A TURBULENT AND DANGEROUS WORLD

March 1, 2006

Dirty bomb, suicide bomber, chemical and biological agents, 8.0 on the Richter scale, tsunami, category 5 hurricane, aids, bird flu pandemic. These have become some of the scariest words in the English language. Increasingly, we are reminded that the world is a turbulent and dangerous place, and the odds that something very unpleasant might directly affect one of us are greater than we would like to believe.

September 11, 2001, more than anything since the Cuban missile crisis, made Americans feel vulnerable. And although we have not had another terrorist attack in the United States in nearly four and a half years, we see the violence in Iraq daily on our television screens, reminding us that the terrorists haven't forgotten about us, and if they could detonate a nuclear device in major U.S. city they would.

Still, we might have recovered our sense of security and the pragmatic attitude we had in the later years of the Cold War had it not been for other events. After 9/11, the December 2004 Asian tsunami, hurricane Katrina, and increasingly frequent and devastating natural disasters around the world, were seen in a different light. The proliferation of programs on cable TV about historic disasters of biblical proportions, and warnings that they will inevitably happen again, further heightens our sense of vulnerability.

Take those pesky recurring extinction events, for example. The dumb people Jay Leno interviews on the street on the Tonight Show, notwithstanding, you'd be surprised how many people now know that there have been no less than five mass extinctions in the history of the planet. The first occurred 450 million years ago after the evolution of the first land-based plants. The second came 350 million years ago. Two mass extinctions occurred during the Triassic period, between 250 and 200 million years ago. The fifth, caused by a giant meteor, occurred 65 million years ago and ended the dinosaurs dominance of the Earth. For the record, 98 percent of all species that ever existed on earth have gone extinct.

The meteor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs was not an isolated event. The earth is rife with craters from past meteor strikes. Small meteors strike the earth almost daily and astronomers tell us that a large meteor will someday strike the earth again, they just don't know when.

OK, the odds of the next mass extinction or a giant meteor strike occurring in your lifetime are about the same as you're winning $350 Million in the lottery. But if you watch the Discovery Channel regularly, like I do, you know that when Cumbre Vieja erupts on La Palma in the Canary Island chain and half of La Palma falls into the Atlantic Ocean a mega tsunami will travel across the Atlantic ocean at the speed of a 747 and devastate every costal American city from Maine to Florida. Scientists say it's not if this will happen, but when.

Events like mega tsunamis are far more common than mass extinctions and occur every five to eight thousand years. The loss of life from such an event likely would be far greater than from all of the volcanic eruptions and tsunamis that have been recorded in the past five thousand years. Our ancestors didn't have to concern themselves with such possibilities. They didn't know about them, but, thanks to modern science, we do.

If all this doesn't make you uneasy, don't try and tell me you aren't worried about a bird flu pandemic. After all, it has been disease, not natural disasters that has accounted for the greatest loss of life in the course of human history. More insidious than natural disasters, pandemics happen two or three times a century. They have wiped out entire peoples. We may have thought that modern medicine and antibiotics had freed us from the pandemics of the past, but we are learning that this isn't the case.

So what's the point? You either bite your fingernails to the quick worrying about all this every day, or you go about your life figuring the odds are slim and there isn't much you can do about it anyway so why dwell on it.. The vast majority of Americans do the latter. But if you think that the modern world is beyond disasters of "biblical" proportions, think again. There's a reason they call it the "miracle of life."

So don't dwell on the fact that sooner or later a mega tsunami will kill millions of people or that another mile wide meteor will strike the earth causing a sixth mass extinction. Bird flu is going to mutate and pass from human to human or it isn't. Terrorists are going to attack us with a weapon of mass destruction or they aren't. Lead a normal life, but from time to time consider the possibilities and value the life you have. It could change in the blink of an eye.