Now a more serious post (sorry, Sinsull)

There's a good article about accidents by the Dutch Willem Wagenaar titled 'Impossible accidents'. Summary: Each single accident is extremely unlikely, but accidents happen nevertheless and whatever precaution is taken will only avoid the particular accidents one has thought about before. The accidents that will happen are the others.

It is a bit the same with disaasters. Though some Mudcat Monday morning quarterbackers have made more or less useful remarks about what could (should) have been done in NO. But if you think about each conceivable disaster and make all you can to deal with the possible consequences there's not enough money to pay for all that. I don't mean the best option is always to do nothing but sometimes a possible option is not to act with respect to some scenarios of disaster.

Look back at your lives and think about the disasters that seemed likely. For me, nuclear war (and nuclear winter, that's the opposite of global warming, BTW) was the biggest menace for most of my life. I for instance had not the fantasy or imagination to think of an organisation below the level of states to be a significant source of disaster. That is, in, say 1999, I had no idea that a single man and his organisation (Bin Laden and Al Qaeda) could possibly nuke European or American towns (I still hope they can't but I'm not completely sure). Global warming was a small danger in my mind, compared to nuclear winter, only about 15 years ago.

From that experience I predict that the next (really big) disaster will be one that we do not think of yet. But I also predict that if there'll still be Mudcat (a world without Mudcat, isn't that the biggest conceivable disaster?) then some posters will say what should have been done (and that Bush is to blame, if it comes within the next three years).

Recently I have read what two clever scientists have written about really big disasters. Some ideas (from memory):

The big mountain in Teneriffe (?, whatever, Canaries it is anyway) that is kind of unstable will definitely fall into the sea (it could happen next week, or the week after, or the month after that, Carol). The wave will still be about 100 feet high at New York.

There will be a global epidemy fairly certain within the next fifty years.

A genetic wengineering experiment could go very wrong.

The SETI efforts could signal to one superior life form that they'd better get rid of us now. Better safe than sorry, who could blame them?

And then the very weird, unprobable, but theoretically possible strangelet scenario. (Not too bad in my mind, for we'd all be gone in a second or so; I wonder how believers in reincarnation deal with that, BTW).

Wolfgang