My aunt, recently retired from the printing industry, has regaled me with many tales of the intricacies and complications she went through to print everything from Harry Potter to Jocko Willink. Kindles were also banned from entering her home.
That's a good human survival play book. But what are we capable of now to clean the planet after a quadrillion tons of ash and fire hits our atmosphere.
Absolutely agree with this point! You also raised another interesting idea - since we don't know when a giant impact or similar catastrophic event will occur, we can't categorize it as a near-term risk or long-term risk. It could happen anytime within the near to long range. How are risks on that broad time scale defined?
Actually, my understanding is that astronomers have a pretty good idea of where all the dino-killer asteroids are in the solar system and that none of them are a problem for at least a century. Comets are more of a risk, though not much of one. That much is known at least. And similarly, the Yellowstone volcano is a bit over-hyped. The most likely disasters are a pandemic (seems quite likely now.) or a large coronal mass ejection aimed at the Earth, but those would primarily affect humans/technology, so again they might actually be good for the overall ecology.
There have been mass extinctions before, but it's a thing that happens once in awhile in geological time, so not really something to keep us up at night. Really human caused disasters - climate/pollution, nuclear weapons, rogue AI, are the things that are likely to get us.
I understand this won't sit well with a lot of people, but reading a chapter or two of the Bible before bed totally resets my mind and helps me fall asleep almost immediately when I am ready. It calls you to a different realm. Especially the historical books like Judges, Samuel, and Kings.
When I walked the Camino de Santiago (Catholic pilgrimage across Spain) there was one segment near the Pyrenees where lots of aggressive graffiti seemed to warn that "you are in Basque country now!"
Basque nationalism was quite a thing a few decades ago. I recall once my grandparents driving us from Pau in France down to Bilbao to see the Guggenheim, at one point we drove past the bombed out remains of a politicians car that had happened recently enough that it was still smoking.
Well, Basque nationalism is still a thing, as they hold the 58% of the seats in their parliament. What we don't have now, fortunately, are armed Basque nationalist organizations.
But seriously why can't we just start building more net-zero natural gas plants that take up 1/100 of the land area? This is insane.