[pjc50]

> I wonder why our society tolerates these unknowns

Society tolerates an infinite number of unknowns because it's impossible to know everything, or even a microscopic corner of "everything". The tradeoff for every society larger than a subsistence farming village is things you can't see happening over your horizon that you have to trust. Or trust in the vague hope that someone else is checking and would notice if things went bad.

> Wuhan

I had to look this up, and the business address is of course Shenzen, where you'd expect. https://milkv.io/about gives a Romanized address of "1603, Block B, FengHuang Zhigu Building No.50 Tiezai Road, Xixiang, Baoan Shenzhen, 518102 China", which is in a different administrative area from Wuhan and five hundred miles away. Not that it matters.

[pbronez]

Heh and farming, even subsistence farming, is at the mercy of weather/climate, animal migration patterns, human labor and thus health…

Nobody has perfect knowledge of their world. All we have are heuristics that work well enough to get by. It’s by definition impossible to anticipate out-of-context events that barge in like the Vogons.

Excession by Iain Banks is a fun exploration of this concept. It’s set in his “Culture” universe, where a hybrid human/AI culture enjoys an interstellar empire. Excession imagines that powerful civilization encountering a phenomenon that is as far beyond them as they are beyond us, or we are beyond the subsistence farmer.