Chapter1

Cassandra:
From Myth to Reality

T
here are people among us who can see the future.
Often they clamor for our attention, and just as often they
are ignored. We are right to discount most soothsayers, but hor-
rible things happen when accurate warnings of specific disasters go
unheeded. People die because we fail to distinguish the prophet from
the charlatan.
This book tries to find those rare people who see the future, who
have accurate visions of looming disasters.
Cassandra was a beautiful princess of Troy, cursed by the god
Apollo. He gave her the ability to see impending doom, but the in-
ability to persuade anyone to believe her. Her ability to pierce the
barriers of space and time to see the future showed her the fiery fall
of her beloved city, but the people of Troy ridiculed and disregarded
her. She descended into madness and ultimately became one of the
victims of the tragedy she foretold.
Are there Cassandras among us today, warning of ticking disas-
ters, whose predictions fall on deaf ears? Is it possible to figure out
who these seers are? Can we cut through the false warnings to tune in

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 2 WARNINGS

to the correct visions, saving millions of lives and billions of dollars?

That question is not about Greek mythology. It is about our ability to-
day, as a nation, as an international community, to detect impending
disaster and act in time to avoid it, or at least to mitigate the damage.
Buried in billions of pages of blog posts and tweets, academic
research, and government reports, Cassandra figuratively calls to us,
warning of calamity. Often she is unheeded, sometimes unheard. Fre-
quently she is given only a token response or dismissed as a fool or a
fraud. Her stories are so improbable, so unprecedented, that we can-
not process them or believe them, much less act upon them.
The problem is, of course, that Cassandra was right, and those
who ignored her may have done so at the cost of their own lives and
that of their state.
Not just the ancient Greeks had a tale of a seer tragically ignored.
The Bible tells the story of the Hebrew prophet Daniel, who was able
to read mysterious words that appeared on the wall of the Babylonian
king Belshazzars banquet hall during a rowdy feast. The words mene,
mene, tekel, upharsin (numbered, numbered, weighed, divided
in Aramaic) were unintelligible to all but Daniel, who warned the
king that they foretold the fall of his kingdom. According to the story,
Belshazzar was killed in a coup only hours later. Daniel had seen the
writing on the wall.
Today when someone is labeled a Cassandra, its commonly un-
derstood that they simply worry too much and are fatalistic, overly pes-
simistic, or focus too much on the improbable downside, a Chicken
Little rather than a prophet. If we refer to the original Greek myth,
a Cassandra should be someone whom we value, whose warnings
we accept and act upon. We seldom do, however. We rarely believe
those whose predictions differ from the usual, who see things that
have never been, whose vision of the future differs from our own,

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CASSANDRA: FROM MYTH TO REALITY 3

whose prescription would force us to act now, perhaps changing the

things we do in drastic and costly ways.
What the ancient Greeks called Cassandra behavior todays social
scientists sometimes refer to as sentinel intelligence or sentinel be-
havior, the ability to detect danger from warning signs before others
see it. The behavior is observed in a variety of animals, including, we
believe, in humans. Those with sentinel intelligence see with great
clarity through the fog of indicators, and they warn the pack. In other
animals, the pack seems genetically disposed to respond quickly to
the warnings of their sentinels. In humans, that ability is less well
developed.
We, the authors, are Dick Clarke and R. P. Eddy. We have known
and worked with each other for over twenty years, in and out of govern-
ment, on topics including the rise of al Qaeda and then ISIS, nuclear
and biological weapons proliferation and the emergence of deadly
viruses like Ebola and HIV, the introduction of the cyber threat, and
wars from Iraq to Bosnia to Afghanistan. We are neither pessimists
nor obsessed with doom. Indeed, we are optimists who believe we
are on the cusp of great technological advances that should make
human life vastly better. For much of the time we have known each
other, however, the news has been dominated by a series of disasters
that could have been avoided or mitigated. Among them are 9/11, the
Great Recession, Katrina, the Second Iraq War, and the rise of ISIS.
We worked directly on many of these topics, and were personally af-
fected by some. They have loomed large in our conversations with
each other, often over a good single malt, with one question regularly
recurring: how could we have avoided or better prepared for that?
What we noticed was that almost all of these events were followed
by investigations and recriminations, seeking to lay blame for the ca-
tastrophe or responsibility for failures that made the situations worse.

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 4 WARNINGS

In many instances, however, it seemed that an expert or expert group,

a Cassandra, had accurately predicted what would happen. They
were often ignored, their warnings denigrated, disregarded, or given
only inadequate, token responses.
We began to wonder whether there was some pattern of prescient
but overlooked warnings. Could there possibly be a way to identify these
accurate but unheeded warnings before disaster struck? If there really
was a frequent phenomenon of unheeded alarms that later proved to
be accurate, finding a way to detect and validate those warnings in ad-
vance could save lives, avoid suffering, and reduce financial losses.
We discovered that at any given time there is a plethora of predic-
tions of doom. Most are ignored because they should be. They are
created by cranks and have no empirical underpinnings or basis in
reality. Some warnings are heeded, but then events prove the alarm to
be false. Often, however, true experts in a field do their job and sound
the warning in time, only to be ignored or given only an inadequate,
token response. We began calling such episodes Cassandra Events.
That led us to ask whether there was something about past Cassandra
Events that can help us identify contemporary alarmists whose warn-
ings will turn out to be right. We asked friends, colleagues, associates,
and world-leading experts what they thought about this Cassandra
phenomenon.
The Cassandra problem is not only one of hearing the likely ac-
curate predictions through the noise, but of processing them prop-
erly once they are identified. We began to realize that to successfully
navigate a Cassandra Event, an organization or society must move
through several stages. First we must hear the forecast, then believe it,
and finally act upon it.1 In practice, these steps are each individually
challenging. Moreover, executing all three sequentially is often im-
mensely difficult. In particular, the ability to get it right is exceedingly

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CASSANDRA: FROM MYTH TO REALITY 5

rare when the prediction varies substantially from the norm, from the
past, from our experience, or from our deeply held beliefs about the
way the future should unfold. Add a significant financial cost as a re-
quirement of acting on such a warning, and the probability for action
often approaches zero. If, however, we ignore a true Cassandra, the
cost of not acting is usually far higher than the cost of dealing with
the problem earlier.
Thus, this book will seek to answer these questions: How can we
detect a real Cassandra among the myriad of pundits? What methods,
if any, can be employed to better identify and listen to these prophetic
warnings? Is there perhaps a way to distill the direst predictions from
the surrounding noise and focus our attention on them? Or will Cas-
sandra forever be condemned to weep as she watches her beloved city
of Troy burn?
To answer those questions, we begin with short case studies of
real human beings in current times who had a Cassandra-like abil-
ity concerning some important issue, and who, like the mythological
princess, were ignored. This book will not attempt to be the definitive
case study of any of the disasters we review. Instead, we will focus on
the Cassandras themselves and their stories. We will try to determine
how they knew when others did not, why they were dismissed, and
how circumstances could have been changed so that their warnings
would have been heeded.
While our case studies focus on individuals, many are also stories
about organizations created to be sentinels. Governments and some
industries and professions have long realized the value of having look-
outs, scouts, and sentinels to give warnings. Among our case studies
are stories involving parts of the U.S. government: the intelligence
communitys warning staff, the agency created to watch for poten-
tial mine disasters, the national disaster management organization,

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 6WARNINGS

and the financial regulators who exist to look for fraud and potential
systemic economic instability.
We begin our examination of past Cassandra Events by looking
at Saddam Husseins invasion of Kuwait in 1990, an event that gave
rise to a series of disasters that continue today. Next, we examine what
happened in Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina. We examine the
concurrent calamities of a tsunami and multiple nuclear reactor melt-
downs in Japan. Back in the United States, we go underground in
West Virginia to take a look at the recurrent nature of mining disas-
ters. The Middle East intrudes again with the rise of Daesh (ISIS).
Then we shift to economic and financial Cassandra Events, examin-
ing the case of Bernie Madoffs Ponzi scheme, as well as the Great
Recession of 2008.
As we proceeded through these Cassandra Event case studies in a
variety of different fields, we began to notice common threads: char-
acteristics of the Cassandras, of their audiences, and of the issues that,
when applied to a modern controversial prediction of disaster, might
suggest that we are seeing someone warning of a future Cassandra
Event. By identifying those common elements and synthesizing them
into a methodology, we create what we call our Cassandra Coeffi-
cient, a score that suggests to us the likelihood that an individual is
indeed a Cassandra whose warning is likely accurate, but is at risk of
being ignored.
Having established this process for developing a Cassandra Co-
efficient based on past Cassandra Events, we next listen for todays
Cassandras. Who now among us may be accurately warning us of
something we are ignoring, perhaps at our own peril? We look at
contemporary individuals and their predictions, and examine the on-
going public reaction to them. Our cases here include artificial intel-
ligence, genetic engineering, sea level rise, pandemic disease, a new
risk of nuclear winter, the Internet of Things, and asteroid impacts.

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 CASSANDRA: FROM MYTH TO REALITY 7

Finally, we end this volume with some thoughts about how society
and government might reduce the frequency of ignoring Cassandras
when it comes to some of the major issues of our time.
While we will not endorse the predictions of the possible con-
temporary Cassandras (we leave it to the reader to decide), we will
apply our framework to their cases, evaluating each elementthe
individual, the receiver of the warning, and the threat itselfto de-
termine the Cassandra Coefficient. If you find value in our method-
ology, perhaps we would do well as a society to turn our attention to
those scenarios with the highest scores: the future high-impact events
we are ignoring.
If this seems like an ambitious undertaking, we dont think so. Its
actually quite easy to put the pieces together. The hard part may be to
first realize these invisible people exist.
Until Warnings, no author has explored how to sift through the
noise to identify the actual Cassandras. This is the first effort to help
people judge which warnings deserve a closer listen, and thereby per-
haps stop these disasters before they happen.

A FEW PEOPLE THOUGHT WE WERE INTERESTED IN THIS TOPIC BE-

cause of Dicks role in the September11 tragedy. So, are you inter-
ested in Cassandras because you, Dick Clarke, were the Cassandra
about al Qaeda and 9/11? The short answer to that question is no.
Both authors have an interest in the phenomenon of Cassandras be-
cause of our fascination with leadership decision making and its role
in significant historical events and trends. Inevitably, however, people
want to talk about al Qaeda and the attacks of September11, 2001.
Dick addressed this issue in detail many years ago in his book Against
All Enemies, and neither of us has any desire to replow much of that
ground again here, so lets just get it out of the way. Here is what Dick
thinks about warnings and 9/11:

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 8WARNINGS

A lot of other people were also warning about the al Qaeda threat
by 1999 and certainly by 2001. Chief among them were FBI Spe-
cial Agent John P. ONeill, CIA Director George Tenet, and most
of the leadership of the CIAs Counter-Terrorism Center. Regretta-
bly none of us was able to predict the time, place, or method of the
September 11 attacks. We had achieved what military intelligence
people call strategic warningidentifying intentbut not tactical
warningidentifying the when, where, and how. Why we failed to
achieve tactical warning is a controversial subject centering on the
repeated, conscious decision of senior CIA personnel to prevent the
FBI and White House leadership from knowing that the 9/11 hijack-
ers were already in the U.S. (A much more detailed discussion of the
topic can be found in another of Dicks previously published books,
Your Government Failed You.)
The Bush administrations response to the warnings leading up
to 9/11 mirrors the bungled responses we will discuss further in the
Cassandra Event case studies presented in this book. Officials heard
the warnings but didnt fully believe them and certainly didnt act
on them. Most of the leadership had been out of government since
the previous Bush administration eight years prior. Their biases were
a decade old. They couldnt believe that the world had changed so
much. The number-one threat to the United States was not a nation-
state but a stateless terrorist group? Much less could they believe that
the threat would manifest as a plan to attack the country from within.
Simply put, it had never happened before, so they couldnt really be-
lieve that it would.
Unfortunately, even when recognized experts and institutions ex-
plicitly and loudly sound the alarm, they do not always succeed in ef-
fectively conveying a message or eliciting a meaningful response from
the appropriate authorities. Decision makers dont typically welcome
predictions of impending disaster. Rather than acting as comprehen-

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 CASSANDRA: FROM MYTH TO REALITY 9

sively as possible to prevent or mitigate the effects of the coming ca-

tastrophe, they often go into an implicit state of denial. They may
not dispute the evidence and reject the warning, but they dont act as
though they actually believe it to be true. So it was with the al Qaeda
threat, the terrorist attacks of September11, 2001, and the Bush ad-
ministration. Now lets move on.

IN OUR PRELIMINARY DISCUSSIONS WITH FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES,

we were directed to a couple of famous examples of Cassandras in

recent history. The most common figure people repeatedly brought
up was the historic giant Sir Winston S. Churchill. Thick volumes on
Churchills public and private life abound, some written by the man
himself. Indeed, the former British prime minister was a prolific his-
torian. Few public figures have documented and explained their lives
and careers at greater length than Churchill. It is likely that no others
have been the subject of so much scholarly research and writing, ex-
cepting perhaps U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. Consequently, we
know a lot about Churchills life, including those events that might
qualify him as a Cassandra. We also have a rich body of work describ-
ing the mans disposition, intellect, and character.
Unlike some Cassandras whom we will meet later in this book,
Churchill was far from an obscure, unknown individual when he be-
gan his warnings in the 1930s. He had been elected to Parliament in
1900 at age twenty-six and became a Cabinet member a mere eight
years later. He served in a succession of ministries in domestic policy,
economic affairs, and foreign policy. By the middle of the next de-
cade, he was best known for his role as the civilian in charge of the
Royal Navy during World WarI. He was the mastermind behind an
attack on Turkey that was poorly implemented, resulting in the Brit-
ish defeat at Gallipoli. Resigning under criticism, he joined the army
and went to the Western Front, the trenches in France.

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 10WARNINGS

He later attracted more attention by switching political parties,

making him an even more controversial figure. In the 1930s, Prime
Minister Stanley Baldwin and his successor, Neville Chamberlin, both
thought Churchill a troublemaker. His writings, books, and newspaper
columns focused on military topics, contributing to his image as a mili-
tarist. Thus, when in 1933 he began warning of the growth of German
military power and calling for expansion of the British military, many
discounted what he had to say.
Unlike many Cassandras who themselves generated the empiri-
cal data that drove them, Churchill did not discover the extent of the
German rearmament problem on his own. Concerned civil servants
and military officers fed him secret government documents. One
source in particular provided Churchill details on the rapidly expand-
ing gap between the Royal Air Force and the new Luftwaffe. Another
source passed him photographs of a new wall of German fortifications
and defenses, the Siegfried Line, which would make it difficult, if
not impossible, for France and Britain to invade or counterattack.
Armed with this smuggled intelligence, Churchill railed against the
German air threat in speeches to Parliament, predicting that in a fu-
ture war the Germans would sweep through Belgium and Holland
into France. Many government ministers dismissed his claims and the
data, despite the intelligence having come from within the govern-
ment itself.
Some in government did take Churchills warnings seriously even
before they were proven true. In the mid-1930s, a friendly member
of Parliament and a future prime minister, Harold Macmillan, con-
cerned that Churchill would give up, cautioned that he was in dan-
ger of relapsing into a complacent Cassandra. Macmillan described
Churchills attitude at the time as, I have done my best. I have made
all these speeches. Nobody has paid any attention. All my prophe-
cies have turned out to be true. I have been publicly snubbed by the

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 CASSANDRA: FROM MYTH TO REALITY 11

Government. What more can I do?2 Lady Longford, the famed Brit-
ish historian, even thought at the time that Churchill was the disre-
garded voice of Cassandra.
What Churchill did have in common with many others who ac-
curately warned of impending disasters was a colorful personality,
often described as compulsive, driven, hardworking, outspoken, and
abrasive. He was thought of as a permanent hawk and an adventurer.
Macmillan noted that there was general doubt as to the soundness of
his judgment. The person who ultimately saved Churchills reputa-
tion was Hitler, whose actions gradually proved the outspoken British
critic correct. As Hitlers aggression grew, Churchill was asked to re-
join the British Cabinet. When war clouds on the horizon grew plain
to see, he was asked to become prime minister.
As a wartime leader, Churchill was masterful, keeping the spir-
its of the beleaguered people from flagging as the nations fortunes
slipped, and bringing creativity to military strategy, tactics, and tech-
nology. Some historians consider his contributions the key factor be-
tween victory and defeat. Yet his prescience and leadership were not
enough to carry him past the end of World War II. Churchill was
defeated in 1945, in the first election after the war.
A more contemporary Cassandra was the engineer who fought
the NASA leadership prior to the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle
Challenger. Indeed, the Cassandra Event involving Roger Boisjoly
and his attempts to prevent the shuttle launch on that fateful morn-
ing in January1986 has become one of the preeminent case studies
in risk management and decision-making ethics.
The Challenger disaster stemmed from an inherent flaw in the
original design of the solid rocket boosters used to launch the Space
Shuttle into orbit. Morton-Thiokol, the company awarded the contract
to build the boosters by NASA, had modeled its design on the reliable
TitanIII rocket. The cylindrical booster sections were manufactured

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 12WARNINGS

separately, then mounted end-on-end, using O-rings and putty to seal

the sections together. However, Morton-Thiokol made several signifi-
cant changes to the TitanIII design to simplify the complicated manu-
facturing process and cut costs, including changing both the way the
sections were mated and the orientation of the O-ring seals.
During initial testing and later, even after the Shuttle started fly-
ing, engineers at Morton-Thiokol and NASA became increasingly
alarmed by problems discovered in the modified design of the rocket
booster. Rather than creating an airtight seal, hot combustion gases
were burning through the putty, leaking into the joints, and burning
the O-rings. Moreover, this problem, which became known as joint
rotation, was exacerbated by cold temperatures.
Boisjoly was a solid rocket booster engineer at Morton-Thiokol.
He became seriously concerned, not only by the joint rotation itself,
but by the fact that NASA continued pressing ahead with Shuttle
launches with the consent of the Morton-Thiokol management, de-
spite not having found an acceptable fix. Among top officials in both
organizations, the O-ring problem became viewed as an acceptable
flight risk. In a memo dated July31, 1985, about six months before
the Challenger incident, Boisjoly warned Thiokols vice president of
Engineering that the O-ring issues were a disaster in the making, omi-
nously predicting that the result would be catastrophic of the highest
orderloss of human life. Boisjolys warnings were ignored.
The morning before Challengers final flight, the temperature
forecast was 30 degrees Fahrenheit, far colder than any previous
Shuttle launch. Boisjoly and his engineering colleagues at Thiokol
argued that, due to past O-ring performance problems, the tempera-
ture posed an unacceptable risk to the safety of the launch. These
Cassandras were unable to persuade NASA and Morton-Thiokols
management, who were under pressure after several previous aborted
launch attempts.

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 CASSANDRA: FROM MYTH TO REALITY 13

The launch proceeded on the morning of January28, 1986, in

an ambient temperature of 36 degrees Fahrenheit, 15 degrees colder
than on any previous attempt. Challengers mission ended at 11:39
a.m., seventy-three seconds after liftoff, when an O-ring seal in the
right solid rocket booster failed. The result was complete structural
failure. A horrified American public, along with engineers and man-
agers at NASA and Morton-Thiokol, watched as the vehicle was
ripped apart in a giant fireball.
As we will see, Cassandras are seldom appreciated for their ef-
forts even after the disaster comes to pass. Roger Boisjoly was shunned
and ostracized by colleagues and managers at Morton-Thiokol, who
thought that his testimony during the accident investigation would
cost them their jobs. We can, perhaps, cynically understand such a
reaction as human nature, an instinct for survival. However, such a
response does little to help prepare for future disaster or to ensure that
Cassandras warnings do not again go unheeded.
As it seemed we werent the only ones who had noticed Cassan-
dras in our midst, we then wondered if there existed any scholarly
research on the topic of predictions. In fact, prediction is something
that academics have spent a lot of time studying and considering.
The statistician Nate Silver has taken a highly quantitative approach
to prediction, one that works for a certain class of event. The jurist
Richard Posner examined the phenomenon of catastrophes in the
years after 9/11. Psychologists like Dan Ariely and Tsachi Ein-Dor
have probed the way our brains work (and dont) through empirical
observation and the study of warnings.
Unquestionably one of the foundational works in this area, pre-
dictions within the social sciences, is Philip Tetlocks Expert Political
Judgment. Tetlock began his project in the 1980s, somewhat tenta-
tively at first, and then with increasing rigor. Then a psychology pro-
fessor at UC Berkeley, he felt that the American public was awash

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 14WARNINGS

in predictions by experts, especially on issues like national security

and economic policy. He endeavored to make sense of the many pre-
dictions, which he saw were all too often presented by self-assured
experts as inevitable, only to directly contradict a prediction made by
yet another self-assured expert.
Over the next nearly twenty years, Tetlock asked a panel of 284
experts, defined as a professional who makes his or her livelihood by
commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends of
significance, to make predictions on a variety of issues, both within
and outside of their specific areas of expertise. While the study was
carried out anonymously, the experts were generally all highly edu-
cated with at least several years of experience in their field. Some
worked in government, some in the private sector, international agen-
cies, or think tanks. Tetlock compiled and analyzed their responses,
over twenty thousand in all, and then made some fascinating predic-
tions of his own.
Overall, experts were terrible at forecasting the future, but Tet-
lock did something interesting: in addition to asking the experts what
they thought about a particular scenario, he also examined how they
thought. After evaluating their cognitive styles, Tetlock divided the
experts into two categories, hedgehogs and foxes, after an essay
written by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. In his essay, Berlin refer-
ences the Greek poet Archilochus: The fox knows many things, but
the hedgehog knows one big thing. The hedgehog style of thinking
is marked by a belief in the truth of one big thingsuch as a funda-
mental, unifying theoryand then aggressively extend[ing] the ex-
planatory reach of that one big thing into new domains. Conversely,
a foxs cognitive style is marked by flexible ad hocery that require[s]
stitching together diverse sources of information. Tetlock writes that
foxes are rather dubious that the cloudlike subject of politics can be
the object of a clocklike science.

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 CASSANDRA: FROM MYTH TO REALITY 15

Once the experts were separated in this way, Tetlock discovered

some surprising relationships. The foxes consistently beat the hedge-
hogs in the accuracy of their predictions by a significant margin. Not
only did the foxes perform better when asked forecasting questions
within their areas of expertise, they still performed better than hedge-
hogs on questions with which they were less familiar. And perhaps
most surprisingly of all, hedgehogs actually did significantly worse
when asked to make predictions within their areas of expertise. Tet-
lock attributed this startling finding to the idea that hedgehogs dig
themselves into intellectual holes. The deeper they dig, the harder it
gets to climb out and see what is happening outside, and the more
tempting it becomes to keep on doing what they know how to do...
uncovering new reasons why their initial inclination, usually too opti-
mistic or pessimistic, was right.
Still, maddeningly, even the foxes, considered as a group, were
only ever able to approximate the accuracy of simple statistical models
that extrapolated trends. They did perform somewhat better than un-
dergraduates subjected to the same exercises, and they outperformed
the proverbial chimp with a dart board, but they didnt come close
to the predictive accuracy of formal statistical models.
Later books have looked at Tetlocks foundational results in some
additional detail. Dan Gardners 2012 Future Babble draws on recent
research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to
detail the biases and other cognitive processes that skew our judg-
ment when we try to make predictions about the future. And building
on a successful career in sports and political forecasting, Nate Silver
discusses in his book, The Signal and the Noise, how thinking more
probabilistically can help us distill more accurate predictions from a
sea of raw data.
Fundamentally, these books all identify the difficulties inher-
ent in trying to see into the future. Predicting natural phenomena is

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 16WARNINGS

stymied by the chaotic nature of the universe: natural processes are

nonlinear systems driven by feedback loops that are often inherently
unpredictable themselves. Human behavior, or the behavior of a gov-
ernment or society, is driven by countless factors, making behavioral
forecasting all the more difficult.
Thus, our initial and informal survey of those whose judgment
we trust told us that people had thought about related issues and
they even had in mind some archetypal Cassandras. Some experts
had published learned books that plowed the ground on the phenom-
enon of prediction in science, social science, engineering, and secret
intelligence. None of the books we researched really focused on the
experts who saw disaster coming or why they were ignored. And none
asked how we can spot those with sentinel intelligence before a disas-
ter occurs. Therefore we do so in this book.
One reason that no one has focused on the people who warn is
that many, probably most, prophets are wrong, giving the others a bad
reputation. We have listened to forecasts of the world running out of
fossil fuels, being unable to grow enough food for humanity, being
crushed by a wildly proliferating population. Today, we look around
and see a glut of hydrocarbons, new ways to increase crop yields,
and some nations now worrying about negative population growth.
Whom to believe?
Another reason that people do not pay attention to these kinds
of prophecies, we postulate, is that even putting aside the numerous
erroneous warnings, there is just a lot of data, an ever expanding sea
of it. People and organizations often try their best to make sense of it
to inform their decision making, perhaps through big data analyt-
ics and machine learning. Its an important effort for many busi-
nesses and governments: knowing which seemingly low-probability
prediction accurately forecasts a high-impact event can be the differ-
ence between success and failure, sometimes between life and death.

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 CASSANDRA: FROM MYTH TO REALITY 17

There is also an overwhelming amount of seemingly well-informed

expert opinion coming at us from endless channels on the Internet,
television, and print. Blinded by the bright promise of big data and
awash in the cacophony of pundit opinion, how can a decision maker
identify Cassandras warning?
For us, the authors, this has been a journey of discovery, explor-
ing a wide variety of important issues that we found fascinating and
gripping. It has meant, in many cases, sitting down with the candidate
Cassandras and getting to know them as people, as well as discussing
their issues. It has taken us on physical journeys from the shores of the
Arab Gulf (or Persian Gulf, if you prefer) to laboratories in California.
It has taken us on mental journeys from rocks spinning beyond the
Solar System to rocks deep underneath the mountains of Appalachia.
We can already tell you this much: if even just some of these con-
temporary warnings are right, we are in for a rough future. Thus, it is
important for all of us to decide whether or not we should be doing
more now to mitigate these potential crises.
If we are right, searching for Cassandras using this systematic
methodology could help todays leaders reprioritize their attention
and resources in a meaningful way to address the threats of tomorrow.
Warnings might allow people who would have otherwise been Cas-
sandras to become the heroes who convinced society to act in time.
We begin this journey well aware that, like the citizens of ancient
Troy, we are mere mortals frequenting the precincts of the oracular
temples of the gods in our search for the truth and a vision of the
future. We know that inevitably we will err. Nonetheless, we try and
try again, lured toward the prospect of foreseeing and preventing di-
sasters on the horizon. We seek to understand: to learn how to listen
for Cassandra.

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