16 How likely is it that a survival-level emergency will happen to me or my family?

You may want to consider assigning a percentage of probability to various possible threats. How probable is it that a worldwide pandemic will occur in the next ten years? How about the next twenty years? Will the economy hold together for another five years? Will the supplies of petroleum, water, food, and other essential needs manage to sustain the population as it expands indefinitely? The probability of any particular scenario may be only 10 percent or less, but if there are ten or more possibilities for a catastrophe, the probability that one or more will happen gets closer to 100 percent. The potential of a given event such as total depletion of food, water, fuel, and other items, may be low for the next ten years, but inevitable at some point in the future. Things like pandemics and wars increase in probability with time. The individual probability of needing to survive a particular disaster may be low, but the sum total of probabilities and time virtually assures that one or more catastrophic events will occur and will dramatically affect you and your family within the next decades.