Together with colleague Walter and Philip, I attended a lecture by Toon Verlinden of his book "Code Rood" or Code Red.
In the book Code Red, Toon Verlinden analyzes the vulnerability of our modern civilization by linking four catastrophic scenarios to their historical predecessors. He uses the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora as a chilling example of a supervolcano; it caused a year without a summer and global famine at the time, reminding us of the fragility of our current food chain. Regarding the danger of asteroids, he points to the 1908 Tunguska explosion, where a relatively small fragment wiped out thousands of square kilometers of forest, to demonstrate why we are now developing missions like DART to prevent impacts with precision missiles.
Verlinden also warns of a repeat of the 1859 Carrington Event, a solar storm that merely caused telegraph lines to spark back then, but today would completely cripple our power grid and the internet. Finally, he draws lessons from the devastating 1918 Spanish Flu to emphasize the necessity of rapid vaccine development and global surveillance against new pandemics. By analyzing these destructive moments from the past, Verlinden shows that our modern technology is not only a source of vulnerability but also offers our only real chance to survive a subsequent global disaster.
I bough his book back in 2024 and beside signing my book, a selfie with author was made.
