For the love of God, look up
In less than a week, a giant space rock bigger than the Empire State Building will zoom past Earth. I don’t know, maybe someone important should look up and wonder if we are taking big risks seriously enough.
In a good piece by Matt Yglesias, he argues that the disaster-movie-satire Don’t Look Up, which has been a recent sensation on Netflix, works better if you extend the metaphor beyond climate change – to, say, comet strikes or even supervolcano eruptions.
I don’t want to tell you that there has never been a story in the mainstream press about supervolcanoes, but there really aren’t very many. There’s no mainstream constituency at all to fund a larger scientific effort to understand supervolcano risk and how to mitigate it. And a candidate for office who goes on “Meet The Press” to say one of his top priorities in Congress is improving U.S. efforts to tackle supervolcanoes would be roundly mocked.
There are some catastrophes that we know have a real change of happening (including pandemics and, yes, even supervolcanoes), that we don’t prepare for properly. What if we get another Carrington event – only worse. Do you know just how big solar storms can get?
Of course, the idea of total control is a delusion. Some things can’t be stopped. Maybe Elon Musk is right that we need a second planet as a backup, stat. But meanwhile here on Earth we barely try. Even in the middle of a devastating pandemic, we somehow can’t summon the attention to pre-empt the next outbreak.
Here’s Dominic Cummings in his email newsletter January 7:
As many have pointed out, despite the enormity of the covid disaster, we are still allowing extremely dangerous research to continue in labs without adequate safety regimes! And of course there is practically no mainstream media coverage, just like in 2019 when I blogged on it!
And we are failing to build many things we should be building, here and across the world, to help detect future natural or manmade pandemic threats and ensure they are suppressed one way or another. Follow @kesvelt and @geochurch for details.
And here’s Matt Yglesias again, saying something very similar:
What’s particularly frustrating about this is that we have a clear success story in Operation Warp Speed. Instead of treating that as a one-off, it should be a foundation for continued, ongoing research into super vaccines targeting whole virus families, new generations of antiviral drugs, a better understanding of air filters, designing new iterations of masks, the whole deal. If you went on TV to talk about comets, people would laugh at you. But people on TV are talking about the pandemic all the time. So why can’t we talk about forward-looking pandemic policy?