On the nature of man and disaster

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.William Shakespeare"Julius Caesar"Human response to risk can be either proactive or reactive. Proactive measures include avoiding known risks by not settling in or venturing into hazardous environments, and mitigating them by constructing dams, levees, and other protective infrastructure. Proactive mitigation also includes creating disaster warning systems, infrastructure to facilitate rapid evacuation, and emergency shelters in advance of need. Proactive measures are necessarily costly because they both consume and sequester resources for an indefinite period of time. This cost is particularly psychologically burdensome because it is impossible to predict with any certainty precisely when a threat will become a crisis or a disaster.In contrast, reactive measures are much less expensive in the short term. Delivering emergency food, water, shelter, medical care, and post-disaster evacuation have the theoretical advantage of being deployable anywhere, ideally from just a few locations. The appeal of post-disaster response is that the overhead is low and the resources can be used reliably on a regular basis. Unfortunately, what is not factored into this approach is the vastly more expensive loss of property and lives that proactive mitigation would have prevented. The reasons for disasters such as Hurricane Katrina can only be understood by inquiring into the nature of technology and the human minds that wield it.There is an anthropologic perspective on the evolution of technology. One way to look at this progression is in terms of timescales. To begin, the 'trivial timescale' is bounded by day-to-day activities such as bathing, unstructured socializing, and going to work. Humans, and presumably most other v