I feel like the current catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is establishing THE model for how we globally experience and respond to disasters.
Namely, we Twitter the hell out of them and map them with Google Earth. The government is no longer the bottleneck for disseminating large-scale catastrophic events. The emergency broadcast network has been crowdsourced. BAM. If only we could plug an oil well with tweets, we’d be sorted.
Then of course we cap them with dome technology reverse-engineered from Stephen King and the Simpsons Movie. I don’t know what James Cameron is waiting for, I fully expect him to fix this thing singlehandledly, and in 3D, but it will probably take him 10 years, and by then the oil slick will either have attained sentience and its own Twitter feed, or we’ll have moved on to the nuclear option:
Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily,reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: “the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.”
Easy peasy lemon squeezy. And bonus, this will create Godzilla.