Sure it could. Yellowstone could blow its top tomorrow and devastate most of the country. But the likelihood of that happening is pretty much zero.
Aliens from a distant planet COULD land on the White House lawn at ANY MINUTE.
A gamma burster could occur at any time and wipe out half of life on earth.
A meteor COULD fall on your car and smash it to bits. It could happen TONIGHT. In fact, a meteor the size of the one that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs could appear this year and devastate life on the entire planet.
You could be abducted by space aliens in your sleep tonight.
A lion COULD escape tomorrow morning from the zoo, and attack and eat you on your way to work. It COULD happen.
And the odds of any one of these things happening to you or me is so low it’s almost precisely ZERO.
Hell, I will gladly bet you ten thousand dollars that Yellowstone doesn’t erupt and devastate the country this calendar year. If it erupts and throws ash all the way to Texas, I will pay you ten thousand dollars. And if it doesn’t erupt and throw ash all the way to Texas, on January 1 of 2011, you pay me ten thousand dollars. Do we have a deal?
I didn’t think so.
On the other hand, we KNOW that around 1/3rd of Americans ARE GOING to die from major cardiovascular disease (mostly heart attack and stroke), and almost 1/4th of Americans will die from cancer. When you throw in another 3% or so that will be killed by diabetes, that makes up about 60% of us.
And an awful lot of those deaths are at least postponable. In fact, I would say that the vast majority of them will have been hastened by our lifestyles that promote heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other health problems.
But what do we worry about? Do we worry about the fact that we’re 23 pounds overweight? That’s the stat if you’re an AVERAGE American. It’s like carrying around 92 sticks of butter injected under your skin, every day and everywhere you go.
No, we don’t worry about THAT. We worry about things that happen on planet earth once every 650,000 to 800,000 years.
If it erupts (as in large scale caldera eruption), the banks will be closed (or nonexistent).
: )