The Top 40

The world has been remarkably free of major civilization-damaging disaster for a long time now. We're not technologically beyond or evolved past horrific disaster, we've simply been spared for centuries.

It will happen again, whether asteroid impact or solar flare EMP or horrendous outbreak of a new disease, major climactic shift or any other strange thing. Its a matter of when, not if.

On the hills around Los Angelos the brush grows quickly after any rain and in the dry months the threat of wildfires grows greater and greater until (surprisingly) a great, uncontrollable conflagration scours the hills and the many times rebuilt expensive mansions of the rich.

The thick brush and grasses, the great masses of humanity packed tightly together. What's the difference? You can't criticize the hills for not having a space program and immigration to the planets and to the stars. But of course, the day the first spaceship lifts for far horizons is the day that Zero Sum politics are proved to be a lie.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:

They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

I'm good with that.