Think Galileo
By: David Aaronovitch, Haaretz, courtesy of Walla News!
Everything is getting worse. Reports from places you've almost never heard of, where hundreds of thousands of people lived by the ocean and barely made a living, tell of tens of thousands of deaths. All of a sudden, in the interval between vacations and layoffs, we experienced the biggest natural disaster of our lives.
What do we learn? Well, the prosaic nature of the disaster catches your eye. The surges were not 30 meters high and high-rise buildings did not collapse; On the other hand the water, without the accompaniment of dramatic music from the movies, just kept flowing when it should have stopped.
Beyond the facts that are gradually revealed, the narratives also gradually emerge. Why fear global warming, some ask, which is only an imaginary disaster, when we have to face the real disaster? Others sing in chorus that as always, shame and disgrace, the poor are the ones who suffer from the floods. Or - why spend money in Iraq when it would be better to use it to help the victims of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean? In fact, why should one even fear and worry if the forces of nature still have such clear control over man?
The earthquake in the Indian Ocean was the largest event of its kind since the earthquake in Alaska in 1964, which caused tsunami waves that also caused damage on the California coast. But its destructive effect was much greater than any earthquake since the Messina Egypt disaster - the same earthquake that was exactly 28 years old on December 96, and in which between 80 and 100 thousand people were killed in Sicily and Calabria. The Catholic poet Alice Maynell wrote a poem called "Messina 1908", in which she lamented before God: "You have broken your yoke, you have broken / Your strong children, your beautiful children..." before attributing the relief efforts ("Your ships in the sea, the trains on the earth") to His mercy to himself.
The authorities, inspired by God or for other reasons, rebuilt Messina so that the next time the number of dead will be much smaller. This is the same drive behind the determination of the United States - known for floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions - to eradicate the effects of natural disasters.
This is what should have happened in the Indian Ocean. Although in the last decades the region has not experienced as many tsunami waves as the Pacific region, the occurrence of the event that happened this week was very likely due to the seismic activity and the activity of the volcanoes there. Two of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history - Mount Tambora in 1815 and Krakatoa in 1883 - occurred in this area. But as we all know now, no warning system was installed that could have helped save the lives of many in the countries further away from the epicenter. The lack of such a system is not only a consequence of the regional poverty; This is more due to risk estimates and the timetable of the more distant future. The risk was not that great, and it was not likely that this would happen soon.
If you need proof of how widespread this feeling of lack of urgency is, it can be found in the certain knowledge that one day the volcano located on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands will erupt, causing an avalanche of rocks weighing hundreds of billions of tons and such tsunami waves that will destroy New York. On Tuesday, in The New York Times, Dennis Smith used the disaster in the Indian Ocean to argue that now is the time to destroy part of the mountain to reduce and "weaken the impact of the event if the mountain ever slides into the Atlantic." "But who," asked Smith, "would finance such a colossal destruction of a land mass?" Hmmm, what country exactly is New York in?
Similarly, the day will come when we will be hit by a giant asteroid if we don't find a way to intercept asteroids in space. Maybe not soon (or maybe not very soon), but an asteroid will come. But when President Bush revealed in public before the election his ambition to restart the American space program, he was met with waves of laughter.
In 1969 we landed on the moon, then we stopped. In the 60s we dreamed of eradicating disease and now we focus on the imaginary dangers of the illusions of that science that might save us. Right now there are outbreaks of rubella in the rich and prosperous southwest of Germany, because the middle classes there refused to vaccinate their children and thus the general immunity of the population was compromised. This is not progress, this is a reaction.
On December 28, a report was published in the "Guardian", according to which nanotechnology can be very useful in targeting cancer treatment - a treatment that in some respects is similar to medieval charlatan medicine: sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it fails. But some put forward strong arguments against the new technology, precisely Just as others speak against genetic engineering or stem cell research, not on a factual basis but out of fear of unknown "Frankenstein" technologies.
In the West, too much emotional and political energy is invested in narrow-minded carnage or in the aspiration to retreat back to village life, surrounded by idealization. And this is true not only when it comes to science, but also when talking about improving the earth and the lives of the people living on it. The death of many of those who will die this week or next month will be because they were too poor to live anywhere other than the coast, and because they lived in places where the services are so basic that it will not be possible to prevent the diseases that break out following a disaster.
The disaster may remind you of the vulnerability of humans, question the existence of God, make you wonder what the point of life is. All this is good and beautiful and understandable. But it can also raise once again the critical choice between fatalism and activism, between doing little or doing much.
In 1581 there was an earthquake in northern Italy. A 17-year-old student standing in Pisa's cathedral noticed how the shocks affected the lamps hanging in the shaking structure. This was the beginning of Galileo's journey.
