General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Doomsday Preppers [View all]Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)On the other hand I've been a voracious reader for going on sixty years now and I know a bit about a great many things and a lot about quite a few things.
I grew up in the fifties and sixties where we knew as a matter of course that civilization could end any moment, duck and cover drills at school every week kind of made that blatantly obvious. If I could handle the idea of personal annihilation and the destruction of civilization at nine years old then I suppose I can handle it at sixtysomething.
Personally I think our civilization has been remarkably fortunate for the last couple of hundred years, there's just so many possible natural disasters that can wreck us, our luck is only going to hold out so long, sooner or later the law of averages will catch up with us and we'll have a truly major natural disaster.
For instance the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa is a potential source of a mega tsunami that would inundate much of the east coast of both north and south America, Florida would just be gone after such a tsunami, it could roll right over the entire peninsula.
Even the New Madrid fault in the Missouri area has the potential to royally screw up our civilization for a while, a really big quake there could cause heavy damage over multiple states that aren't really prepared for quakes.