Please God, not so many reminders

[fivemack]

Five hundred reported dead this morning; ten thousand by the time I type this; when the toll is finally tallied, I'd be unsurprised if it hit 50,000.

1am on the night after Christmas day, or around lunchtime local time, about two hundred exajoules of strain (an exajoule is a unit roughly equal to six times the total explosive power of the largest H-bomb ever tested) were released from the plate boundary just east of the main islands of Indonesia.

Absolute worst-case situation: largest earthquake since 1964, in shallow water, in a region surrounded by densely-populated beaches and without the infrastructure for a Japan-scale early warning system. Tsaunami on a scale not seen since Krakatoa. The sea-surge caused serious flooding in the Seychelles, and capsized fishing boats off Somalia, further from the epicenter than I am from New York. Nobody seems to have reached Aceh, yet.

On the news this evening we had interviews with half a dozen English holiday-makers (including a couple of BBC reporters who'd been holidaying in Sri Lanka and the Maldives) talking about what had happened to them. But this is not the sort of event you can report on or react to; you can't hunt down the perpetrators, nor plausibly rebuild things proof against six-storey waves, nor hold tectonic plates in place with even arbitrary refinements of engineering. I'm sending the Red Cross a cheque tomorrow.

God, we know that there are things that human power cannot avert. We've read Plato's reports from Vesuvius and the articles from Batavia when Krakatoa exploded. We remember, already. Why remind us again?

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I decided when I was twelve years old that a deity who would do something like killing 21000 people in Asia to remind people that there are things they can't control might be omnipotent and omniscient but fails even the simplest test on benevolence, and an evil omnipotent deity is something I want nothing to do with at all.

It's strange how hard it is to get my head around the concept of 21000 people I didn't know, who were all leading their lives in human complexity and potentiality on Saturday and now are dead, just like that.

[armb.livejournal.com]

I think the only plausible excuse for a benevolent deity is that tectonic activity or something equally dangerous is necessary for self-willed intelligent life to evolve, and once the universe is set up that way this sort of thing has to happen. Maintaining omnipotence then takes a lot of (unconvincing, to me) handwaving about ineffability and mysterious ways beyond our comprehension not allowing direct intervention for reasons our puny mortal minds couldn't understand.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

We've read Plato's reports from Vesuvius and the articles from Batavia when Krakatoa exploded.

Um, Pliny the Younger? (Thereafter known as Pliny the Only.)

[meirion.livejournal.com]

yep. a surprisingly uplifting read around that situation is pompeii, by robert harris.

i have my own take on what God's motivations might be, but (should i expand on them) it will be on my own lj, as i do not wish to invite flamewars into anyone else's.

-m-