Here are some preparedness-related ideas from 1999 as part of a hope by me to eventually use to design self-replicating space habitats (though not enough time to move them much further along):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
"The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products. ... The OSCOMAK project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas. ..."
Here is my own list of concerns from 1999 (I'd add supervolcanoes and Cascadia subduction zone to that list now -- and of course replace Y2K with the Year 2038 problem):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm
Here is a picture of what happened to my mother's home city in the Netherlands when she was a teenager -- her family's house burned during the initial invasion -- and then she saw people including an elderly relative starve to death a couple years later -- so disasters do happen and sometimes seemingly out of the blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_bombing_of_Rotterdam#/m...
Most US Americans may ignore this fact, but our lives in the USA are completely dependent on the continual error-free functioning of decades-old Soviet missile-launch computers built with computer chips we tried to sabotage:
http://www.businessinsider.com/russias-dead-hand-system-may-...
"To deter the possibility of a U.S. nuclear first-strike, the Soviets created a system called Perimeter, also known as "Dead Hand." The Dead Hand was a computer system that could autonomously launch all of the USSR's nuclear weapons once it was activated, across the entirety of the Soviet Union."
Let's hope those 1970s-era Soviet computer engineers knew how to build reliable systems from unreliable components! But, it still may be prudent to prepare for the situation where those Soviet computers eventually fail in some unexpected way.
Example: "99 red ballons - Nena" (but failing from a large earthquake misinterpreted as a nuclear strike may be more likely):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14IRDDnEPR4
Humans have become a geological force with all our technologies of abundance -- including control of nuclear energy as well as massive use of fossil fuels. But then we ignore the implications of all that technology because dealing with the implications requires thinking differently -- and thinking differently can be hard, expensive, and sometimes painful. Related humor on the difficulty of thinking differently: "Star Wars: The Death Star Cantina | WDR" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yl_reBjVqU
As Albert Einstein said, "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)".
Of course, any Apple watch these days has more power than the computers used to design the first atomic weapons.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/07/turings-cathed...
"[N]o other book has engaged so intelligently and disconcertingly with the digital age's relationship to nuclear weapons research, not just as a moral quandary to do with funding, but as an indispensable developmental influence, producing the conceptual tools that would unlock the intellectual power of the computer."
I generalized Einstein's theme for our new century to: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-tran...