Revised March-September 2011

Japan is in its worst tragedy since the end of World War II. What is happening to the generous and industrious Japanese people exceeds the fertile creative minds of the most unlikely and amazing movies or science fiction novels. The catastrophe that is in full development was impossible to predict barely twenty-four hours earlier. The March 10, 2011 nobody could imagine that an earthquake would alert such a vast region comprising the Asian shores lapped by the waters of the Pacific, from Russia to Indonesia, Oceania and American, from Alaska to Cape Horn virtually the North Pole to the South Pole, no less than half the globe. Much less foresee that would be put on high alert three nuclear power plants at a time, to present danger fusion reactors could.

We can not yet know what will be the outcome of the disaster, but that because of immense magnitude and destructive capacity, will be remembered forever. This disaster should serve to remove a vast amount of teachings regarding the human-Earth relationship. While it is true that an earthquake will -and what kind of earthquake in Japan can be blamed not the hand of man, it is also true that humans have lost respect for nature and we have emerged as supreme beings entitled to intervene in what is, from the simplest things to science and technology beyond the understanding of privileged brains, such as unusual experiment, started by a group of scientists, to artificially reproduce the Big Bang, that if were to become reality, with a single swipe of computer key up could destroy the Earth, the solar system, the Milky Way and more. We are too bold, we believe powerful. Fukushima, Onagawa and Tokai are warning us: should get off his pedestal.

One bristles when he sees the frightening images of those huge masses of water exits out of nowhere, suddenly, without notice, published in the least expected, slipping between cars and corridors of buildings, and its rapid route intersection destroy everything its path, moving trains, cars, embrocations, houses and buildings as if they were miniatures made of cardboard, clay figurines or origami. The force of the raging water is unstoppable, and roll it all amounts to a high-power pump back stick, boulder, junk or spoil anything, animal or human that will stand.

Imagine for a moment that if what happened with the tsunami, the result of an earthquake and its aftershocks, in areas of relatively limited damage, what if the coasts, beaches and islands in the world, due to global warming, were flooded with waves simultaneously two, three or five meters, as a result of melting glaciers and polar settlement blocks that are already occurring phenomena and their effects have closer. How many lives would reap? How many towns and cities would be destroyed? How many houses? How many crops? How many factories? How many stores? And finally, most disturbing question: How many nuclear plants would be out of control, spreading their deadly radioactive contamination over the entire surface of the planet?

We are not against science and technology; much less progress. But improvisation, lack of vision, irresponsible speeches, populism, corruption, mafias, the “let’s do it anyway, it’s not going to happen”, the “then will”. It is time that citizens demanded that our leaders cancel improvisation and lack of transparency of their actions. If we do not get experiences of Japan, if we do not look in that mirror and continue as if nothing had happened, it is safe to say that even in less time than you would we could attend the extinction of human life and many other species the earth. “The end of the world” would not be this time the title of a film or a book of catastrophic genre. It would be real, not fiction.

Sandor Alejandro Gerendas-Kiss