Christopher Collins
9/1/09
ENC 1101 (Central Idea for Essay)
Hurricane Katrina
In 2005 Hurricane Katrina, a category 3 hurricane that began as a category 5, struck most of the land surrounding the Gulf of Mexico. From its origins as a tropical depression off the coast of the Caribbean, it gained massive amounts of energy from the northwest in the temperate seas of the Gulf. The warm waters fueled the storm, which directly impacted New Orleans, Louisiana. A swampy lying metropolitan area like itself rendered defenseless as the hurricane destroyed over 50 of the constructed flood prevention levy’s and hurdled a wall of water straight for downtown New Orleans. One of the top 5 worst natural disaster’s in this country’s history, the violent storm brought an unprecedented 1,836 deaths, did over $100 billion dollars in damages and left a whole city on its knees stranded from the rest of the world lying in ruin. The waters from the Gulf engulfed 80% of the city in excess of 14ft high and did more damage than the storm itself! While the jaw-dropping statistics stand for themselves, the hurricanes significance in my eyes lies in the way it exemplified our true vulnerability to mother nature and offered a glimpse into a future plagued with intensive climate fluctuation due to global, or anthropogenic warming. Global warming is said to be a natural phenomena in the scientific community presently and the public discourse of global warming has actually stemmed from humans acceleration of the process by massive wasting of carbon dioxide. The record breaking 15 strong 2005 hurricane season stood as testament that as humans release what is now up to 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide into our planets atmosphere per year, we are reaching an ever-increasing imbalance of our environment that will lead to severe storms and climate change making Katrina seem like a normal thunderstorm. As overpopulation increases due to a high birth rate and low death rate and more people move to areas closer to the shore, events like hurricane Katrina seem to foreshadow a gloomy future exponentially worse than today’s current conditions considering the variables at hand. We as human beings must learn from this wake-up call and combine our knowledge together to ensure a safer home for generations and centuries to come. In the coming years, changes and shifts towards the ways we use our planets resources will spark global awareness and better prepare us for natural disasters as well as human-related catastrophes.
NASA’s ‘Pathfinder’ lands on Mars- 1997
NASA’s ‘Pathfinder’ landing on Mars was a monumental step in mankind’s walk up the ladder of intelligence. The purpose for sending the micro-rover to Mars was obviously to collect samples, take pictures, and measure atmospheric and geologic factors of the red planet. The not so obvious mission was to prove NASA’s commitment to make space exploration as cheap as any other space program on Earth. Including mission operations and the launch vehicle, the whole mission came out to be about $280 million dollars. Since the day I could speak, I have dreamed just as much if not more than any other human being of space exploration and fascinated by the idea of an age where space colonization existed. Progress in space exploration, in a sense, gives the people of the world unity; space is in my opinion what can bring this world together. I feel space exploration is essential to the human species and it his something we’ve been attempting for thousands of years; and we’re not going to stop now.
The World Wide Web becomes readily available to public in 1992
The establishment of the Internet marked a new era of communication that forever changed the way we live and coincide with each other. I can remember being not even 10 when my family got WEBTV, and how amazing I found it to e-mail my penpal given to me in elementary school who lived in Canada. It gave me a lot of insight on how people live up North. This was simply representing what the internet has done worldwide; give people knowledge on everything and anything they wished. I believe we have built a society whose infrastructure is so weaved into a quilt of web pages that in its absence havoc would be wreaked upon, economies would crash, and life as we know it would take a turn downhill.
I like the first idea, but I would to know more about how Katrina impacted you. For example, did you know anyone personally that had lost their homes or your reaction to the news of the destruction Katrina had caused.
ReplyDeleteI need some personal angles on these, as well. Give us YOU in these stories...
ReplyDelete