Disasters always feel like a thing of the past. We want to believe that better technology, better engineering will save us. That the more information we have, the safer we can make our technology. But we can never have all the information. In creating new technology to address known problems, we unavoidably create new problems, new unknowns. Progress changes the parameters of possibility. This is something we strive for—to innovate past the event horizon of what we can imagine. And with so much that is inaccessible, opaque, and in flux, we can’t even hold on to what we already know.
