ARROGANCE MEETS ITS LIMITS AS OIL SPILLS INTO THE GULF

"Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Macbeth
William Shakespeare

I may be alone in this but I have the distinct impression we may have grossly overstepped our bounds.

"BP Plc engineers desperately explored options on Sunday to control oil gushing from a ruptured well deep under the Gulf of Mexico after a setback with a huge undersea containment dome fueled fears of a prolonged and growing environmental disaster.

The spill is spreading west, further from Florida but toward the important shipping channels and rich seafood areas of the Louisiana shoreline, where fishing, shrimping and oyster harvesting bans have been widened.

A state of emergency was declared in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, with sheen, the leading edge of the oil slick, forecast to come ashore near Port Fourchon within days.

BP (BP.L) is exploring several new options to control the spill after a buildup of crystallized gas in the dome forced engineers to delay efforts to place a massive four-story containment chamber over the rupture on Saturday."
Reuters

"Concern grew Sunday that the US Gulf coast is facing a whole new level of environmental disaster after the best short-term fix for a massive oil spill ran into serious trouble.

BP's giant containment box lay idle on the seabed as engineers furiously tried to figure out how to stop it clogging with ice crystals.

The British energy giant, which owns the lion's share of the leaking oil and has accepted responsibility for the clean-up, has tried to banish the notion that the dome is a "silver bullet" to end the crisis.

But should efforts fail to make the giant funnel system effective, there is no solid plan B to prevent potentially tens of millions of gallons of crude from causing one of the worst ever environmental catastrophes.

Untold damage is already being done by the 3.5 million gallons estimated to be in the sea so far, but the extent of that harm will rise exponentially if the only solution is a relief well that takes months to drill."
Yahoo

We are idiots, putting ourselves in the place of God, believing we can control the forces of nature. It's one thing to push the limits of technology. We have to grow and learn; that is our nature. But, to take risks that have such huge downsides; that is sheer arrogance.

We have opened the very bowels of the earth in a part of the world that we can barely function in under the best of circumstances. This is the equivalent of outer space in technological terms. When we go to space we take risks, but they are limited to the crew and equipment, the money and the prestige. The loss of a space shuttle is horrific but it has very little impact on the world.

This spill, on the other hand, even if we can eventually get it under control, is going to affect the lives of millions, perhaps billions. Economies will collapse and vital resources will be destroyed, if not forever then for a very long time. The clean up costs alone have the potential to push the United States economy over the cliff we've been teetering along for the last decade. BP can't pay for this, even if their assets are seized and sold. This is beyond the ability of any company to absorb. Or any nation in the current economic reality.

All of this destruction and ruination when all the time we've had access to nuclear power, a clean and safe energy source that we won't run out of. If we had made the commitment to nuclear thirty years ago we probably wouldn't be at war in the middle east, the gulf wouldn't be dying under a blanket of oil and we would have made huge strides in the technology because the market would have demanded it.

But instead, in the name of profits, power and "cheap" energy we have opened the door to hell.