[grabbalacious]

It's hard to think about these potential calamities. Any given pandemic is unlikely to be on the scale of 1918. But the next big one will come, eventually. Any given asteroid strike is unlikely to be on the scale of a Yucatan. But the next big one will come, eventually. And the fact that there were so many small pandemics, impacts and so on will be used as evidence by Naysayers that there's nothing to worry about. And Doomsayers will continue to classify each potential calamity as uniquely dangerous in order to gain leverage.

[cm2187]

But the problem is that the Naysayers have been continuously right since 1918! So the problem given that we now cry wolf several times a month (a few weeks ago we were "on the verge of ww3"), is that how can you give any credibility to a real threat when it ultimately comes?

[jopsen]

Maybe, just maybe, crying wolf about ww3 or pandemics is the reason we did something and these things dooms day scenarios didn't happen..

(Maybe not, just saying -- we don't know)

Example, experts did warn Russia might invade Baltic NATO members, NATO did post a reaction force, and Russia haven't invaded a NATO member.

It's hard to say if dooms day predictions caused NATO posturing, and if NATO posturing caused Russia to not invade.

Maybe some of the scenarios we cry wolf about are real threats, we don't know..

[lm28469]

> Any given pandemic is unlikely to be on the scale of 1918.

We just need a long incubation period / low initial symptoms deadly virus and we're fucked with today's level of globalisation.

[maxerickson]

Fortunately there's usually a relationship between symptoms and how much virus is shed (and thus transmission rates).

[JohnJamesRambo]

I was watching a Nova episode about Fukushima and it seems inexplicable that the plant was designed how it was. Humans just couldn’t fathom the sort of black swan tsunami event that happened, when in hindsight we can see it was inevitable that it would happen. I’m trying to apply this sort of thinking to my own problem solving.

[abecode]

Other reactors on the Japanese coast survived because they updated the breakwaters after the Indonesian tsunami. So it wasn't really a black swan event because another tsunami had happened a few years earlier.

[MertsA]

There's a couple things to note about the Fukushima disaster. They planned for a tsunami, but at the time the plant was built IIRC the scientific consensus was that a tsunami was caused by a large landslide underwater. They surveyed the underwater topology around the site, they thought they were building a sea wall high enough that any tsunami in that area would be too small to overtop it.

The theory was improved in the years since the plant was constructed but no one ever went back and realized the implications for Fukushima Daiichi. It was not a new plant, they broke ground on it before they did on Chernobyl. They thought a tsunami was inevitable and planned for it, they just didn't realize that they were operating on a flawed theory of how tsunamis form.