Nature is nasty by nature

Hate to ruin your day, fellow earthlings, but Nature is not our friend. In fact, she tries to kill us and our raggedy excuse for civilization every chance she gets.

In the short run, she reminds us who’s boss with monster hurricanes or uncorks a second-rate volcano like Mount St. Helen’s. In the medium run, she sends mile-thick sheets of ice creeping toward us.

In the long run, well, as a scary but upbeat article in the June Futurist points out, we humans haven’t been around long enough to see what damage Nature can do when she really gets nasty.

Let’s just put it this way: if you think global warming is a serious planetary-crisis-in-the-making, wait till another Krakatoa volcano explodes with the power of 40 Mount St. Helens and puts the Northern Hemisphere under cloudy skies – for 18 straight months.

Wait till a 100-meter tsunami sweeps into New York Harbor (no cheering, please). Worse yet, wait till the swelling lake of lava half the size of Connecticut under beautiful Yellowstone Park blows again and covers Nebraska 10-feet deep in sulfuric ash – a mega-cataclysm that faithfully occurs every few hundred thousand years or so, no matter which party is in the White House.

When Yellowstone or one of its super cousins inevitably blows, most of our descendants may wish they had been hit by an asteroid the size of Texas – on the head.

But humans are a hardy lot. And, as the article in the Futurist says, if we use our brains and technology our distant grandchildren should be able “to stare Armageddon in the face and win.”

“Preparing for Armageddon: How We Can Survive Mega-Disasters” was not written by Oprah or Al Gore. It was written by Douglas Mulhall, a serious expert in building sustainable development methods and author whom the Futurist describes as a “disaster prevention practitioner and journalist.”

Mulhall’s can-do spirit, trust in technology and sci-fi imagination are boundless. To avert becoming a planet of cave people again, he says we must “mold ourselves and our ecology into new forms.”

That means, among several pages of possible and really far-out things, we should be prepared to use “mass robotic replanting” methods to quickly replace destroyed crops if an erupting volcano makes North America a permanent twilight zone.

Mulhall says we should begin to transform ourselves into “an advanced civilization of quick adaptors.” Perhaps we can use Buckminster Fuller’s 50-year-old idea of a self-sufficient, completely portable house that would allow millions to migrate easily. Also, we will need “rapid escape vehicles” – cars that fly – so large populations can escape things like floods and move to safer locales.

Of course, instead of running from on-creeping glaciers, Mulhall says, we could always use “terraforming” tools to build mountains or change the climate to stop them (after first testing them on Mars).

The principal challenge earthlings face, Mulhall says, however, is not technological. It’s facing this reality: sooner or later human civilization is going to hammered by an inherently hostile galaxy. And unless 6 billion of us can move to Mars, pushing Nature around in major ways may be our species’ only “road to salvation.”