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A plot of the data reported by Peter Brecke on the number of casualties in conflicts from 1400 to now, scaled to the world\u2019s population. The future is always difficult to predict, but these data can be analyzed to show that wars are a statistical phenomenon generated by interactions among human beings. Ugo Bardi put this on a double-log scale. As you would expect, large wars are less probable than small ones, but a power law is also called a \u201cfat tail\u201d distribution because the \u201ctail\u201d events (the very large ones) are more probable than in other kinds of common kinds of distribution. Unfortunately, it means that large wars are not as unlikely as we would want them to be.<\/em><\/p>\n This is the unfortunate conclusion of fat tail distributions. Large wars are more likely than you would expect. And there is a good chance that the next big war has not 60 million casualties but 600 million. Outliers are far more likely than you would expect from a normal distribution.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/expatcircle.com\/cms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/war_fatalities_follow_a_power_distribution_fat_tail_distribution.webp\")
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