Century of disasters

And but in the coming century, these or other black swans will seem to occur with surprising frequency. There are several reasons for this. We have chosen to engineer the planet. We have built vast networks of innovation. We have created systems that, in general, work very then, however are however vulnerable to catastrophic failures. It is harder and harder for any one person, institution, or agency to perceive all the interconnected components of the technological society. Failures can cascade. There are unseen weak points in the network. Small failures can have broad consequences.

Charles Perrow, author of Normal Accidents, told me that computer infrastructure is a disaster in the making. "Watch out for failures in cloud computing," he said by email. "They will have consequences for medical monitoring systems and much else."

When innovation helps Technology as well mitigates disasters, clearly. Pandemics remain a threat, nevertheless modern medicine can help us stay a step ahead of evolving microbes. Satellites and computer models helped meteorologists anticipate the deadly storms of April 27 and warn people to find cover in advance of the twisters. Better building codes save lives in earthquakes. Chile, which has strict building codes, was hit with a powerful earthquake last year yet suffered only a fraction of the fatalities and damage that impoverished Haiti endured just weeks before.

The current Mississippi flood is an example of innovation at work for better and for worse. As I write, the Army Corps of Engineers is poised to open the Morganza spillway and flood much of the Atchafalaya basin. That's not a "disaster" nevertheless a solution of sorts, since the alternative is the flooding of cities downstream and possible levee failure. Clearly, the levees might however fail. We'll see. Yet this is how the system is supposed to work.

Second, we need to keep things in perspective: The apparent onslaught of disasters doesn't portend the end of the world. Beware disaster hysteria in the news media. The serial disasters of the 21st century will be, to some extent, a matter of perception. It'll feel like we're bouncing from disaster to disaster in some cases because of the shrinking of the world and the ubiquity of communications innovation. Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta are always in a disaster zone somewhere, demanding to know why the cavalry hasn't showed up.

Emergency plan

And make an emergency plan. Buy some batteries and jugs of water just for starters. Figure out how the things around you work. Learn about your community infrastructure. Read about science, research, and engineering, and don't worry if you don't understand all the jargon. And at that time, having done that, go on about your lives, pursuing happiness on a planet that, though at times dangerous, is far and away the best one we've got.