The Probability of Earthquakes in California

The chance of a very serious earthquake in california is on the order of one every 100 years. So we cand say, if we weren't being too careful, that basically, were not ant have an arthquake, don't worry about it. But in fact, the xpected damage from such an earthquake is enormous. And so people convert that to more of a cyclical time thing, like that we expect the sun to rise once a day. I think what we didn't realize is that for people without a math's background, words like probablistic and words like monte carlo simulation, are just quite scary.