Sardonic post title aside, please pray or do whatever positive imaging you can for the folks in Japan. With modern communications and videography equipment (i.e., anyone that has a smartphone with video can make a video), its pretty easy to snap good pictures and video of a natural disaster, and some of the shots of the tsunami running rampant over farmland... this isn't cheesy CGI in a cheesy Emmerich movie, its the real thing, and its pretty damned scary - amazing to see from an overhead shot. The destruction and just the *inevitability* of the waves ruthlessly chewing up everything in their path is jaw dropping to watch.
We'll probably never know the total death toll, but I'm going to be very surprised if the estimates are much < 10,000 and probably will go higher. Japan is like the 98 pound weakling that just got sucker punched without warning by Alex Karras Blazing Saddles style. Except Alex Karras is the size of Godzilla in this case. Watching the carnage, you start to truly understand why Godzilla and Mothra are still so popular in Japan; being on the Pacific Rim these folks truly are living on the edge every day.
So let's do what we can for Japan... and don't forget New Zealand. Even here in California some of the waves flipped boats over in Santa Cruz and up near the Oregon Coast.
What has got me worried at a lower level is this...
"Um, OK, now you've had a quake in NZ, and Japan, and if the quakes are moving in a clockwise pattern, that puts the next quake, um, near Alaska or the US west coast..." Add in the superstition of bad news coming in threes (although in Charlie Sheen's case, he's the entire Raman spaceship *fleet*), yeah, I'm a little twitchy. LA or San Francisco are nice juicy little targets for earthquakes (as are Portland, Seattle, and points north, etc.). Sacramento does get quakes but our local geology is such that we've never really had a "bad one" - you usually get the pictures rattling for a few seconds and you're done.
The larger question that's invoked by disasters on the scale of Haiti, NZ and Japan (not to mention other places that have been wacked recently by giant quakes or powerful storms) is just how, um, inhospitable our planet can be at times for those of us who live on its surface. There's the giant caldera in Yellowstone, for example, that blows up and throws a lot of ash into the planetary atmosphere roughly every 250,000 years or so, and the last eruption was ... um, about 250,000 years ago.
And here we are about to retire the only space transport (except for that secret stuff that our military has GOT to have - I do not believe for a second that we don't have a manned space capability or a plane that can fly to orbit. I can't see us giving up that capability when we have no shuttle) we've had for the last 30 years, courtesy of Nixon, who canceled several Apollo missions for cavorting in LEO in a giant space truck and an obscenely expensive orbiting studio apartment.
Yes, yes, we've got Virgin Galactic, and the creator of the DOOM game and some other dot-com and otherwise millionbillionaires who are underwriting private rocketry into LEO, but we still have failed - since the astonishing achievement of landing men on that hunk of rock in the sky 40+ years ago - to move the human presence in this solar system farther than 200 or so miles from the surface of what is probably (unless you're a Von Daniken fan) our planetary home of origin.
The Kepler space telescope already has confirmed what we've known for several years now, that exoplanets are plentiful and as the detection techniques get better, we'll find candidate Earths... and as space hardware gets smaller and smaller, and lasers more powerful, we should be able to orbit lasers that have the capability to push tiny probes pushed by photons to high enough velocities to fly to other star systems and take pictures... but that's not getting people off of Earth where either the combination of some stupid series of natural disasters or flesh eating zombies could do our species a serious turn to extinction.
We *could* do the one-way Mars missions that are proposed with the rockets we have now - its just a matter of throwing sufficient money at the project... anyway, it seems a shame that 40 years have passed and the space program still is struggling to get more than 200 miles from the launch pad.
We need to leave this solar system, and get at least a few hundred light years away from the stars capable of going supernova to ensure the human races' survival for the not so distant future...
In the meantime, though, we need to help Japan rebuild, because there just might be some young genius, or geniuses, huddling in the cold and dark right now, scared half to death through the aftershocks, who figures out how to build stargates or warp drive...
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