You must live on the coast. There's plenty of us in the midwestern US that could never make it to a coast before the boats were all gone.

Go down the Mississippi :-)

Not that it involved a catastrophe but most of those people had been traveling dangerously for months to make it to Libya (or Egypt?)

Also going on a boat to leave the US would be very stupid.

There's a reason migrants take the Mediterranean route, instead of the Atlantic route.

> Also going on a boat to leave the US would be very stupid.

Why? As a Minnesotan, the first thing I'm doing is hopping on my boat and heading north to Canada.

I think they meant trying to cross the ocean as opposed to one of the great lakes. crossing either ocean in a shoddy boat is much more dangerous than going across the Mediterranean.

Nicely played I didn't think of those!

This is something of a false equivalence - yes, "everyone" is at risk from a country ending event, but not all countries are equally at risk.

What kind of single events could destroy most countries without taking out half the world or all of the world?

Not all countries at the same time. But one country at random which would affect that random person. The rest of the world would watch and think that it never could have happened to them, just as that random person may have thought not long before.

A coup that splits the nation into warring factions.

Really, anything where the government response makes things worse and spirals out of control.

A lot of the Central American refugees are fleeing very sharp increases in gang violence.

Just listening to ‘Fukushima’ on BBC World Service podcasts and ‘major nuclear incident’ is definitely one that springs to mind.

Wat?

Fukushima a) happened and b) Japan and the world are still there

Only those near a coast, actually

Many people are walking for months to reach the coast to escape on these refugee boats.

So that's at least two things between them and the boat, then

It depends how you frame it. I'd consider the walk to the boat part of the journey.

The difference is when Libya collapses into civil war (or 3 governments or whatever) Libyan refugees migrate to other countries that are stable.

When China, Western Europe, or the US collapses into civil war refugees from those countries do indeed migrate. The problem is other countries start collapsing as well because they were dependent on some form of trade with those regions. As a result its unlikely there will ever be a large scale exodus of people from the US. We'll all just be survivors in the wasteland at that point.