One would think Bill Gates would be pretty much fearless as he’s crossed the most unimaginable technological boundaries and has access to pretty much anything in the world; but that’s not the case. Being the brilliant man that he is, Gates is fully aware there’s things money and technology can’t fix or save us from. In an interview with Ezra Klein for Vox, the tech mogul was asked to talk about what worries him in life, to which he confessed that most of the things that worry him have a very slim chance of happening, like a big volcanic explosion or a gigantic earthquake; Gates even said he rates the chance of a nuclear war happening during his lifetime as “fairly low.”
So what is Gates’ biggest fear? “A widespread epidemic far worse than Ebola, well over 50 percent,” he explained. The Microsoft founder went on to explain that the 20th century had three death rate spikes; the first was Word War I, the second was World War II and the third (which reached the same height as WWII) was the Spanish Flu, which killed approximately 65 million people. “We still don’t know where it came from,” he said. “I funded a disease modeling group that uses computer simulation and that work has been phenomenal in helping us target our eradicating resources,” Gates continued.
Now, the question is, why, if we have such advanced medical technology would we not be able to stop something like the Spanish Flu? The answer is simple: transportation. “The force of infection because of modern transport compared no 1918 is over 50 times as great, and so if you get something like the Flu, and you look at that map of how, within days it’s basically in all urban centers of the entire globe,” Gates explained.
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