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Comment by yellowstuff | Hacker News Reader

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. It could be that worrying about doomsday is an innate human trait, and that as the article asserts, certain types of worries are motivated by racism.

I still think it's a good idea to allocate some resources towards mitigating low probability, high impact events.

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Being prepared for emergencies is prudent. And most contingencies require the same basic preparations and planning. A store of non perishables, water and a way to purify more, a good rifle and ammo, clothes for adverse conditions, perhaps a generator etc are all good to keep on hand.

But the number of times in human history the world has "ended" can be counted on one hand. That time 10k years ago when the human population had a big bottleneck, maybe a super volcano. The bronze age collapse is another. The fall of the western roman empire. That's about it.

But there are many more smaller events that still warrant emergency preparedness. Catastrophic weather, civil unrest and war count.

Your advice is good, I agree that the most important thing is to be prepared for these smaller events. I would like to add an entry to your list of armageddons though. The indigenous people of the Americas had a pretty bad century after first contact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno...

An even more rational approach is think about it in terms of classes of scenarios to prepare for – many threats can be averted and/or mitigated through common preparations. Seed stores, distributed infrastructure, general survival training, and so on. But given how remote many scenarios seem to most people making decisions, the extra effort for long term benefits over short term gains tends to favor the latter over the former.

> Seed stores, distributed infrastructure, general survival training, and so on.

If we actually thought like this and prepared ourselves in this manner during good times it’d increase the resilience of our species so profoundly.

We can. Now is good times. Apart from the pandemic – but that's only one type of bad time; we're mostly okay as regards climate change, we don't currently have much crop blight, nuclear armageddon seems far away… and we're mostly in a position to prepare and mitigate those issues, even if we missed the boat on this particular pandemic.

Some of this does exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

That's the focus of the classic prepping guide: Doomsday Prepping For Less Crazy Folk

https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/

Nice Heller/Kobain reference.

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