Life, a Question?

As we watch the news each night we are assaulted with the calamities of the day.  It may be civil unrest in Africa, shootings in Arizona, earthquakes in California, nuclear power plants exploding, forest fires in Yellowstone, volcano’s in Washington, or Tsunami’s in the Indian Ocean, or as we see right now earthquakes, tsunami and nuclear power plant meltdowns in Japan.

In the wake of all this doom and gloom it is easy, in fact it is expected, to believe we are in some terrible end time where life is going to be extinguished and we will all perish.  Hollywood makes millions of dollars selling us fiction about how we will destroy our earth, be invaded by aliens, or suffer some cataclysmic event such as believed to have caused the end of the Mesozoic era and the domination of humans on this planet will end.

Somewhere in all this there is probably someone will guess right in whatever dire prediction they make, but until then they are all wild guesses that serve little purpose.  This is akin to the popular "Infinite Monkey Theorem" that postulates if “an infinite number of monkeys were typing on keyboards for an infinite amount of time almost surely would a given text such as the complete works of William Shakespeare be created.”

I would like to put into some context what we see and what has happened in history.  Let start with the simple first, man destroying other men.  My reference is 1900-2000 A Century of Genocide website © 2009 by Piero Scaruffi and is used in accordance with provisions outlined for non-commercial use.

Mao Ze-Dong (China and Tibet 1949-69) – 49 to 78,000,000 (that is million in case you are wondering if I typed it correctly)

Joseph Stalin (USSR 1932-39) – 23,000,000

Adolf Hitler (Germany 1939-45) – 12,000,000

Leopold II of Belgium (Congo 1886-1908) – 8,000,000

Those are just the big hitters in the last hundred or so years.  The list is way longer and I would recommend, if you were curious, a visit the site.  More importantly it does not include the wars we have fought and the lives lost in those sanctioned conflicts.

How about earthquakes?  From the US Geological Survey we find.

As point of reference:  Worldwide in 2010 there were 226, 729 deaths from earthquake.  This would compare to 0856 when 200,000 died in Damghan Iran, or 1556 when 850,000 perished in Shensi China, or 1920 when 200,000 lost their life in the earthquake in Haiyuan, Nigxia China.  Obviously there are many other examples, and probably an equal number that have not been documented.

How about nuclear plant meltdowns?  I know of only Chernobyl, although I would bet there are a couple of subs on the bottom of the ocean that may have had incidents.  On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl plant exploded from a power output surge sending a radioactive fire plume that spread contamination over a wide area.  This led to the resettling of 336,000 people, see CHERNOBYL. The immediate deaths from radiation poisoning seemed to center on the first responder fire fighters who were not told about the potential for radiation.  I would think this an example of a complacent bureaucracy seeking to protect itself first?

Finally, earthquakes and their tsunami by products; in 2004 there was a 9.1 scale earthquake off the island of Sumatra.  Final count 227, 898.  Hopefully the Japanese totals will be significantly less than this.

I think the take away I would close this with is while nature and our human mistakes can inflict a pretty significant toll on humanity the numbers will actually pale when compared to the damage mankind does to itself.