Recollections of a journey, our past, present and future…
"Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." - Churchill
The connectivity of the globe has turned our planet into a huge ‘living room neighborhood.’ It has been a relatively quick journey of just more than a century since we were able to conquer distance, albeit with lot of back and forth. Last two decades are about global togetherness in terrestrial space; our village has shaped up so fast that our minds are not able to cope with new realities of our huge village. Pleasures as well as pains of the entire world have become our own. We see them live and are a part of them. We tend to learn about disasters and their gory details far more minutely than we ever had before. Even if we are not interested, our global networks make sure that we are stuffed with pleasures and miseries of far beyond. We don’t, due to our ingrained curiosity, mind watching and hearing about the gloom of others or the lives of the rich and famous. Prying in the lives of the rich and famous that includes Jackson trials and OJ Simpson is our past time. We know first hand what happens inside the Neverland ranch. With the information glut of perverted pleasure comes the full-blown stories of tragedies too.
We live in a complex environment that we can control; what we cannot is our destiny. The planet we live on is prone to disasters big and small, and extinction is an integral part of our planet’s behavior. Recent analysis of South African rocks revealed that rivers suddenly became clogged with sediments 251 million years ago, indicating Earth's worst mass extinction, wiped out many trees and other plants that held soil in place. It is believed a huge comet or asteroid walloped Earth to cause the mass die-off at the end of the Permian Period and dawn of the Triassic. God between 200 million to 65 million years ago looked as if He was busy with extinction; these were the years of massive change as life forms evolved one after the other and gave way to better life forms as a part of natural selection of genes. God was not unhappy with the reptiles living then nor was He punishing a Tyrannosaurus Rex for ripping the neck of a Diplodocus Carnegiei.
Much as we enjoy this connectivity, let’s for a moment look back and see how our journey to this point has been made; it is a journey in which the inventors and people who broke the status quo were ridiculed and considered silly. This connectivity has come through innovative landscape of minds, for which Socrates had to drink hemlock. Those lessons of ‘questioning minds’ and ‘freewill’ led to modern developments like telegraph, airplanes and electricity and automated computations or artificial limited intelligence. It seems like an arbitrary treatment of a 5000-year-old journey, but I would definitely try to enclose it in a small box.
Knowing oneself is the first lecture of utmost insight. Once our consciousness started appreciating time, the journey of last 5000 years has been on an accelerated time scale of first seasons, then day, and now nano-seconds not on a cosmic time scale. Time can beat at different rates throughout the universe, depending on how fast one moved. A dinosaur had no idea of time, but a self-conscious mind has an idea of time and its movement. For both, the time moved at a different speed; for a dinosaur, time really never moved; for a Neanderthal man, the perception of time was rudimentary; for our ‘hominid history,’ it is narrated in millions of years; and our ‘modern history’ is narrated in decades.
On all these fronts of progress, we have been unable to grasp the potential that these ideas and inventions offered us. The cycle of progress has been based on rejection of earlier entrenched ideas; no idea has ever been permanent in nature. Copernicus’s theory of a universe with the sun at its center rejected Aristotle and Ptolemy's view of the universe. Not that the latter’s contributions were not good enough, but taking knowledge from the level of horoscopes to the science of astronomy, new ideas junked the old. The ‘Little Commentary’ of Copernicus is a fascinating document. It contains seven axioms; its notable defenders included Kepler and Galileo while theoretical evidence for the Copernican theory was provided by Newton's theory of universal gravitation around 150 years. Newton suffered the same fate at the hands of Einstein who in 1905 was a 26-year-old family man stuck in a dead-end job at a Swiss patent office. He depicted the incompatibility of Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell's equations, the two pillars of physics. One or the other was wrong. Whichever theory proved to be correct, the final resolution required a vast reorganization of all of physics He finally tapped into "God's thoughts." Einstein's Big Idea" deftly interweaved theories of scientists like Michael Faraday who laid the groundwork for the modern concept of energy, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier who said that total mass is never lost, James Clerk Maxwell, who in the late 19th century showed that light is an electromagnetic wave and Emilie du Chatelet, a mathematical genius and lover to the French philosopher Voltaire, who showed that the velocity of an object must be squared when calculating its total energy. Einstein’s answer was simple and elegant: time can beat at different rates throughout the universe, depending on how fast you moved. Interchangeability of mass and energy opened new frontiers of knowledge that helped our globe to become a village.
Despite reaching this level of connectivity, we remained skeptics and made dreadful prophecies. On’ Telegraphy’ the thing that brought the death of distance, when Samuel F. B. Morse offered to sell his telegraph to the U.S. government for $100,000, the Postmaster General rejected the offer on the basis that "...the operation of the telegraph between Washington and Baltimore had not satisfied him under any rate of postage that could be adopted, its revenues could be made equal to its expenditures." Just a week before the successful flight of the Kitty Hawk by the Wright brothers, a comment in the New York Times December 10, 1903, editorial page was that "...We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and the money involved, in further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly... For students and investigators of the Langley type there are more useful employments.” When ‘Railroads and locomotives were being proposed, skeptics argued that ‘any general systems of conveying passengers would answer, to go at a velocity exceeding 10 miles an hour, or thereabouts, is extremely improbable.’
We are inherently skeptical and cynical; we look at things myopically and prefer the darker side to the lighter. It is the inventors and thinkers who break the ice and go for new frontiers. Although sometimes even the inventors have been wrong, like Thomas A. Edison is reported to have said: ”Just as certain as death, [George] Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size." However, cynicism is not the answer to the world or pessimistic forecasts. Limitations to our growth potential help us with new thinking processes and find new frontiers. It is these frontiers that distinguish our self-consciousness from other competing beings in the universe. Self-consciousness is a universal truth and its values will remain the same all over the universe. Any competing alien, if self-conscious, would be trudging along either millions of years ahead of us, or millions of years behind us, but the trajectory remains the same. If ahead of us, that would be far more peaceful and cooperative; if behind us; they would not be scientifically advanced enough to discover us or have the ability to issue wireless signals. We may have to go and find them; we may alone if the pace of development is lower, and if probability of that ideal mix that led to the development of the first single cell may not exist on any other 200 billion stars in the outback of our galaxy. The savage master race alien is a possibility if they are within the same thousand years of development, then may be their consciousness retained the insatiability and narcissism of humans.
With or without Gods, the risk of tragedies is high. We live in treacherous surroundings; we are bombarded with notions of threats from asteroids every day, global warming or endemic virus that can possibly eliminate us. However, we cannot live in an overkill state of preparedness. Even when the risks are “relatively low,” we the ‘doubters’ make up numbers, killing hundreds of millions of people in the next few years justifying precautions and preparedness. Last week's announcement that the 1918 influenza pandemic was caused by a virus that jumped from birds to humans has increased fears that another avian flu crisis might be looming. As we stare into future, we worry about ‘Global Epidemic,’ the most recent is the Avian Flu, the last one was the Mad cow disease. We forget that in our infancy we have conquered something as ugly as plague without the fifth generation antibiotics; we survived as a race even after such epidemics when there was no cure for leprosy or plague. The moment the World Health Organization confirmed Indonesia's fifth human case of avian influenza after a 21-year-old man in Lampung province in Sumatra tested positive for the virus, a man who was in direct contact with bird breeding, WHO’s Nabarro floated that scary 150 million number on September 29 as his upper-end estimate of how many a 1918-like H5N1 pandemic might kill, with 5 million as his lower-end estimate for a pandemic more like the mild ones of 1957 and 1968.
Preparing is one thing, exaggeration is totally another. Risk-talkers should not have vested interests; there are other kinds of mortalities that are pressing and can be addressed with proper distribution of drugs that are available. Aids in sub-Saharan Africa needs more drugs, famine in general needs more food and better distribution. Overstatement of facts, fiction of numbers and ideas have become part of our daily routine. We live in fear of the unknown; we create our own demons in our heads. At the turn of this millennium, the talk was all about Y2K and Nostradamus' apocalyptic prophecies. Nothing came to fore, the turn to the new millennium happened very serenely; no nuclear reactors clogged, no planes dropped from the skies, but preparations were made for the worst.
Risk pundits tend to overstate a threat in order to urge people to take protective action. It is sometimes the luxury of a full stomach and good diversion from those who have to fill time in the emptiness of nothingness in their lives. The biggest polluter in the world is ‘poverty.’ Absolute poverty and lack of food kills more people every day than green gas emissions. Greenpeace claims that a global warming catastrophe is just around the corner to get us focused seriously on greenhouse gases. This is a planet littered with bones of extinct species showing us that such catastrophes on Earth happen to individual species on a routine basis. Without human race releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide, which is minuscule in proportion to the gases and energy released in one earthquake! Earth itself releases vast amounts of methane into the environment on which we have no control. Researchers have uncovered new evidence of a sudden, fatal dose of global warming 180 million years ago during the time of the dinosaurs. The methane came from a gas hydrate, a frozen mixture of water and methane found in huge quantities on the seabed. This hydrate suddenly melted, allowing the methane to escape. It is possible that the rate at which we are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere now may be far lower than the rate at which earth crust spews out methane for its own survival!
Preparedness isn’t about things that are already happening. And preparedness is only rarely about things that are sure to happen. Preparedness is mostly about things that might — or might not — happen. "When the time for action comes, the time for preparation has passed." But on earth where we have a history of billions of years of life conquering death, order conquering chaos, our theoretical level of preparedness against petty things is nothing but wasting time. May be we can save ourselves from being fried by the sun by our ability to change the orbital course, we may be able to change the course of an incoming asteroid, we may have the technology, but these are challenges that made life extinct before and not some obscure over population or endemic.
A newly presented mathematical argument suggests that the birth of Homo sapiens was guided by a catastrophic asteroid or comet impacts, which created climate conditions that competing species, frankly, couldn't handle. It also holds that our human ancestors avoided early elimination by the statistical skin of their rotting teeth. Within the last three to five million years, after human and other ape lineages diverged from the hominid stem-line, the human line produced a variety of human species. According to the Toba catastrophe theory, a massive volcanic eruption changed the course of human history by severely reducing the human population (called a 'bottleneck'). Around 75,000 years ago the Toba caldera in Indonesia erupted with a force three thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helens. According to Ambrose, this led to a decrease in the average global temperatures by 3 to 3.5 degrees Celsius for several years. This massive environmental change is believed to have created population bottlenecks in the various human species that existed at the time; this in turn accelerated differentiation of the isolated human populations, eventually leading to the end of all the other human species except for the branch that became modern humans (see volcanic winter). A 4 to 8 mile wide asteroid or comet, roughly the same size as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, did even worse damage 250 million years ago. The worries of catastrophic Climate Change totally ignore the fact that cycles of extinction has been part and parcel of this universe. . We know that we're here thanks to an asteroid, because if an asteroid had not hit the world about 65 million years ago the dinosaurs would still be ruling our planet The impact released an amount of energy that was basically about 1 million times the largest earthquake recorded during the last century. The jolt roused volcanoes, which buried huge areas in lava and sent up ash to join the dust from the explosion to plunge the world into centuries of unnatural dark and cold and wiped out 90% of all organisms.
It appears that ‘God’ has assigned its attributes of ‘omni-potent and omni-present’ to this inquisitive generation of mankind. It sounds blasphemous, however, the greatest trait that was celestial was that only God could have witnessed events at one time all over the universe. Today this is in the grasp of any commoner who has access to TV, let alone owns a TV. We are all mini-Gods of sorts, with sound and sights that gape across the universe. We want to take the pleasure of knowing what is happening live on Golf courses around the world, or in the football stadiums. But this propinquity has also brought the misfortunes of our global village in our living areas. It is not that ‘disasters’ have increased; rather, it is that we know too much about them as they happen, as they unfold. We are part of a ‘new information’ overflow; we are citizens of a globe which has a neighborhood that extends from Sydney to LA. We live in a world that has physical boundaries of nations but no boundaries of mind. These dichotomies where we are nationally separate, but humanly one, result into our prejudices. This coming together is a new frontier; our limitations do not allow us to cross this frontier. But traverse we will. No knowledge is provincial or regional today. As celebrity news sell, so do news of human tragedy. Anything that sells has a market. If we can be peeping toms in the lives of others, it is inevitable and by default that we will also be guinea pigs in the hands of media when it comes to reporting tragedy.
Doomsday prophecy forecasters worry about Genetic Engineering as the possible cause for extinction, or a dangerous pattern of Planetary Alignment or even an Asteroid Strike, or an Alien Invasion. Forecasters dread that by 2020 computing power equal to human mind will cost about $1,000, in the next twenty years it is even more frightening with all the brainpower available for $1,000. Many, including the Wired Cassandra, Bill Joy, (the main contributor to the non-Microsoft operating systems world), see this as likely to lead to human extinction.
At present, we know that there are about 1,000 asteroids roughly larger than a half mile (1 kilometer) in diameter whose orbits cross Earth's. These are large enough to inflict serious global consequences in a collision. Furthermore, upwards of 250,000 smaller space rocks are out there too. They are considered more on the city-buster side of terror from the sky. According to the study, we are alive due to cosmic luck rather than our genetic makeup. Populations of hominids and early modern humans were extremely small. "Had any of these impacts occurred in the proximity of these population groups, we might also have gone the way of the dinosaurs.
According to Red Cross, 901,177 had died in natural disasters from 1995 to 2004, compared with 643,418 in the previous decade. In a transparent world of today, it looks like things have really gone bad. But the closed regime of the communist China in July 27, 1976 officially declared 255,000 people killed in a 7.5 Richter scale earthquake in Tangshan, however, estimated death toll was as high as 655,000. The figures of famine and other natural disasters were hardly ever reported under the communist regimes. The openness of the world has increased information that is helpful to evaluate tragedy to the right scale and prepare responses accordingly. We worry about ‘Nuclear disaster / World War III’ – that is one worry which is self-created and one impending disaster we need to work on to avoid through efforts of reconciliation and understanding. The last decade has seen a massive decommissioning of nukes between US/USSR since the inception of nukes. Yes, few more nations now have nukes, but in numbers and in responsibility, the nations of the world take weapons of mass destruction far too seriously. The myth of ‘Overpopulation’ has been with us since Malthusian age. Today we have crossed the threshold of malnutrition; we die not because of lack of food but because of lack of distribution and our greed to maintain price stability at the cost of human lives. We will burn but we will not share; so the cause for worry is our self-destructive knack to survive as the fittest and not as a beneficial.
Tsunami is not something new, neither are hurricanes nor earthquakes. God is not sitting up there to punish us; rather nature is most benevolent and has the highest of recuperative capabilities, our own immune system is a primary example. Earth, a living planet, cannot be ruthless to its inhabitants. In the North Atlantic Ocean, the Storegga Slides were a major series of sudden underwater land movements over the course of tens of thousands of years, which caused tsunamis and mega tsunamis across a wide area. Some time between 1650 BC and 1600 BC (still debated), the volcanic Greek island Santorini erupted, causing a 100 m to 150 m high tsunami that devastated the north coast of Crete, 70 km (45 miles) away, and would certainly have wiped out the Minoan civilization along Crete's northern shore. Santorini is regarded as the most likely source for Plato's literary parable of Atlantis. On February 22, 1491, a tsunami more than 10 times as great as the Sumatra one almost certainly hit Australian shores, rising at its peak to 130m above sea level. That event was probably caused by a comet or meteor smashing into the ocean, but an equally devastating flood could happen at any time, caused by an earthquake on a geological fault running down the west coast of New Zealand's South Island. In recent years we had a Tsunami around Lisbon, Portugal-1883, Krakatoa explosive eruption 1929, Newfoundland tsunami 1946, Pacific tsunami 1960, Chilean tsunami 1979 and Tumaco tsunami. It is our misfortune that we don’t know about these natural upheavals and therefore present God as the instigator of Tsunamis to wreak disaster on poor transgressing humans!
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, known by the scientific community as the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, was an undersea earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC (07:58:53 local time) on December 26, 2004. The tsunami generated by the earthquake killed approximately 275,000 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in modern history. The disaster is also known as the Boxing Day Tsunami. The India Plate is part of the great Indo-Australian Plate, which underlies the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal, and is drifting northeast at an average of 6 cm/a (2 inches per year). The India Plate meets the Australasian Plate (which is considered a portion of the great Eurasian Plate) at the Sunda Trench. The same movement of Indian plate under the Eurasian plate caused the recent Pakistani earthquakes. Other larger megathrust earthquakes occurred in 1868 (Peru, Nazca Plate and South American Plate); 1827 (Colombia, Nazca Plate and South American Plate); 1812 (Venezuela, Caribbean Plate and South American Plate) and 1700 (Cascadia Earthquake, western US and Canada, Juan de Fuca Plate and North American Plate). These are all believed to have been greater than magnitude 9, but no accurate measurements were available in those days. Each of these megathrust earthquakes also spawned tsunamis (in the Pacific Ocean), but the death toll from these was significantly lower; a few thousand for the worst one, probably because of the lower population density along the coasts near affected areas and the much greater distances to more populated coasts.
End of human race theories abound. Disasters seem to be never-ending, from Sumatran Tsunami to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the unusual rains in India and now the South Asian earthquake that has wiped out entire generations, we rightfully ask: are we reaching to an end of an era of tranquil nature we are acquainted with? Or have our excesses finally taken enough toll on our planet? Are these early signs of a dismal earth demonstrating pangs of pains and screaming through these hurricanes, earthquakes and Tsunamis, “Enough!”?
When tragedies envelop us we feel as if the world is coming apart, actually it is not! The rage of Gods and superstitions become our favorite slogan; we reason our calamities on our transgressions from strictures of deity. After Earth's heavings subside, it is self-flagellation and self-condemnation that takes over; it is said it is the price of our wrong doings, but it is not. These self-delusions should not reverberate in people's minds. Winchester says that after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake killed 60,000, "Priests roved around the ruins, selecting at random those they believed guilty of heresy and thus to blame for annoying the Divine, who in turn had ordered up the disaster. The priests had them hanged on the spot." The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in what is now Indonesia fueled the growth of an extremist strain of Islam, bent on purging society of impurities displeasing to God. That strain has twice recently been heard from in Bali. San Francisco's 1906 disaster prompted the explosive growth of a Pentecostal movement based in Los Angeles, a movement then embryonic, but now mighty. Yet when A.P. Hotaling's whiskey warehouse survived San Francisco's post-quake inferno, a wit wondered: If, as some say, God spanked the town. For being over frisky, why did He burn the churches down and save Hotaling's whiskey? No one is out there to punish us. We live in a very beneficent environment. It is run by natural postulates that are uniform.” To clear up dogma and bigotry we need to depend on science as Adam Smith affirmed, “Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.” If we understand the phenomena that lead to disasters, we will relax and be less cynical.
Looking at our disasters wrongly means sometime we lose our hopes and our future! Future of our children is built on optimism and anticipation.
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