All it takes is the temporary, local failure of one small part of the system your survival happens to depend on to ruin your day. This is not a doomsday scenario, except perhaps for you. That is what this community ponders.

Chrichton is entertainment media, not science and facts. In fact, it's often the opposite of science. I enjoy his fictions as much as the next guy.

But evidence...evidence is all that matters, and I look to every instance in the last 50 years where we had riots, blackouts, natural disasters, man-made disasters - and the top gets whacked, but it spins back up.

Crichton's fiction is often heavily researched and factually foot-noted, and his science credentials-Harvard MD-are not shoddy. And, he agrees with your position, as do I. Our society in particular, and biology in general, is incredibly adaptive.

My theory is that the Internet exposes people to worries they may not have been aware of before and allows immersion into every facet of it (such as EMP and solar storms).

Prior to the mid-1990s, most people had many fewer information resources than today. For me growing up, my information sources were (aside from school teachers, friends and family) a daily monopoly newspaper (The Oregonian), three television networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) and a small town library that was 20 miles from my house. And the occasional Time or Newsweek magazine.

The years since 2000 have also been quite tumultuous -- from Y2K to a disputed presidential election to 9/11, anthrax, wars, economic crash (that we're still not recovered from), etcetera.

History is replete with societal resilience (such as, we survived the aforementioned decade) but we are also an increasingly technology-dependent just-in-time society and many people are mindful that major disruption is just a power outage away....

A no-tech dog walk in the woods always helps soothe the worrier in me.

Well said Dagny; ivory tower folks concur:

NPR talk of the nation today; researchers suggest war and violence on the decline in modern times here .

Basic thought: Retail violence was much more prevalent in previous centuries, much rarer now.

I don't wish to start a flame war, but Martin is right. Chrichton wrote fiction. A Harvard MD certainly makes him qualified to write about medical topics. It does not automatically mean he knows anyting about any other area of science. Regarding his footnotes, several of the prominent scientists he cited have publicly stated that Chrichton totally misunderstood their work and/or took them grossly out of context.

Enjoy his books as science fiction. Do not presume that they have any significance beyond that.

Gosh, a lot of the MDeities that I have worked with believe that a medical degree grants expertise in politics, economics, and social commentary, but perhaps you are right. I promise never to refer to Crichton as an authority again.

I enjoy his books,dont write too much else into the equation though,just good entertainment,works for me.

I think the great quantity of information available tends to make folks lock themselves into "cultural ghettos". My term for those who limit their information gathering to one particular worldview. Soon it appears that everything they see confirms that worldview.

I try very hard to seek views that are not like mine. This becomes even more difficult when search engines return results filtered based on your past selections.

At the very least, planning my escape from my own self created cultural ghetto provides me with insight to how others see the world. And I become more confident that my decisions are bases on a more accurate assessment.

Nomad