"At the same time, the world is overdue for an extreme influenza epidemic. The last major outbreak was the 1918 Spanish influenza, which killed fifty million [and possibly more, as we will not know the real numbers] people worldwide and changed the course of history. […] Disease will certainly play a larger role in the Long Emergency than many can now imagine. An epidemic could paralyze social and economic systems, interrupt global trade, and bring down governments. […] At the very least, the Long Emergency will be a time of diminished life spans for many of us, as well as reduced standards of living—at least as understood within the current social context. Fossil fuels had the effect of temporarily raising the carrying capacity of the earth. Our ability to resist the environmental corrective of disease will... prove to have been another temporary boon of the... [industrial] age [...]. So much of what we construe to be among our entitlements to perpetual progress may prove to have been a strange, marvelous, and anomalous moment in... history."
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Chapter 1, pp. 11–12.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Long_Emergency
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The Long Emergency
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