From worshipping Tyche to playing with wild cards

Abstract

In his Physics, Aristotle acknowledges the role of Tyche, the Greek equivalent of contingency. His home, the Greek peninsula, was, and is today, regularly struck by natural hazards. Ancient records document that they wrought substantial damage to the infrastructure and political integrity of communities. Lacking reliable forecasting systems, for the ancient Greeks any of these hazards was contingent, even though there existed accepted interpretations of what (or who) caused these phenomena. Roughly 2.500 years later, future studies call sudden, unpredictable events like these ‘wild cards’. Occurring with a low probability but a substantial impact, wild cards pose challenges to social, political, and economic stability. Just as natural hazards unexpectedly interrupted and transformed social, political, and economical life in ancient communities, wild cards have the potential to disrupt current and future societies and economies. With the modern world increasingly complex and interconnected, wild cards will increase in frequency, likelihood, and impact. More than ever, local calamities will show global effects. To mitigate these effects and enable a fast recovery, creative approaches are needed. A gaze into how the societies of the distant past successfully coped with the wild cards that hit them, may thus yield inspiration for disaster risk reduction in the Anthropocene.