X-Events: Complexity Overload and the Collapse of Everything

(Paperback)

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"I am an assiduous reader of John Casti's books. He is a real scientific intellectual." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, New York Times bestselling author of Fooled by Randomness "Casti is at his best in presenting difficult philosophical ideas enthusiastically and lucidly, and in presenting everyday examples to illustrate them." -New York Times Book Review In his highly provocative and grippingly readable book, X-Events, author John Casti brilliantly argues that today's advanced, overly complex societies have grown highly vulnerable to extreme events that will ultimately topple civilization like a house of cards. Like Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan meets Jared Diamond's Collapse, Casti's book provides a much-needed wake-up call-sounding a fascinating and frightening warning about civilized society's inability to recover from a global catastrophe- demonstrating how humankind could be blasted back into the Stone Age by a meteor strike, nuclear apocalypse, worldwide contagion, or any number of unforeseeable X-Events.

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"I am assiduous reader of John Casti's books. He is a real scientific intellectual." -- NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, author of The Black Swan "One of America's greatest pioneers of simulation." -- London Times

Author Bio

American complexity scientist and systems theoristJohn Casti, is cofounder of The X-Center, a Viennabasedresearch institute focusing on human-causedextreme events and how to anticipate them. Casti haspublished nearly twenty volumes of academic and popularscience and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from theUniversity of Southern California. He lives in Vienna,Austria.