The corona crisis has a major impact on the world, but for me personally 2020 is not a bad year.
It’s just feels like I’m busier than I like to be (not just this year though).
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If anything, 2020 is a monument to adaptability.
As long as we survive, we adapt (one might say it’s the other way round, but I stand by my statement 
).
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I realised that I made a dumb comment in this post, asserting that the Toba supervolcano’s eruption caused a crop failure… ~60,000 years before the development of agriculture.
The main effects woud have instead been:
- Darkness, stunting wild food plants and disrupting ecosystems
- Reduced temperatures
- Pollution of the water and soil with ash
There’s genetic evidence for a population bottleneck in several species occuring around this time period, including humans. Some scientists, iirc, believe that total human population could have been reduced to less than ten thousand people.
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It has been quite a crazy year as everyone seems to agree. At this time last year, I know that I sure would not have expected anything like this to happen, but I think that it just goes to show how unpredictable our world is.
Now with the US elections coming up and the great separation that my country deals with, along with the racial issues and a great lack of law and order in many of America’s cities, it makes me very upset. I am deeply grateful for all the people that want the best for our world and work tirelessly to protect us, take care of us, and unite us. I hope and pray that we will come closer to each other and work together to overcome this. For the better or the worse, we are always making history.
On a side note, at this point, I really would not be surprised if the Yellowstone supervolcano were to erupt at some point before the end of this year. And I should point out that I live disturbingly close to it. 
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It can happen any moment now!
Luckily on a geographical timescale “any moment” is basically any time within the next 10’000 years or so 
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The three supereruptions occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and approximately 630,000 years ago,
Non-explosive eruptions of lava and less-violent explosive eruptions have occurred in and near the Yellowstone caldera since the last supereruption.[13][14] The most recent lava flow occurred about 70,000 years ago, while a violent eruption excavated the West Thumb of Lake Yellowstone around 150,000 years ago. Smaller steam explosions occur as well: an explosion 13,800 years ago left a 5 km (3.1 mi) diameter crater
Less big eruptions are more often and
scientists believe that the proportion of molten rock in the chamber is far too low to allow for another supereruption.
so next eruption is more likely to be " relatively small " but it still better to be 1000 km away when that happens
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So we’re talking only what? 100 nuclear bombs worth of energy? A thousand? I’m not sure if what volcanologists mean by a “small” volcanic eruption is quite the same thing that I mean by it. 
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Fortunately, Yellowstone has been carefully monitored for many decades and the magma behavior has not done anything unusual enough to make scientists think there will be an eruption soon. I agree that a large eruption is very unlikely, at least in our lifetimes.
That being said, although many people don’t like to hear it, if there is one thing I have learned about volcanology it is that anything can happen. If Yellowstone has the most dramatic eruption it is capable of, ash will be thrown thousands of miles around and there will be a great deal of damage. And, as bad as that seems, the real problem is the effect it could have on the climate, which would effect the entire world, and likely much worse then most people realize. It is likely that there will be some smaller ash explosions for a little while first but we really don’t know that. It could go off practically instantly without any warning.
The fact is, volcanology is an extremely difficult and not very predicable field because humans have not been studying this kind of thing with enough depth for very long and so we really don’t know that much because we have not seen enough eruptions in general.
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Always expected 2020 to be a year with a grand vision about the world we live in. Now I am not so sure anymore.
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In a sense, in 2020 we got to see exactly who each of us is and who everyone else we know is, so it’s only hiding behind our pinky if we deny it.
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they predicted it…
Yeah, quite good work on their part!
A shame in a way that they missed the pandemic. Also, the idea that Revolution is imminent (in the US - I guess that’s implied) is wildly optimistic.
Optimistic because most Americans have their basic needs satisfied and are happy?
This is a good one too!
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I read a very interesting article about this on Russia Today a few months ago: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/495291-split-societies-global-chaos/
Even before 2020 I used to think that we live in the most interesting time in world history, but most people don’t realize it. Now I think it is becoming more apparent.
Also, I believe the enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons are the Chekhov’s gun in the history of humanity. They have to be used now that they exist. No one wants it to happen, but I think everyone will be powerless to stop it once certain events are put into motion.
Although everyone’s quality of life will be reduced to the stone age after this disaster that we are stumbling into, we are lucky to experience the most massive event in the history of mankind. Everyone will talk about it forever once it’s over and it will eventually become mythology as the writing system is forgotten and civilization is rebuilt, but we were there when it happened.
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He saved the world once:
“unlucky”?
who?)
are you sure?
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I think it’s rather because of Murphy’s law: if there are nuclear weapons in existence, when an irresponsible government is not the cause for one of them going of, then it is only a matter of time before a mistake is made and one of them is launched. It already almost happened by the Soviet and almost happened by the US. And then we’re not even aware of those times that have been kept secret (for obvious reasons)
Ah, apparently there are far more accidents than I even thought, apart from the above two there’s a list here here with plenty other examples
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Well, when you put it like that it becomes even more interesting, because then we are currently living with the highest quality of life that any human will ever experience. Maybe there will be no humans on Earth in the future and we will become extinct like the dinosaurs. Sooner or later we will go extinct anyway so why not in the foreseeable future?
I recommend Herman Kahn’s old book “On Thermonuclear War”.
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