Isaac Asimov - Catastrophes!

She chuckled. "There was an answer last time," she said. "There will be an answer the next time."

"It won't be the same answer as Merdeka," he vowed. "We grew up a little at sea. This time we can do it with brains and not with nightmares and superstition."

"I don't know," she said. "Our ship will be the first, and then the other ships will have their accidents one by one and come and tie up and build their bridges hating every minute of it for the first two generations and then not hating it, just living it… and who will be the greatest man who ever lived?"

The captain looked horrified.

"Yes, you! Salter, the Builder of the Bridge; Tommy, do you know an old word for 'bridge-builder'? Pontifex."

"Oh, my God!" Tommy Salter said in despair.

A flicker of consciousness was passing through the wounded chaplain; he heard the words and was pleased that somebody aboard was praying.

Despite the gloom of potential catastrophe that we mast face, there is no reason to give up. If we think about catastrophes with the sober scientific speculation of A Choice of Catastro phes, we must conclude that:

1) Some catastrophes are high-probability and even in evitable, but will take place so far in the future that it makes no sense to worry about them now,

2) Some catastrophes may take place in the near future, even tomorrow, but are so extremely low-probability that it makes no sense to worry about them excessively.

3) Some catastrophes are high-probability and may take place in the near-future, even tomorrow. It is only these which must concern us now.

In every case, however, the catastrophes that are both high-probability and near-future are human-caused: nuclear war, overpopulation, overpollution, resource depletion, and so on. And if they are human-caused, they could, conceivably, be human-cured.

As Isaac Asimov stated in A Choice of Catastrophes, the most significant meaning of the title is that "We can deliberately choose to have no catastrophes at all."