The Black Sky Event

Carrington-level events though are roughly every 100-150 years, of that we're pretty certain and it's been like 160 years since the last one.

A Cascadia Tsunami apparently hits every 240 years (on average according to VERY good records from Japan), the last one would've decimated basically half the state of Washington.... probably most of Seattle, etc.. not sure about if it goes up to Vancouver, etc...

As far as things that are due to hit us, besides global warming related catastrophes, I think Carrington and Cascadia Tsunami's probably have the most possibility of occurring soonest. Carrington is the scariest though... as it basically affects everyone globally and sets us back to the 1800s..

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Writing solid, characters slightly on the meh side, scientific research pretty ok (from an amateurs perspective, that is).

There's a question I occasionally ask people: what would you do if you woke up and the power was off and it wasn't coming back on any time soon? That's not an unreasonable scenario - it can happen in the US, as we've seen. I'm not talking permanently, but say it's indefinite: you don't know when the power will come back on, but not today or tomorrow or this week. No cell service, and - depending on where you live - maybe no water or heating either.

So what do you do? I mean specifically: what would you, not a theoretical person but you, do if that happened?

Most people don't have any idea, and a shocking number of them reply the same way: "I guess I'd probably just die." I've heard that from people of every race, age and gender. And they're not really kidding.

I have a lot of issues with the culture of "preppers", because there seems to be a lot of really nasty and unpleasant politics always lurking around there - like, I'll go find some sort of teehnical discussion of how to keep dry goods for long periods and halfway through the writer will start muttering about race wars or some awful fucking thing - but I do think there's value in at least having some skills and knowledge in that direction. I mean, I'm not Grizzly Adams, but in my thirties I realized that most of my skills involved computers, and that I'd be functionally useless in such a scenario.

So I started teaching myself basic carpentry and handyman stuff, learning how to make things with my hands and how to repair stuff, and how to build a basic shelter, do basic triage - Army survival manual stuff - and then how to wire up solar panels and charge controllers and all that good stuff. I figured out how to keep food - funnily enough, the Mormon church has some of the best community info about that for religious reasons - and safely store water, etc.

Nowadays, I'm the guy people say they'd go find if disaster struck, not because I have some compound with years of canned food and water tanks, but because I've actually thought about that question - what would I do if the power went out? - and tried to come up with good practices and strategies.

I'm working on a book about it, in fact - not a prepper manual but more a guide on how to think and act rationally in such situations, and the sort of information and tools you'd probably need. How to think about things we don't usually think about and come up with concrete plans, not just vague "Oh, I'd get out of town and find a place in the woods to hole up".

(How would you get out of town? If you don't have a car of your own with a full tank of gas, you're probably not going anywhere in a crisis, as public and mass transport will be instantly full. What "woods" would you go to? Some campground you vaguely remember seeing on the side of the highway once? You and a million other people. Planning on buying some energy bars and Dasani water bottles on the drive? Good luck, homie.) :-D