the wind and noise coming off their massive wings.
And indirectly cause the loss of 95% of a city’s architectural heritage.
Viz. Los Angeles.
Where do the concepts of “Los Angeles” and “architectural heritage” intersect?