28 December 2004 - natural disasters

Despite all our progress, natural disasters remain worse than artificial disasters. Great tsunamis like the recent one occur perhaps once or twice a century, about the same rate as world wars. The greatest natural disasters we know of are the great mass extinctions, which occur around once every 100,000,000 years. The only reason we don’t know about anything worse is that if anything worse happened, we wouldn’t be around to know about it. So as you see, despite all the environmentalist hype, humanity has a long hard road ahead to master all the forces of nature so that we can destroy the planet before it destroys us.