Fragility

I enjoy reading "History of mankind" books. The most popular today is probably Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari (it is also available as an illustrated history). I can also recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, which I read after visiting Peru about 10 years ago (it has a great description and analysis of Pizarro attack on the Inca army at Cajamarca). Both Harrari and Diamond point to the role of viruses in shaping our global history (and now we can just experience how this works...).

But the grand view after these lectures is the more advanced a civilization is, the more fragile it becomes. Who knows, maybe this is the reason our search for alien life has not bear any fruit....

We have an extremely well functioning system for spreading viruses across the globe - thanks to the modern means of transport. Our ancestors definitely did not have the capacity for a global pandemic. 

And today (this has practically changed over the last decade) we rely entirely of electronic information  storage and communication system. A hundred years ago it was not possible to burn all the libraries on the planet, while today it is not impossible to imagine an event destroying all our stored information - it could be either an EMP wiping out the electronic storage or even permanently destroying the power grid globally. Washout electricity we would not have capacity to rebuild the grid. Just recently LiveScience has brought this up in the context of active military research to guard against EMP.

While a global EMP or an asteroid collision are extinction - class events, there are many more probable events which would not lead to extinction of humankind, but would certainly have devastating potential. I touched upon our reliance on GPS last week and it is really hard to believe how much today is totally dependent on a tiny fleet of  24 satellites. We could afford ignoring GPS just 20 years ago, but no longer now.

Similarly there are several fundamental digital services which are our single points of failure like cryptography (imagine a vulnerability in AES-256 is discovered) or even DNS.

Finally - the supply chains can be traced to just a few critical technology providers like semiconductor fabs (you have probably heard of the current chip crisis). The structure of dependencies  in other manufacturing sectors is similar, with extreme concentration in just a handful of hubs.

The bottom line is the globalization, the progress and the continuous drive to improve profitability has been pushing us to the zone of very high fragility. Our ancestors, despite being much less developed, were much more resilient.