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Survive the Inevitable Pandemic

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Exporting Pandemic

Recently I sent away for a gizmo made in China. Yes, I know – for a number of good reasons my advice is to buy as locally as possible. However in this case the particular item is made no place other than China, which means China is as local as it gets.

Be that as it may, the remarkable thing is that it took merely a day and half for this item to get from China to the East Coast of the United States.The speed of transport between any two points on earth is a major triumph of the 21st Century and one that has done much to bring all people of the world closer.

Too close. Just as China (or any other country) can now export goods to anywhere in the world in just 36 hours, so too can it export disease and pestilence via the transport of people.

Spreading Pandemic

But there is more. One only has to visit any of the large cities in the world to see how close physically we have become. The subway stations, airports, and city streets are jam packed with people going about their daily business.

In the 1909 the world contained “only” 1.7 billion people. Just one hundred years later there are four times as many, some 6.8 billion people and growing.

Where an infected person could travel, at best, only several hundred miles per day even just 100 years ago, in that amount of time we can now travel across the entire world; spreading a swath of infection along the way to people who will in turn spread it further.

This combination of speed of travel and jam packed population centers means an eventual pandemic disaster. It may not happen today, or tomorrow, or next week. But it will happen.

Pandemic is Natural

Nature has a way taking care of overpopulation in any species.From microorganisms in Petri dishes to lemmings in the Arctic. Man is no different. At some point the critical mass is met where disease and pestilence wipes out a large number of individuals, knocking the population back to at least the carrying capacity of the environment and usually even lower than that.

The black plague in Europe during the middle ages is a prime example. It is estimated that some 1/3 of the population succumbed to this pandemic.

Pandemic Aftermath

Why You Will Want to Survive

It is often not understood that a large reduction in population can lead to some good things.

In a nutshell, pre-plague Europeans in the Middle Ages were often serfs of the soil subjected to high rents paid to landowners or living in urban areas in abject poverty. This is largely because for the agricultural technologies of the time, there were simply too many people producing too little food.

The land was reaching its carry capacity for human beings. Many people subsisted mainly on grains, with little meat other nutritious foods that require more resources to produce. This lead to widespread malnutrition and poverty with many people living like rats in the filth of overpopulation.

Yet the population continued to grow. Sound familiar?

The plague solved this.

When the Black Death brought the human population down by a third, there came to be more land and other resources for all. Jobs became plentiful and higher paying as labor became more valuable. The typical diet went from mainly grains to include meat, fruits, and vegetables.Increasing numbers of people were no longer tied to the soil or lived in abject poverty.Health increased dramatically. With increased health and wealth and more free time the arts and science flourished.

It was the Renaissance.

After the Pandemic

What I am getting at is that should you survive the coming modern pandemic, you will be in excellent position for a better life. Whereas now many people throughout the worldlabor all week for barely enough for a roof over their heads and a little food to get by on, suddenly the value of labor will be higher.

The cost of housing would drop dramatically. This is good news to the large percentage of people, even in developed countries, who can barely afford to rent a roof over their head much less buy a home of their own.

The Earths resources will not be as strained as they currently are. The fisheries may experience a come back from their current dismal state. Desertification may slow or even reverse as less farmland consumes the natural soils. Energy consumption will be reduced, leaving more for those who remain. The list of positives goes on but chances are the standard of living for nearly everyone will rise, perhaps dramatically so.

In the long run, lives may actually be saved due to a major Pandemic. How can this be? War. Fighting over resources has traditionally been the basic reason for war. With fewer people there will be more for all and less reason to take from others. Add to that the lessening in the numbers of malnourished people (an epidemic in its own right).

I believe the next major Pandemic will lead to good things for those who survive. Make sure that includes YOU. And if humans are as intelligent as they claim to be, perhaps they will this time choose to limit population growth to less than the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Nature may well respond in kind, reserving the next Pandemic for when man becomes a plague upon the earth.