When we think about rare but truly extraordinary risks that have global effects, and even more so when we contemplate catastrophic events that could severely damage or even end modern civilization, we do so on an altogether different mental plane: those real (albeit very low) risks belong to a very different perception category. As with every event that might take place in a possibly quite distant future, we strongly discount their impact and, as demonstrated yet again by the 2020 pandemic, we are chronically unprepared to deal even with those risks whose recurrence is measured in decades, not
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