I believe they're referring to that cranky guy who argued to save even more. Every culture has one, I'm sure. I'll be that guy today. Every industrialized country should have decades worth of dried food stockpiled for every person. We have barely enough food stored to survive one major crop failure! That's insanely close to the edge considering our capacity.
When I suggest this, people mostly dismiss it as bizarre and just too outside-the-box to really appreciate what I'm even suggesting. They don't live in the same world I do with the same perceived risks.
To the people I've suggested it to, a volcanic eruption disrupting agriculture for years just isn't real, not in a way that would make them want to save food in planning for it. Just as a 1 in 1000 year harsh winter or drought wasn't real to a lot of neolithic farmers. Until it was. And I'm sure one of their neighbours probably even suggested the possibility to them.
> Every culture has one, I'm sure. I'll be that guy today. Every industrialized country should have decades worth of dried food stockpiled for every person.
The Mormons come closest-- they stockpile for a year. They're a good resource when you need a shopping list for the next pandemic:
For every cranky guy warning against "apparently theoretical problem which is not immediately affecfting our daily life", society will contain some other people who criticize the idea for being wasteful, or anticipating problems that won't occur, or won't have nearly the impact claimed, and will push back.
For some subset of the warnings, they are legitimate and represent rational response to rare, but impactful events. Identifying and planning for existential threats is something that successful societies do. Only extremely unlucky societies that fail to plan survive while those that do plan are statistically more likely to survive.
I don't think we exist in a time and place where if you say "we should multi-home humanity to solve the meteor problem" will lead to people spending trillions on mars bases, though.
