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Seventy four thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia, Homo sapiens had a very bad day, perhaps the worst day that we’ve ever experienced. On what is now the Indonesial Island of Sumatra, a mountain called Toba exploded -- though the word doesn’t do justice to the act of sheer geographical violence perpetrated that day. What happened to Toba was a destruction that scientists would eventually coin a term for volcanic disasters of its scale: supereruption. But the eruption was only the beginning. Toba’s aftereffects dimmed the sun and draped a volcanic winter around the world. It might have brought our species closer to the brink of extinction than ever or since. At a moment when Homo sapiens was far from the world-dominating force we are today, Toba was our ultimate trial. It was also a warning -- the most dangerous natural existential risk we face comes not from the skies above, but from the ground beneath our feet. ~ Excerpt “End Times” Author - Bryan Welsh

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. . . . Again and again we find that the biggtest barrier to combating existential risks -- including nuclear war -- is a mental one, for the human mind rebels against the sheer scale of extinction. Homo sapiens evolved to live in small groups, and so we feel acutely the grief of small scale loss, that of a friend or a relative or even a stranger. But there is no individualizing the deaths of millions of people, perhaps even our entire species. And so we choose to deny it. ~ Page 100

3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.

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