The other day I was talking about just how precarious life on this planet is. Modern human civilization is a tremendous logistical achievement. The amount of uninterrupted energy and food production to sustain it is enormous. Even the slightest interruption can cause the deaths of thousands if not millions.

This past summer, the American north east experienced a 24 hour black out. I don't know how many people died (if any) but it caused a massive economic hit.  Imagine the results of something that caused a power outage for say a week? Or a month? How well would you do? Do you have enough food to last for more than a few days? How much fresh water do you keep stocked in your home?

If you're like most people, the answer is, you probably have enough drinking water for maybe 2 or 3 days and enough food to last a bit longer if rationed. But beyond that, you'd be out of luck. Which is amazing, if you think about it. The modern world has only had universal electrical power for less than a 100 years. Yet now we are totally dependent on it. Hence, it wouldn't really take a major natural catastrophe to bring about a human catastrophe. Maybe a major volcanic eruption, a massive solar flair, a huge earth quake would cause week or two long power outages across an entire continent.

Consider this: Ever been to Yellowstone national park? The geysers and pools of boiling water are pretty neat. Ever wondered what their source is? It turns out, Yellowstone national park -- all of it, is the mouth of a gigantic volcano that happens to erupt on occasion. And it's overdue. When it blows, it sends millions of tons of ash into the atmosphere. If you're in the United States, don't worry, you'd likely die quite early on. But if you're in Europe, things get less fun due to massive food shortages from a year or two of darkness that causes massive crop failures and goodness knows what.  Less developed areas would suffer too but their lower dependence on the modern logistical miracle would enable more survivors -- though millions would still die.

And so 80 or so years of reliable electrical power have turned the industrialized world into dependents. We make the assumption that it will always be reliable -- 24/7 or nearly.  In fact, we don't just make that assumption, we have literally bet our lives on it.  But history has shown that over the long haul (i.e. centuries) that periodic minor natural disasters occur. Disasters that would certainly disrupt the kind predictable we have grown accustom to.