From Wiktionary (obtained only moments ago):
Damocles was an obsequious courtier in the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse, a fourth century BC tyrant of Syracuse. Damocles exclaimed that, as a great man of power and authority, Dionysius was truly fortunate. Dionysius offered to switch places with him for a day, so he could taste that fortune first-hand. In the evening a banquet was held, where Damocles very much enjoyed being waited upon like a king. Only at the end of the meal did he look up and notice a sharpened sword hanging directly above his head, held only by a single horse-hair. Immediately, he lost all taste for the festivities and asked leave of the tyrant, saying he no longer wanted to be so fortunate. Dionysius had successfully conveyed a sense of the constant fear in which the great man lives.
Today, we all live under a similar threat of death, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. The sword, in our case, is technology. The single horse-hair that keeps it from falling are the power grids and the communication networks. It is these that essentially supply the food and drink that we need to survive. It is these that essentially insure that we don't freeze in the winter or die of heat prostration in the summer. The absence of either of these would be catastrophic, to say the least. If both were to fail at the same time, it would drive the proverbial sword through our entire population.
When I was born, there were less than three billion people on the globe. Half of them were starving and malnourished while the other half made out well enough. Today, there are now more than seven billion--a 160% increase in just my lifetime--thanks to improvements in food productivity and delivery mechanisms. Half of the world is still starving while the other half is still doing well enough. Throughout history, the world population has always been controlled by the supply of food and water. In more primitive cultures, entire tribes died out when they had so many people that they stripped the earth bare of renewable resources. Today we are simply doing the same, but on a much larger scale and far more efficiently than our ancestors. An efficiency that is driven by power sources, whether they be water-driven, coal-fueled, solar, nuclear, or other. Power sources that leverage the equivalent work of a few hundred humans into moving a vehicle or millions of them lifting a rocket into space.
Like the Sword of Damocles, the possible failure of our technological marvels hangs over our collective heads. At any moment, the single horse-hair holding everything together could be snapped by a powerful blast of electromagnetic radiation from the sun. The certainty of such an event is one-hundred percent--it happens all of the time; the likelihood that such an event will hit our tiny planet, fortunately, is quite remote. However, remote does not mean never. While, the odds are very close to zero, they are still a finite possibility.
Maybe it will happen before I can finish this and the world will never have a chance to see my thoughts (how fortunate for the rest of the world). Or maybe it won't happen until long after I'm gone. I like the second choice better than what any of the post-apocalyptic novels portray as my possible future when it happens. It won't be pretty, but, hopefully, I'll never have to deal with it.
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