Katrina Reminds Me Why I Do This

You think the federal government will save you? Like they did for the people of New Orleans, right?

I have been glued to my television, newspapers, online resources--watching helpless as people suffered and died, Americans every one, yet somehow suddenly isolated and unreachable--these pitiable, unsaveable masses set adrift from the nation for days, suffering seemingly without end.
Help comes, too late of course. But what else could they do? How fast could they have possibly responded to such an epic calamity? Thousands dead, a million people homeless...one million Americans suddenly scattered across the nation like refugees...1,000,000...1,000,000...1,000,000....
And this was just one little storm. You ain't seen nothing yet. Global warming is not a joke, the number of named storms in the Atlantic has dramatically increased. They have gone through the alphabet five times since they started naming storms in the 1950s. But four of the five happened in the last decade....
The prospect of more, and quite possibly even worse, storms striking heavily populated areas is a foregone conclusion. It's not "if" it's "when"....
It's a bad situation for Humans...Not simply across the ocean, but right here...We have populated huge swathes of the surface of this planet creating plenty of targets for random yet no less severe meteorological events...

Then suddenly I remember why I do this. This right here, now, the thing with all these words streaming from my consciousness....

Why I write this pathetic Blog, this journal of Space exploration, is no secret: It's time Human Beings to expand into Space.
I am afraid for our survival. As a species we are fragile, so fragile as to be considered constantly in danger of elimination.
One little hiccup--a storm--and thousands die, and this from the most developed nation in the world.

Yellow Stone blows, an errant asteroid or just an ordinary solar event that comes a little too close, and we will suffer in huge numbers, far beyond the capacity of any nation to correct. How would we recover, how could we recover?
Let this remind everyone who reads these words, it is no idle threat. The Solar System is a dangerous place, it is time we tame it, conquer it and claim it as territory for Human Beings. Let's spread our civilization, our knowledge; let our cities gleam from every corner of this system so as to offer protection--some protection for all of us, the children of our descendants perhaps most of all, from the dangers that exist.
Or we too could go the way of the dinosaurs...