March 11, 2011: This is the day when an earthquake of the magnitude 8.9 on the Richter scale struct east of Sendai, in Japan, what followed this phenomenon was nature venting its fury out.. Tsunami.. small quakes. Well what I have to write is not about the quake or the aftermath. Men claimed to be gods of earth; created a home in space; built ships which can travel in and on water. Air travel, space travel and oops now its space tourism.. Medical break throughs; inventions & patents by the hour. I watched on TV with my eyes filled with tears and deep sense of grief within my heart as Man and all his inventions brought to knees in a matter of few seconds by mother nature. What are we in front of nature?
Japan is a developed country; rather they are no two in terms of its economy. When nature stuck it never made any difference to whether you are rich or poor; whether you own a business or you a doctor or an engineer or you are a street hawker. All i took is the simplest form of a shake and water in its liquid state to bring a nation to standstill. Japan crumbled and the world watched and feared the worst. Death toll and missing people list just seemed like an endless wishlist of nature. Homes lost, children orphan's, families lost, Business shut, factories lost, production stopped, hospitals destroyed and a nuclear plant at the verge of creating havoc. Looks like nature had a field day.
Can Japan repeat history? They did come out of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Did nature pick a worthy opponent in Japan? Can humanity win? Will the world stand as one to support a nation crumbled nation?
These are questions that will be answered in time. We need to wait and see. lets not be mere spectators as Japans answers this question. Let us also use this to see where we are as a nation if nature does decide to have a go at us.
I wont say pray for Japan, I will however close by saying Do for Japan.
1 comment:
All the technology advancements of humanity have come post World War 2. The contribution of pre-WW2 science was mostly theoretical from the perspective of what we have since achieved since then.
Post WW2, mankind has been applying science and its knowledge to its best of its capability. And the progress has to be lauded.
This achievement however totally masks the complacency that has developed, or as shown by Japan incident, that we are happy with what we know. There are zillion things mankind has no clue about.
Take for instance civil engineering, which is an age old science is dramatically different from Stonehenge days. Most of our civil engineering projects are based on assumptions that 9.0 on Richter is max we will ever see. How do you know it? No body measure what a earthquake intensity was in say, 13th century! We have barely enough records on earthquakes to make a time series of 100 years living on a planet which is 3billion years old.
Richard Dawkins is correct when he says it is wrong to assume anything with a very limited time series. We really don’t have information on Earth and its past to comfortably say, this is the maximum damage nature can ever perpetrate.
Luckily, as of now this even is highly contained. i.e. quakes are happening in and around Japan. If such large tectonic events occur there are high chances that something is shifting somewhere else too. So keep a watch out for further quakes in near future (and it could be happening anywhere). Remember, this quake was within 2 weeks of New Zealand's worst quake.
Something is really shifting, and we have no clue what so ever. Just hope our towers of Babel are strong enough to hold us safely through the events.
So, brace up and pray for the world. Not just Japan. And its high time we start acknowledging the forces of unknown and respect nature for its fierce unpredictability.
@Persist2End
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