One of the most disturbing things I ever read was from here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/10n/why_safety_is_not_safe/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/10n/why_safety_is_not_s

One of the most disturbing things I ever read was from here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/10n/why_safety_is_not_safe/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/10n/why_safety_is_not_safe/ >...The great civilizations of Europe and China were roughly on par, the former having almost caught up over the previous few centuries; yet Chinese oceangoing ships were arguably still better than anything Europe could build... Perhaps China might have reached the Americas before Europeans did, and the shape of the world might have been very different... >...By the 16th century, the fleets had vanished...to this day there is no consensus on the underlying factors... Some writers have blamed flat terrain, which others have disputed; some have blamed rice agriculture and its need for irrigation systems. Likely there were factors nobody has yet understood; perhaps we never will. >An entire future that might have been, was snuffed out by some terrible force compared to which war, plague and famine were mere pinpricks - and yet even with the benefit of hindsight, we still don't truly understand what it was. >Nor is this an isolated case. From the collapse of classical Mediterranean civilization to the divergent fates of the US and Argentina, whose prospects looked so similar as recently as the early 20th century, we find more terrible than any war or ordinary disaster are forces which operate unseen in plain sight and are only dimly understood even after the fact. >The saving grace has always been the outside: when one nation, one civilization, faltered, another picked up the torch and carried on; but with the march of globalization, there may soon be no more outside. >...we react instantly to the lesser death that comes in blood and fire, but the greater death that comes in the dust of time, is to our minds invisible.