Some colleagues thought him compulsive, obsessive, but he had not made it this far by overlooking any information of significance. Weeks, months, and years of work had culminated in this moment, a moment when he would be forced to exercise his authority to the fullest extent.

The Cassandras hoped, after decades of halfhearted fixes punctuated by willful neglect, that their warnings to seriously plan for and mitigate the hurricane threat to New Orleans had finally been heeded. Tragically they learned, barely a year later, they were wrong.

Tunisia was a one-off. That was what all the self-proclaimed experts said over little glasses of hot tea and demitasses of thick Arab coffee. Every Arab country is different from the others, after all.

On this day in June 2009, this quiet little man had something big to say, and since then Okamura has regretted not saying it louder. Considering the threat of a significant tsunami in the region, he later reflected, “The truth is, I felt it was high time to speak up.”

For two years, Markopolos had been trying to get the watchdog agency to do something. Then he would keep on trying for six more years, bombarding the S.E.C. with letters, meetings, mathematical proofs. It didn’t do any good.

Why did he see the disaster at Upper Big Branch coming when the company did not, and why was he ignored? How is it that, even when a calamity is predicted by government officials, the very people who presumably have access to the resources and authority needed to avert it, the tragedy occurs anyway?

Though the bank was known to have problems, the extent of those problems was much greater than anyone had acknowledged—so great, Whitney realized, that it had the potential to shake the global economy.

The preceding chapters were stories of gloom, and made more painful by the fact that in each instance a Cassandra was pounding the table and warning us precisely about the disasters that came as promised. The people with the power to respond often put more effort into discounting the Cassandra than saving lives and resources. Thus, each of these predictions turned into Cassandra Events: warning given, warning ignored, and, of course, catastrophe…

The U.S. Air Force has also been planning for lethal autonomous drones, writing in its “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009– 2047” that it was only a matter of time before drone aircraft would be making life-and- death decisions on their own using artificial intelligence (AI) software.

Our brightest minds felt the scientific tools at that time were simply not available to create these chimeras. They didn’t think the walk-in’s nightmare Andromeda strains could be real. They weren’t sure if he believed what he was saying, but they didn’t. That was then.

He had risked his career but had ultimately been proven right. Now he was at it again. This time he is predicting rapid and massive sea-level rise, and again he is being criticized. If he is right once more, we are in very deep trouble, ….

Hours later it began, a three-day orgy of death and destruction that put one of the world’s megacities on lockdown. Eight thousand miles away, on the campus of Rutgers University in New Jersey, the massacre left an American climate scientist fearing his theory was about to be tested.

The e-mail he sent could’ve had the subject line “I told you it would happen.” Instead, it was simply “Ukrainian electric grid attacked.” …. As usual, it seemed he was right. Weeks later, U.S. intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security came to the same conclusion.

By the 1980s, with extensive test data to supplement what had been recorded over five decades earlier, scientists and engineers were able to calculate what happened that last night of June in 1908, and it terrified them.

Governments adopted CRISPR as a matter of national security. A new class of elite human would come to dominate the species. This was never the intent of the woman who had created the technology in 2012, but the thought had crossed her mind, and haunted her nightmares.