OUT OF NOWHERE
THE BIG NEWS STORY IN AUGUST 2011 WAS THE THREAT HURRICANE Irene posed to the way of life of New Yorkers. If events happened to fall just âright,â Manhattan and other low-lying regions might well be swamped, shutting down public transit systems, the New York Stock Exchange, food and water supply chains, and other niceties of urban life in New York City. Luckily, Irene ran out of steam before delivering such a life-changing blow, and the end result was a just bit worse than what would have been experienced from a very heavy summer storm. So the good people of Manhattan dodged a bullet, and the media hype beforehand simply amounted to a large dose of overreaction to the possible threats presented by Irene. But one day the bill really will come due, as it did in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, showing that overreaction and near-paranoiac prudence are two sides of the same coin.
Of course, believing that the sky is falling is a well-known defense mechanism when weâre faced with a threat so far outside our comfort and knowledge zones that we can only run around like Chicken Little, hoping the threat goes away. Often it does. But not always. And itâs those ânot alwaysâ cases that donât just capture headlines, but also force us to confront the unpleasantries of existential threats to an accustomed way of life. This is no joke, either. X-events do occur. And they can wreak the kind of havoc and damage that many of us would like to believe only science-fiction writers and Hollywood film producers take seriously. But an X-event is not reality television; itâs reality, period. Here are a couple of examples as prelude for the stories told in the pages of this book.
ABOUT 74,000 YEARS AGO, ON WHAT IS NOW THE ISLAND OF SUMATRA in Indonesia, the supervolcano Toba exploded with a force that cannot be compared with anything that has been seen on Earth since the time humans began to walk upright. Just for the sake of comparison, the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 had an explosive force of 150 megatons of TNT, which was ten thousand times greater than the atomic bomb that flattened Hiroshima. The Toba explosion is estimated to have been about one gigaton, over six times greater than Krakatoa and three thousand times greater than the energy produced by Mount St. Helens when it erupted in 1980.
At the time of the Toba event, Neanderthal man inhabited Earth, alongside Homo sapiens in Europe and Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis in Asia. The last Ice Age was then at its peak, with woolly mammoth and saber-toothed tiger on the menu for humans of the day. The volcano changed all thatâovernight.
Alongside gigantic tsunami waves, the nearly three thousand cubic kilometers of dust and debris ejected into the atmosphere reduced the solar radiation so dramatically that plants received too little light to survive. The average temperature worldwide dropped to (note: not by, but to) 5 degrees (Fahrenheit), turning summer to winter and winter into a very deep freeze.
Today itâs estimated that the total number of human survivors of this event was only a few thousand, mainly those living in small groups in Africa. This figure is the result of remarkable genetic detective work by scholars who examined DNA samples from that period. The researchers saw that the genetic samples from all over the world would have been very different if humans had been able to develop without the difficulties Toba created everywhere on the planet. Todayâs humans all stem from those hardy survivors. It was science journalist Ann Gibbons who suggested in 1993 that the Toba volcano was responsible for the near extinction of humankind, a hypothesis that was quickly taken up by researchers including Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois, who developed theories and dug up the data to back up Gibbonsâs idea.
But still âalmostâ only counts in horseshoes, and even a supervolcano like Toba couldnât in fact totally wipe humans from the face of the planet. It was a monumental catastrophe. No doubt about that. But it didnât send humankind to the graveyard of history. What could do that?
To get a handle on what type of event might end the tenure of Homo sapiens on Earth, we need go no farther than to the most popular wing in your local natural history museum. About sixty-five million years ago, a fireball six miles in diameter crashed into what today is the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico at a speed of about twenty miles per second. This ânear-earth objectâ (NEO) created some of the same existential threats to life a supervolcano generatesâfireballs, tidal waves, blast effects, and the likeâbut on a scale that dwarfs even the biggest supervolcano. To get a sense of what it would be like if such a behemoth struck a landmass today, hereâs a plausible scenario.
First, the local explosion would literally annihilate everything in the immediate area of the impact, generating a shock wave radiating outward for hundreds of miles that kills everything in its path. Gigantic fires would spread for as much as five hundred miles in all directions. And this is not to speak of the global firestorm produced by the huge amount of debris that would be sent into the atmosphere and come raining down all over the planet. The energy released from the strike would probably raise surface temperatures on Earth to levels seen inside a hot oven. Itâs important to note that debris in the atmosphere would block the sunâs rays, producing a global freeze sometime after the impact and that massive shock waves traveling through the planet from the impact could well trigger volcanic activity as an aftereffect.
These effects are more than enough to have led to the demise of the dinosaurs, who dominated all life-forms on Earth for a whopping 170 million years. Their disappearance opened an eco-niche for some small, furry mammals about the size of a big rat that ultimately evolved intoâŚtodayâs humans. The one thing thatâs for certain, though, is that an object like this striking the planet today would stop civilization in its tracks. Itâs more than conceivable that every land animal larger than a cat would die. But who knows? After all, no dinosaur could lay in a supply of canned food, sacks of corn, or ensure a supply of potable water in a deep underground shelter. So some people might conceivably make it through even an event of this magnitude. But it doesnât seem to be the way to bet. Besides, who wants to live in a world in which the survivors would almost surely envy the dead?
In our current form, we humans have been in place for at most a few hundred thousand years. Of course, an asteroid like the one that struck the Yucatan itself occurs only every few hundred thousand years or more. But, then, whatâs a few hundred thousand years compared to the nearly two hundred million enjoyed by the dinosaurs before they exited center stage?
So there we have it: the reality of disaster, catastrophe, extinction. Take your pick. It will not have escaped the perceptive reader that each of the X-events Iâve so far outlined share a common cause: nature. Earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroid strikes, and other such events are all outside the scope of either human cause or human intervention. We are pretty much powerless to influence whatever nature wants to throw at us. And if we get very unlucky, weâll hang up a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign, turn out the lights, and simply declare that the partyâs over. So while these sorts of interventions by nature are useful as background to the story I tell in this book, by far the more interesting and relevant part of this story for humankind is the other side of the X-events coin: human-caused catastrophes, perhaps aided and abetted by nature. Letâs look at a few examples of human-caused X-events that are analogous, but vastly smaller in impact, than the examples weâve just explored. I begin with some hypothetical X-events illustrating the spectrum of possibilities, then move to examples of the real thing.
THE HUMAN FACTOR
CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING POSSIBLE X-EVENTS:
- A virulent strain of the avian virus jumps to humans in Hong Kong, sweeps across Asia, and ends up killing more than fifty million people.
- A magnitude 8 earthquake centered on the Ginza in Tokyo kills two million people outright and leads to property damage running into the trillions of dollars.
- Bees around the world begin dying off in massive numbers, interfering with pollination of plants worldwide, thereby setting off a global food shortage.
- Terrorists detonate a nuclear weapon in Times Square during rush hour, leveling much of Manhattan, killing half a million people, and permanently reducing New York City to rubble.
- A tanker car carrying chlorine derails in Rio de Janeiro, spilling its contents and killing more than five million Cariocas.
This list could be carried on almost indefinitely. The point is that surprising events capable of killing millions, if not hundreds of millions, of humans are well within the realm of the possible. Moreover, even without huge loss of lives, capital stock is decimated, setting back development worldwide for decades. Not a single one of the items on this list is impossible. And, in fact, some of them, like the spill of a deadly chemical, have already happened many times.
Today humans are more vulnerable than ever to X-events. The complex infrastructures we depend upon for everyday lifeâtransportation, communication, food and water supply, electrical power, health care, to name but a fewâare fragile beyond belief, as weâre reminded when even a small glitch in the delivery systems occurs. What are the causes of this high fragility and our consequent vulnerability? Can we really understand these X-events and if not actually control them, at least anticipate them? To address such questions, we need to have some understanding of the root cause(s) that give rise to these events and whether these causes are hardwired into the workings of the infrastructures themselves or are something we can forecast and to some degree control.
As I argue throughout the remainder of the book, the underlying cause of X-events is directly attributable to the ever-increasing complexity of our global society. This complexity shows up in many forms, such as the high connectivity among infrastructures that transmits a tremor in one part of the infrastructure to other parts of the system, often at literally the speed of light. Sometimes the complexity reveals itself in layers of bureaucracy piled upon existing layers until the system can no longer functionâwhat Iâll term âcomplexity overloadâ in the pages to follow. At other times, the problem manifests itself not with any single infrastructure, but as a âmismatchâ in complexity levels between two or more interacting systems, such as a nationâs government and its citizens, as discussed earlier. But in all cases, the systems we count on for everyday life cannot function if they are beyond the ability of their regulator to understand. When the complexity level or the mismatch becomes greater than the system can bear, a reduction is needed to rectify that situation. An X-event is simply the systemâs way of restoring a sustainable balance.
This balancing act will be our leitmotif. Our fortunes are tied to it. If it fails, humanity fails. Whatâs really worrying is that the systems supporting our twenty-first-century lifestyle are simply not as robust as weâd like to think. On this note, let me present a handful of slightly more extended examples of human systems breaking down in ways that hint at how vulnerable we are should a complexity overload highly stress the system.
ACCORDING TO A 2004 REPORT IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, A MAJOR breakdown in Southern Californiaâs air traffic control system was due partly to a âdesign anomalyâ in the way Microsoft Windows servers were integrated into the system. The radio system shutdown, which lasted more than three hours, left eight hundred planes in the air without contact to air traffic control and, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, led to at least five cases where planes came too close to each other. Air traffic controllers were reduced to using their personal mobile phones to pass on warnings to controllers at other facilities, and they observed numerous close calls without being able to alert the pilots.
The FAA ultimately concluded that the system crash was attributable to a combination of human error and a design problem in the Windows servers brought in over the past three years to replace the traffic control systemâs original Unix servers. The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the Los Angeles Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every thirty days. An improperly trained employee forgot to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said. Backup systems failed because of a software glitch.
Three years later in June 2007, a computer system in Atlanta that processes pilot flight plans and sends them to air traffic controllers also crashed, setting off a cascade of such failures around the country. These breakdowns led to hundreds of flights being delayed and even canceled altogether in both directions from New York airports. Just one year later, the very same computer in Atlanta froze again. The problem occurred as routine software work was being done on the computer, leading it to offload work to the other control system located in Salt Lake City. But the Utah system was overwhelmed by the surge of information and could no longer process all the flight plans being filed. End result? No flight plans were processed, which meant no controllers knew what routes planes would be taking and when they intended to land. At that point, controllers stopped giving takeoff clearance and the whole air traffic system froze up.
But human error in the skies is certainly not confined to misunderstandings and aging computers. In September 2010, a US Airways jet carrying 95 people came within fifty feet of a small cargo plane while taking off from Minneapolis, and just a couple of months later an American Airlines flight with 259 aboard nearly collided southeast of New York City with two air force transport planes. Later, an air traffic controller at the Ronkonkoma, New York, radar center that was controlling the American plane complained about the unprofessional, sloppy atmosphere at the center. And this is no backwater facility either, but the second-busiest air traffic radar center in the country.
These stories could be multiplied severalfold, as well as spiced up, by accounts of controllers falling asleep in the tower and other purely human frailties, all of which add up to increasingly less friendly skies for todayâs air traveler. The statistical data bear out this scary picture, as reports of mistakes by air traffic controllers nearly doubled from 2009 to 2010 with no end in sight. Fortunately, most of the errors were not in the most serious category, the sort that would require pilots to take evasive action. But even in that class, the errors reported rose from thirty-seven in 2009 to forty-four in 2010. All in all, there still remain good reasons to be seriously concerned about a true X-event occurring that might shut down the entire air traffic system. The system is highly fragile, perched on the edge of a complexity gap between the airlines wishing to maximize flights and cluster them during desirable travel times and the need by controllers to keep the skies safe. As these stories suggest, the gap seems to be widening at an alarming rate.
ON FEBRUARY 24, 2010, GREEK POLICE FIRED TEAR GAS AND CLASHED with demonstrators in central Athens after a march organized by unions opposing the governmentâs program to cut the European Unionâs biggest budget deficit. The president of a large union stated, âPeople on the street will send a strong message to the government, but mainly to the European Union, the markets and our partners in Europe, that people and their needs must be above the demands of markets. We didnât create the crisis.â Later, air traffic controllers, customs and tax officials, train drivers, doctors at state-run hospitals, and schoolteachers walked out also to protest government spending cuts. Journal...
