X-Events: The Collapse of Everything (June 2012)
Requirements: ePUB Reader | 435 Kb
Overview: In his highly provocative and grippingly readable book, X-Events, author John Casti brilliantly argues that today’s advanced, overly complex societies have grown highly vulnerable to extreme events that will ultimately topple civilization like a house of cards.
A renowned systems theorist, John Casti shows how our world has become impossibly complicated, relying on ever more advanced technology that is developing at an exponential rate. Yet it is a fact of mathematical life that higher and higher levels of complexity lead to systems that are increasingly fragile and susceptible to sudden, spectacular collapse. Fascinating and chilling, X-Events provides a provocative tour of the catastrophic outlier scenarios that could quickly send us crashing back to the preindustrial age: global financial "black swans"; a worldwide crash of the Internet that would halt all communication; the end of oil; nuclear winter; "nano-plagues"; robot uprisings; electromagnetic pulses; pandemic viruses; and more. You won’t ever look at the world the same way again.
Casti’s book provides a much-needed wake-up call — sounding a fascinating and frightening warning about civilized society’s inability to recover from a global catastrophe — demonstrating how humankind could be blasted back into the Stone Age by a meteor strike, nuclear apocalypse, worldwide contagion, or any number of unforeseeable X-Events.
Genre: Non-Fiction, Science,
