Seconds from Disaster...

National Geographic Channel has some wonderful lineups of programming through out the week, and one such outstanding program is the ominously named "Seconds from Disaster" which deconstructs the terrifying sequence of events that led to unimaginable tragedy.

Not to sound voyeurisitic or sadistic, but it does astonish the mathematical and methodical intellect as to how investigators are able to piece together seemingly unconnected and oftentimes absurdly random chain of events that colluded and conspired to cause that disaster.

The domino effect, Chain Reaction, Snowball effect, whatever you might want to call the entire sequence of events. But, essentially it boils down to this. Events and actions, occurring continents away and across a time frame of years, have colluded to cause disasters, which, with the perfect vision of 20/20 hindsight, was avoidable in the first place.

You could almost hear Mr. Murphy shout in the background his now infamous law - if something can go wrong, it will go wrong....

The high-speed train crash of the ICE in Eschede, Germany in 1998 - according to the report presented in the program, the groundwork for this accident was laid during the early to mid-90s when, the train operators, with a view to increasing the rider comfort, opted for a different kind of wheels, where the flange in contact with the rail was not part of the solid wheel base, but rather fitted onto it.

During that fateful day, this two-part wheel would be the primary culprit in that staggering chain of events that ultimately led to the disaster. Essentially, the first straw set the ball rolling on a series of events that would not have resulted in the magnitude of disaster to the train had the location been different - the train was at the exact wrong spot at the exact wrong time and the exact thing that should not have gone wrong went wrong.

Same with the Concorde flight AF 4590 that crashed just after take-off from the CDG in Paris.

Sometimes it makes you think of the odds of occurence of that random yet interconnected-in-disaster sequence of events, and you are left thinking and wondering..rather pondering...

Are all of our little every day actions, seemingly random, seemingly harmless, seemingly run of the mill,and yet so interconnected and jumbled up? Are we, in our supposedly mundane lives, setting in motion various things and events that, while inconsequential now, could lead to profound events later in our lives?

In short, I think the littlest answer is Yes.

Yes, for both the good and bad.

Can we do much to change it? Not really, for, if we were able to predict this far in advance what would/could be the potential outcomes of each and every one of our daily actions, we probably would be God.

Or worse, we would be so damn terrified of our actions that we would even forget to live our daily lives.

About the only thing that we can really control, is the effort...to paraphrase the Bhagavad Gita...
You are here for a reason, to discharge a duty...so...just do your duty, and while at it, do your duty to the best of your abilities.