Hello and welcome to the World Ahead on Economist Radio. I'm Tom Standich, Deputy Editor

at The Economist. In this Future Gazing Podcast series, we consider provocative prophecies

and speculative scenarios to gain a different perspective on the present. But right now, amid

the global coronavirus outbreak, it feels as though we're living in a dystopian sci-fi

scenario already. So in this episode, we'll be taking a number of different future gazing

approaches to look for lessons on how to deal with this extraordinary situation. We'll

find out what a future mission to Mars could teach us about self-isolation on Earth today.

You need to understand that Crouplehesion is the thing that allows a mission to be successful,

and if that fails, then it's all turn out. And we'll find out what's simulating the outbreak

in the form of a popular video game can tell us about how the pandemic might play out

in the next few months. The key scientific aspect in the game is the basic reproduction

number. This is a number that shows how many people can be infected by a single person.

But first, the idea of a black swan event was introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a

mathematician and investor in a 2007 book of the same name. It's an unexpected event

with a low probability of happening, but that has a large impact and falls outside of

people's normal expectations or experiences. So there have been many references to the

COVID-19 outbreak as a black swan, notably from Sequoia Capital, Goldman Sachs, Forbes

magazine and so on. But Michelle Wuker, an American author and analyst, has a different

analogy. This isn't a black swan, she argues, but a somewhat larger animal.

I call this sort of event the obvious, probable, high impact event a grey rhino. It's the

idea that something big, two tons is coming right at you with a horn. It's going to go

over you if you don't do something. It gives you a choice.

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