Acceptance, not complacency
Determinism tells us that whenever an event happens, it had to happen given what came before it. Physics adds that we ourselves, and much else that we value, almost certainly wouldn’t have existed if the event hadn’t happened. (I should stop saying “almost,” because the probability of our existing in the absence of the event is unimaginably close to zero.)
So if we regard our existing as better than our never existing, we must accept whatever happens as the price. But I can’t emphasize too strongly: We must accept it after it happens, not in advance! The deadly 2004 tsunami was, we discovered, part of the price to be paid for the existence of the human species. Yet nothing about that discovery justifies complacency in the face of current or future risks. Nor does it justify ignoring whatever lessons we can learn from disasters, such as building better warning systems for coastlines.
Even if the past necessitates that we won’t learn our lesson from some bad experience, we know inductively that we’re more likely to learn that lesson if we try to learn it than if we don’t. We also know that nothing magical exists to rescue us if we give up or to thwart us if we try. Knowing all this, we ought to try.
