The one thing this article misses, I think, is that all of these scenarios are temporary and local. If an area is devastated by an earthquake, there&#x27;s still a food supply chain in the outside world, aid supplies and workers will eventually start trickling in, and generally you will have <i>some</i> support (if limited and fragmentary) to help you pull yourself back up to a &quot;modern&quot; living standard over weeks and months.<p>If a complete societal breakdown should occur--the traditional global-nuclear-war apocalypse, a major governmental&#x2F;infrastructural collapse in a large, developed nation, etc.--things get rougher. People may start off being civil and helpful, but modern urban society is utterly dependent on food grown on farms spread across thousands of miles and distributed via high-tech infrastructure. If that stops for long enough, in a large enough area, then people start to get hungry, and things start to get really bad.<p>I still find the article heartening in general. Disasters on that scale are not terribly likely in the modern world. Still, it&#x27;s worth considering.