Some thoughts

There have been various disasters happened in the past 1 year, the few that pops right out when I was typing are: oil spill in US Gulf Coast, Japan Fukushima nuclear plant damaged, Hungary Alumina plant accident, Chilean miners spending months in a hole.

Some were luckier than others, but most of these has caused serious damages to the environment.

Although when we zoom out to the past century, there were more than 1 major oil spill, more than 1 nuclear power plant issue, lots of industrial accidents and coal mine mishaps.

These incidents reminded me of a movie I watched recently, called Gasland. It made me think that sometimes, we actually engineered the disaster.

When we claimed that nuclear power is a clean power, natural gas is clean energy, do we really know the contaminations we made when producing these energies?

When we claim that the drilling and mining are done with state of art technologies, do we also have a state of art counter-checking system?

I believe engineering helps man kind to develop, and with measures, develop responsibly. But in the world when anyone can be called engineers and researchers, I wonder if we actually understand what we are doing.

Life is about taking risks, and it is a chain of coincidences, or perhaps accidents, that created sparks that made us unique. Do we want to have the sparks so bright and huge that it consumes the entire earth? I sometimes feel that we are actually planning a mankind funeral to come.

I can't help wondering: do we really need to be so developed? Where are we heading, what are we aiming anyway?