The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

To imagine the twenty-first-century world being hit with a great plague like the great disease pandemics of the past is fantasy, yet it’s also extremely possible and has happened many times before.

Well, funny you should mention that...

Will we ever again have the type of pandemics that rapidly kill large percentages of the population? This was a feature of normal human existence until relatively recently, but seems almost like science fiction to imagine today.

“History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up,” Voltaire reportedly said.

Imagine all the ripple effects if our modern world were hit with a pandemic that killed just 10 percent of the human population.

If we moderns lived for one year with the sort of death rates our pre–industrial age ancestors perpetually lived with, we’d be in societal shock.

In 541 CE, what’s been described as the world’s first true pandemic arrived, and huge numbers of people died.

The same sense of hubris affects us today as affected the generation that was blindsided by the Spanish Influenza. A modern epidemic comparable with the great ones of the past is a thing more akin to science fiction to most people living today rather than something seen as a realistic possibility.

Well that proved prescient .

In the past, societies have been reshaped and at times have nearly crumbled under the weight of a pandemic.

If we do what we have always done, we can depend on outcomes that are disastrous.