No matter how technologically advanced humans become, we'll always spend a good portion of our time pathetically flailing at nature and the various disasters it attempts to grind us down with. Which makes it all the more awesome that many have actually chosen to live right on the bulls-eye of mother nature's bazooka practice target. As we all go blithely about our daily lives, just remember ...

5 New York Is Due for a Hurricane Worse Than Sandy

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There's no shortage of hazards that can be associated with New York: Muggings, terrorist attacks, and terrible celebrity chef restaurants are all par for the course when it comes to the Big Apple. Yet the most dangerous of them all tends to go unmentioned ... right until it throws a skyscraper at you. Most of us were shocked to find out that New York was in hurricane territory at all, then all of a sudden the city gets sideswiped by Irene and Sandy. They flooded subways, collapsed quite a few buildings and dealt billions in damage. And they were nothing compared to what is (eventually) coming.

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Like David-Ortiz-gets-elected-mayor bad.

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Both of those storms were only Category 1 when they hit, meaning that they were not that powerful -- even though they still tore up plenty of shit in the region, some of which still hasn't been fixed. Which is to say that it could have been much worse. As in, Roland Emmerich worse.

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Whoa, whoa, let's not be hasty. Have we forgotten how bad 2012 really was?

In fact, New York City has a pretty good chance of being hit by a category 3 Hurricane this very decade. And the next one. And, in fact, each and every decade. A Category 3 hurricane, in case you were wondering, is defined by the phrase "Devastating damage will occur." We're talking demolished houses, damaged skyscrapers, and destroyed infrastructure, here. We're talking JFK airport under 19 feet of water, according to the people who study this sort of thing.

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Because of New York's unique geography (and in case anyone needed an extra reason to dislike New Jersey), Northeast New Jersey and Western Long Island form a bottleneck for hurricanes to pass right into. Essentially, any storm with great intensity has a decent chance of a direct hit. This, incidentally, subjects the city to far worse things than just a "mere" Category 3: New York's near future can very well see a full-on "Oh shit" hurricane of the Category 5 classification. Destruction wise, this storm would be a dozen times worse than a Category 3.