Note: This is something I wrote in 2011. It was a thought experiment in the positive consequences of natural disasters if people respond appropriately. I haven't re-read it.
Captain’s Log, Stardate 188220.7194.
Our advance team has returned from surveying the damage on the planet Susanoo, in the Izanagi system. Hotaru, a massive, long-dormant volcano, has erupted, destroying six cities in the Miyazaki prefecture and taking the lives of 50 million Susanoons. The air quality of approximately one third of the planet is degraded, and carbon capture devices have been deployed to clean the air worldwide.
The population of Susanoo has mobilized, sending food, medical staff, and military personnel to the affected islands to quell riots, search for survivors, beam them to safety if stable enough, and use shuttles to transport those who are critically injured. Additional aid is arriving from Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, the other Class M planets in the Kamiyonanayo galaxy. Americans are sending a fleet of starships to rebuild the destroyed cities and to protect Susanoo from Saracen pirates, who have arrived en masse and are conducting raids of the Hotaru ruins.
Fear is widespread on Susanoo. The eruption of Hotaru appears to have destabilized the thorium reactor near the planet’s core. Along with the other reactors in its chain, it provides approximately 50% of the power for the planet. While thorium is not as dangerous as other radioactive materials, there is concern that waste containment vessels could crack, leaking waste into magma and putting millions at risk of radiation poisoning. Scientists and military personnel in HAZMAT-theta suits are beaming into a containment facility near the planet’s core to attempt repairs to the reactor.
Captain's Personal Log, Stardate 188220.7479.
En route to Susanoo, I studied the planet and its people’s history. A small group of Japanese settlers from Earth arrived here over two hundred years ago, searching for an ocean planet with untapped natural resources and a biosphere that would be friendly to the fish, animals, and plants native to their region of Earth. While most on Earth started eating vat-grown meat by the middle of the twenty-first century, sushi connoisseurs claimed that in-vitro fish, particularly rare varieties, could not match the texture and flavor of live fish, and so they sought to populate oceans with their favorite species, and fishing had been tighly regulated and controlled since the adoption of the 2072 United Nations Animal Rights Resolution. More importantly, they practiced a revitalized form of Shinto and sought out a land which they could shape with their religion.
After a successful initial colony (New Tokyo), approximately 1.5 million additional Japanese Terrans moved to Susanoo and established additional colonial outposts. A high level of industrialization and a free market led Susanoo to prosper much more than other planets had, and within a few years, it no longer required Japanese subsidies. It sought and gained independence from Japan. Before long, its economy had surpassed the mother country by orders of magnitude. It now boasts a population of 1.8 billion.
History from the early modern period fascinates me. The explosion of technology and medicine that occurred in the twentieth century continues to be unparalleled, and while average human life expectancy is now one hundred twenty years, the gains that were made in the last five hundred years were incremental, all built upon the advances made in the 1900s.
The twentieth century is the most paradoxical period in history. Humanity made more strides than ever--technologically, scientifically, and medically--during the same hundred years that more men were murdered by leaders than any other century in history. The best and bloodiest man has to offer were on display, although rarely in the same country at the same time.
Things that modern Terrans take for granted – fifty-storey greenhouses, in-vitro meat, genetically modified, highly nutritional fruits and vegetables, an abundant supply of clean water, vaccinations that have wiped out the maladies that plagued twentieth-century humanity – are all based on work that had begun within a century of the discovery and industrial production of antibiotics. I still have a hard time imagining life before teleporting and near-light space travel, though.
I’m having a hard time being an objective observer during the mission to Susanoo, and I suppose that my ancestry has something to do with that. My father’s ancestors immigrated to America from Japan in the late twentieth century, because there were good engineering jobs there. A few years later, Japan reached a major turning point: The Tōhoku earthquake. There’s no telling if I would have been born if Goro Mamoru had not moved from Sendai to Los Angeles, and I wrote my Academy graduate thesis on the population effects of this disaster.
Measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, the Tōhoku earthquake was a massive event that caused a huge tsunami, killed thousands of people, destroyed and damaged over a hundred thousand buildings, and shifted the world on its axis by almost 10 cm. Like the recent eruption on Susanoo, the earthquake damaged multiple nuclear reactors, leading to the release of a dangerous amount of radioactive material.
People were frightened. Everyone was told to stay in their home, in order to be protected from fallout. Thousands of bodies washed ashore. The terror of a natural disaster ruled supreme. For the next few years, people were terrified every time there was a small quake, or sometimes even when there was a loud crashing sound. Goro Mamoru wrote on his blog (a sort of public diary that was popular in the early twenty-first century) that he had lost three cousins in the tsunami but that he had faith in the Japanese people, his people, that they would prevail.
Slowly, across Japan, life returned to normal, with one change: People started having babies again. Before the earthquake, Japan’s fertility rate had hovered between 1.2 and 1.5 births per woman for years. This is the point where a population collapses, and if Japan had continued on this course, it would have become a former civilization, or perhaps a colony of China. But as it happened, the fertility rate spiked to near 3 for a few years, then decreased to 2.5, then to 2.1, which is the replacement rate. In the next couple of hundred years, it would drop below 2 sometimes, and sometimes it would be close to 2.5. The ancient people of the island of Japan survive to this day, due to the way that they turned a curse into a blessing, without even knowing that they had done so.
I have faith in the people of Susanoo, my distant cousins, that they will survive this disaster and thrive, much like the people of twenty-first century Japan did. As horrible and tragic as any particular moment in time may be, and as frightening as periods such as the Iran-Israel nuclear exchange must have been for those that survived them, history’s arrow since the days of George Washington has essentially been one that has led to greater prosperity and freedom. I have faith in the Susanoons, just as Goro Mamoru, the first in my father’s line to live in America, had faith in the Japanese.
They will rebuild, and if we are a just people, we shall help them.
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