When The Earth Moves Again

The earth belches and the plates shift, sending the planet careening off its axis and moving the japanese coast eight feet off its bearings. The cooling system fails at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, causing an explosion and an unspecified release of radiation.

A thousand lives are lost in the twinkling of an eye. The engineers with their standard calculations, antique slide rules and pocket protectors will throw their hands up and say, "don't blame us, it was a hundred year event of a magnitude that we could never comprehend, and besides these isotopes only have a radioactive half life of ten thousand years or so and then things should be pretty much back to normal."

We will mourn the dead and curse an uncaring creator. The only happy one might be the Colonel in Libya, whose air force can now shoot down his own citizens under cover of our short attention span, while the eyes of the world are averted by the distant carnage.

We are dealing with tools beyond our skill set and competence, both on the atomic and genetic level. We can't even conceive the magnitude of the upheaval that our earth is capable of. Worst case scenarios must be inputted into all of the design equations, because if we know anything, it is that sooner or later, the shit always hits the fan.