Guilty! Guilty! Read all about it! Scientists can't predict the future!

    There seems to be a universally accepted belief that the local weatherman cannot be relied on. It is widely accepted to doubt a meteorologist’s forecast. When we read the 5 day forecast we do so with a grain of salt, I’m I right? How many times have I said, “the weatherman said this…, but that doesn’t mean it will happen.”  Though Science in all its areas of study is widely dependable because of its extensive research and precision, it in no way can be an acceptable form of predicting the future. If it was, natural disasters would not be nearly as catastrophic. With timely predictions mass numbers of deaths could be avoided and the devastation, minimal. It is outright absurd to expect the weather man to prevent cataclysmic events simply because nature is a wild, wild force. We can study it and we can dissect it, but to think we can control it is a delusion. Scientists do a phenomenal job in the predictions that they can give, but when they can’t, have they failed? Do we as laymen know their pressure to predict? We are not talking about crystal balls and tarot cards, but sometimes I think we might think that we are.

            Just recently 6 Italian seismologists and 1 government official were sentenced to 6 years in prison for manslaughter because they did not successfully predict an impending earthquake that killed 309 people in the city of L'Aquila on April 6, 2009.

                “On 31 March 2009, during which they were asked to assess the risk of a major earthquake in view of many shocks that had hit the city in the previous months. The meeting was unusually quick, and was followed by a press conference, during which Italy's Civil Protection Department and local authorities reassured the population, stating that minor shocks did not raise the risk of a major quake. In a television interview recorded shortly before the meeting, Bernardo De Bernardinis, then deputy director of the Civil Protection Department, said, ‘the scientific community tells me there is no danger because there is an ongoing discharge of energy’. Most seismologists, including several of the indicted, consider this statement to be scientifically incorrect.”

                It was also stated by the defendant’s lawyers that the minutes of the meeting was never made public and there was never an official statement made by the scientists, so how could they be made responsible for the deaths that were caused by an earthquake?

                A short term prediction for earthquakes is a very difficult thing to say the least! Countries like, Japan, the United States, China and Russia have made much effort in this field, but still nothing has led to a definitive formula in successfully predicting an earthquake. There in fact has only been one successful short range prediction that happened in China in 1975. Very few people were killed despite the fact that 1 million people lived near the epicenter. However, (and this is the real clincher) one year later an estimated 240,000 people died in another Chinese province which was not predicted. There was nothing base a prediction on. There were no foreshocks, there was nothing.

                It seems outright absurd to me that these 6 seismologists would be guilty of manslaughter for something only God could have known. If there was reason to think they kept the warning of an impending earthquake from everyone out of malicious intent, then we would have a case. However which scenario seems more absurd, that these men kept a deadly secret that an earthquake was coming or that they merely were not able to predict the future with the tools they had because nature is highly unpredictable.

                 I can only imagine the pain and grief of the families of the victims; what they are experiencing is an injustice, but isn’t sentencing innocent men to prison, who did their best with what they knew, also an injustice?  Taking these men from their families for 6 years will not bring back the dead. Would it not best serve the community for them to return to their field, to their research to better the study of seismology?

                If cataclysmic disasters could be avoided the world would be a different one…This is a visualization worthy of visualizing.  Most people all over the world would have enough time to evacuate and avoid death by tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, wild fires, flooding, landslides and volcanoes. It would be a different world…it would be a world we could control. It is hard to imagine. It raises all sorts of thoughts in my mind…we live every day at the mercy of many things that under the right conditions prove fatal. For example, air traffic controllers and pilots, they are under extreme pressure to get passengers to their destinations safely under difficult circumstances. Yet, fatalities happen all the time, but do we blame the pilots and the traffic controllers for these misfortunes? Do they not do they best they can under the circumstances they are in? It is no different, because the earth cannot be tamed as hard as we might try, it is not tamable. It is good what science does to learn from the earth to better all of our lives, but in the end we will not control it. This is partly why it is so awesome, no?