We live in a world more complex and larger in scale than our forbearers could have ever imagined. Our technology-dependent society has become a dizzying, interconnected web as unstable as a house of cards

All it may take to send civilization crashing back to a preindustrial level is a nudge from what theorists like John L. Casti call an “X-Event” (short for “extreme event”), a rare and surprising event that yields extreme consequences. When the X-Event hits, finance, communication, and travel will halt. The flow of food, electricity, medicine, and clean water will cease. What will you do?

In X-EVENTS: The Collapse of Everything (William Morrow; June 12, 2012), renowned complexity scientist, John L. Casti, shows how our world has become impossibly intricate. Technology is advancing at an exponential rate and so too is our reliance on that technology in every aspect of our lives. Yet it is a rule of both mathematics and human nature that higher and higher levels of complexity make a system correspondingly more fragile and vulnerable to sudden, spectacular collapse.

Fascinating and chilling, X-EVENTS is a provocative tour of the catastrophic outlier scenarios that could send us back to the horse-and-buggy era in a flash: global financial “black swans”; the world-wide crash of the internet; the end of oil; nuclear winter; “nano-plagues”; robot uprisings; electromagnetic-pulse bombs; pandemic viruses; and many more.

X-EVENTS is a provocative and terrifying wake-up call to all of us who think our complex society can continue growing without consequence. It’s no wonder the book was one of the hottest books at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair, selling at auction in Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Russia, Portugal, Brazil, and more.

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Professor John L. Casti received his Ph.D. in mathematics under Richard Bellman at the University of Southern California in 1970.

He worked at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, and served on the faculties of the University of Arizona, Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, NYU and Princeton before becoming one of the first members of the research staff at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria. In 2000 he formed two companies in Santa Fe and London, Qforma, Inc. and SimWorld, Ltd, devoted to the employment of tools and concepts from modern system theory for the solution of problems in business and finance.

American complexity scientist and systems theorist John Casti, is cofounder of The X-Center Vienna, a research institute focusing on human-caused extreme events and how to anticipate them.

Casti has published nearly twenty volumes of academic and popular science and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Southern California. He lives in Vienna, Austria.

Other books by Professor John L. Casti:

  • Mood Matters: From Rising Skirt Lengths to the Collapse of World Powers (Jun 7, 2010)
  • Paradigms Lost  (Nov 1, 1990)
  • Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World through the Science of Surprise  (Mar 3, 1995)
  • Mathematical Mountaintops: The Five Most Famous Problems of All Time (2001)
  • Alternate Realities: Mathematical Models of Nature and Man  (Feb 15, 1989)
  • Beyond Belief : Randomness, Prediction and Explanation in Science by John L. Casti and Anders Karlqvist (Nov 16, 1990)
  • Paradigms Regained: A Further Exploration of the Mysteries of Modern Science  (May 8, 2001)