[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.