Imagine it is 2024. For the last few years, it feels as if the world has largely moved past the COVID moment. There is a widely-shared sense that we have successfully dealt with our generation’s big challenge, and can now resume a calmer life. COVID was the worst pandemic in one hundred years, so we allowed ourselves to believe it would be at least another century before we faced anything so disruptive again. Unfortunately, this turns out not to be so. A new pandemic emerges, shutting down the world again, this time for a full two years.
Such a scenario likely seems farfetched. Not because it imagines a global pandemic shutting down the world—while that may have seemed farfetched two years ago, we now know it to be all-too plausible. No, it seems farfetched because imagining another pandemic so soon after the last one violates our bias towards thinking the world is much more predictable than it actually is. Within the framework of this bias, there is room for unprecedented challenges, but only with the unspoken assumption that, the world being predictable, unprecedented challenge will be followed by a long period of relative tranquility, giving us time to collectively regroup. That another global pandemic could conceivably follow COVID in the next three years speaks to a reality of our existence we do not like to acknowledge—that it is deeply uncertain. Regardless of whether or not we see another pandemic in 2024, the possibility that we could is indeed an uncertainty we must each day face.
Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a story with a headline which spoke to the uncertainty with which we live, “U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either.” The story concerned an upcoming government report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), an updated term for what are more commonly referred to as UFOs. The article contained this eye-catching line:
“[S]enior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft.”
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