What are we learning? Well, there's the prosaic manner of the catastrophe. The waves weren't 100ft high and high buildings weren't toppled - instead the water, unaccompanied by momentous music, just kept going when it should have stopped. For once the language of the resulting devastation and chaos - so absurdly over-applied most of the time - was appropriate. When eye-witnesses used the word "literally" it was because they had seen the exact things they were describing.
Beyond the gradually revealed facts, the narratives also are gradually developing.
Why worry - some ask - about global warming, which is only a speculative disaster, when we have the real thing to cope with? Others chorus that - as ever - it's the poor wot gets the flooding, and ain't it all a bleeding shame? Or, why spend money on Iraq when it could be better devoted to relieving tsunami victims in the Indian Ocean? In fact, why worry at all, when natural forces so clearly have dominion still over man?
The Indian Ocean earthquake was the biggest such event since the one that shook Alaska in 1964, creating tsunamis that caused some destruction on the Californian coast. But its destructive impact has been greater than any quake since - 96 years ago yesterday - a tremor, with its epicentre in the Straits of Messina, killed between 80,000-100,000 people on Sicily and in Reggio-Calabria. The catholic poet Alice Meynell wrote a poem entitled Messina 1908 lamenting to the Lord that, "Thou hast crushed Thy tender ones, o'er-thrown/ Thy strong, Thy fair ..." before attributing the subsequent relief effort ("Thy ships by sea, Thy trains by land") to the tenderness of the same deity.
The authorities, whether animated by God or other considerations, rebuilt Messina so that next time many fewer would die. This is the impulse which, in the US - shaken as it is by floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes - has led to a determination to conquer the effects of natural disaster.
The same should be true of the Indian Ocean region. Though it hasn't, in recent history, experienced as many tsunamis as the Pacific region, seismic and volcanic activity has always made an event like this week's entirely feasible. Two of the greatest eruptions in recorded history - Mount Tambora in 1815 and Krakatoa in 1883 - happened there. But, as we all now know, there isn't an early warning system that could have helped save many lives in the countries furthest away from the quake epicentre.
The absence of such a system is not just a function of regional poverty, nor even (as a Today programme presenter somewhat bizarrely appeared to suggest) the fault of the secretary general of the Commonwealth. It is much more a function of risk assessment and distant timescale. There wasn't that much of a risk and it wasn't likely to happen soon.
Proof that this absence of urgency can be quite widespread is furnished by the apparent certainty that one day the volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canaries will erupt, triggering a rock-fall of several hundred billion tonnes and a tsunami that will take out New York. Writing in the New York Times yesterday the author Dennis Smith used the occasion of the Indian Ocean disaster to argue that now was the time to reduce the La Palma mountain in size, "to lessen the impact should it ever slide into Atlantic." "But, who," Smith asked, "will pay for such a huge reduction of a landmass?" Hmm. What country is New York in?
Similarly one day we will be hit by a gigantic asteroid if we don't work out a way of intercepting them in space. Not soon, maybe (or maybe very soon), but it's going to happen. But when Dubya confided his pre-election desire to restart the US space programme, he was widely laughed at.
In 1969 we went to the moon - and then stopped. In the 60s we dreamed of eradicating diseases, and now we concentrate on chimerical threats from the very science that may save us. Right now in prosperous south-west Germany they are suffering measles outbreaks because the local middle classes have broken the herd immunity by refusing to vaccinate their children. That isn't progress - it's reaction.
Yesterday there was a report in this newspaper that nanotechnology could be exceptionally useful in targeting cancer treatment - treatment that, in some respects, resembles medieval quackery in its hit-and-miss application. Yet there are those who argue hard against the new technology, just as others argue against genetic modification or stem cell research - not on the basis of evidence, but out of a fear of unknown "Frankenstein" technologies. Eric Drexler, chairman emeritus of the Foresight Institute in Palo Alto, was one who, in 1986, warned about the need to scrutinise nanotechnology. Now he regrets how his words have been used. "What I did not expect," he told the BBC this year, "was that efforts to quiet concerns over grey goo would lead to false scientific denials of feasible technologies."
In the west too much emotional and political energy is being invested in parochialism or the desire to retreat back to an idealised village life. And this is not just true when it comes to science, but also as applied to improving the planet, and the lives of the people who inhabit it. Many who will have died this week or in the next month or so will have died because they were too ignorant to be able to swim, too poor to be able to live anywhere but on the shore, and lived in places with facilities too basic for them to avoid the diseases that follow in disaster's wake.
This coming year, Gordon Brown told us this week, is "make or break" for development in poorer countries. The chancellor is calling on G8 countries to match Britain's commitment to reach the long-touted, never-achieved target of 0.7% of national income going on aid. He is also taking the initiative on debt reduction.
If past reactions are anything to go by we will react to the government's emphasis on world interdependence in one of two ways. We will either complain that what it is doing is not enough - and then do nothing ourselves. Or we will suggest that there are bigger and more immediate priorities here at home that preclude "gallivanting" around the globe.
This disaster may remind you of the vulnerability of human beings, call into question the existence of God, make you wonder what life is all about. That's fine and understandable. But it could also suggest once again the critical choice that exists between fatalism and activism, between doing little or doing much.
In 1581 there was an earthquake in Northern Italy. A 17-year-old student standing in Pisa cathedral noticed how the tremors affected the lamps hanging in the shaking edifice. That's how Galileo got started.