A Case For The Future
We all have to tell ourselves a story every morning we wake up, in order to go about our day. You are in constant conversation with yourself almost every second of the day. Right now that voice is reading this sentence silently in your head. That voice is or seems to be, for the most part, you. Except in the nights when your brain, which now seems to be not just you but multiple other characters and scenarios that fill up your head while you lie sleeping.
While dreaming, our solitary brain is the director, producer, actor, art director, writer and the audience all wrapped into one.
In your dreams, you talk to other people who seem to be completely different individuals with their own mind, their own brains. All this, a part of an elaborate ruse created by your mind. That one single entity capable of storing around 2.5 petabytes or even more of information about the world around you. That is the same amount of information as watching and memorizing everything on a television channel for 300 years continuously. I hate television.
Dreams are perhaps the strangest part of our existence. Apart from our existence itself, which just happens to happen on a tiny planet created about 4.5 billion years ago in the vastness of space that we label as the Universe, which was created around 14 billion years ago. Mind you, the universe doesn’t call itself as ‘the universe’. It is a label we have created. Just like we created the word ‘label’ and the word ‘word’. What a strange and wonderful World we live in!
There is evidence that perhaps humans are the only species that can wonder and muse about this world. If so, how incredibly wonderful it is that we can. We see the birds dance and the birds see us dancing as well. The images of starlings dancing above a city correspond so starkly to images of schools of fish swimming under the sea. Though the expression ‘under the sea’ is strange in the way that under the seabed we actually find earth’s inner crust, then some more solid layers and then a molten core. Volcanoes sprout up like pimples and sores on Earth’s skinny surface spouting out hot lava instead of pus.
The theory of Earth itself being a huge organism (the Gaia Hypothesis) is perhaps too much science fiction (read Stanislaw Lem’s ‘Solaris’ or watch it’s movie adaptation by Tarkovsky), it nevertheless merits a profound thought in the scheme of the Universe being an underbelly of the billions of living and perhaps breathing, in their own way, organisms that we call stars, planets and galaxies.
Earth being one of the colorful and busy ones, a little loud sphere carrying some wonderful children some of whom are now luckily able to hypothesize and ponder on the meaning of their own existence. Okay, that is science fiction. I must admit that I prefer this kind of sci-fi over the umpteen books we use to talk to “Gods” (perhaps one of our greatest created labels yet, definitely top 5) and to easily justify killing other humans. Myths and stories are a great human invention and I’m all for them. Our mind creates one for us every night.
Unfortunately, we haven’t completely updated our myths in the light of all the information that we do know as facts, which has led to some baffling rituals still being practiced by millions of us that defy all facts, logic and by any measure of sanity do not belong to the present age.
The astronauts who spend some time in the space have been registered as undergoing something called The Overview Effect. Basically, once you see the Earth from up there, you are changed in some way forever. You recognize that we are all one big family on Earth and experience other sentimental feelings that would make uber-nationalists gag at the idea of a kind of peace that could perhaps theoretically be achieved once all the humans on the Earth undergo ‘The Overview Effect’.
In a strange way, there are communities over the World and global businesses that incorporate a feeling of oneness across the seas albeit unknowingly. May it be a corporate entity created solely for the purpose of capitalism, yet when humans are involved they cannot be, fortunately, torn apart from human feelings. Inter-continental marriages are not the norm yet but there are some anomalous, tiny signs of beginnings. Increasingly there are more humans born with such wonderfully mixed gene pool, whom you’d be hard-pressed to identify and place into a known race/country bracket. If ever such a people overtake as majority, who knows, we might have a very different looking and thinking World ahead of us.
You might be reading this on a device assembled in China, made from some parts that are sourced from Africa, designed and marketed by a company in the Western world and made possible due to the internet developed in the West which of course requires radio communications invented by another set of humans from Asia and Europe, which in turn was made possible by the discovery and invention of usable electricity back in the day by famous scientists, not to forget the all important concepts of 1s and 0s and the number system invented by the Eastern Asian mathematicians thousands of years ago that forms the basis of mathematics and computing in every single device we use. Take a moment to ponder how much of your life is influenced day to day by objects, technologies or even food that were created/discovered by humans in completely different parts of the World over the period of human history. Look around your desk, room, surroundings and just google the origins of things you find around you.
A typical Indian samosa is created with ingredients from Western South America (Potato, Chili), area around Turkey and Ethiopia (Wheat, peas) and Central Asia (Onion, spices). This simple mouth-watering dish has a wider and longer geographical history than some of the nations in the present day.
We might like to attach our identities firmly to the country we are born in and yet how much of our lives are influenced and made better thanks to the people all over the planet spread apart thousands of miles across the breadths of the continents over hundreds of countries. It is a humbling thought. Carl Sagan famously said “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
Just think how different the map of the World looked a few 100 years ago to now. Again, the age of country nations is perhaps an intermediate age in the very short history of homo sapiens, we are only about 200,000-year-old. Knowing the fact that these lines have only been drawn on the maps recently and they might undergo changes or permanent erasure perhaps a few hundred thousand years from now, is somewhat comforting. If more humans attach their identities not to one particular area of the land but to all of the Earth instead, a variety of conflicts could be eliminated.
The pandemic being a global catastrophe underlines this connection in a tragic way. Humans, divided by imaginary lines on the map, united by a very real virus. Perhaps there are better lessons to be learnt about our unity and responsibility as people of a planet rather than just nations.
The mRNA vaccine developed by Turkish immigrants living in Germany will be used by people all around the World. Our lives would be saved due to humans of the World and not just by those of our country. The purpose of country states and nationalism is routinely defeated by scientists, doctors and researchers who collaborate across continents creating technology and medicines that end up being the actual life-savers of humankind. Anti-immigrant sentiment maybe on the rise over the World until we zoom out a little and realize that the Earth has been here before humans and a band of early sapiens immigrated all over the World from the jungles and plains of Africa. We cannot truly own a piece of land except for an infinitesimal picosecond in the history of the World. We belong to the land; the land does not belong to us.
Human lives being short in span creates the issue of our vision being similarly short-sighted too. We tend to be majorly concerned with short term happiness and interests. We are okay with oppression and violence and pollution and non-recyclable plastic if it suits the short-term goals, not realizing how naïve and inhuman it actually is for our own selves. Covid-19 is responsible for around 2 million deaths over the World within a year. Each year on average half a million humans are killed by other humans over the World. It takes humans around 4 years to kill as many people as the virus did. Viruses needn’t bother us much going by those stats.
Climate change is another global catastrophe showing it’s effects everywhere and the time to act has been running out faster than we think. Rest assured climate change won’t hurt Earth as a planet much. It will definitely hurt us and the atmosphere we need, the water we drink and the air we breathe.
Cutting down more trees and producing more plastic won’t impact the planet in the long run. It will impact us. It will impact all life on the planet. It will definitely ensure that the humans are wiped out. That there are no starlings flying above the cities or schools of fish under the sea. The Earth shall continue spinning in the void like before. It has seen the age of dinosaurs who lasted on the planet for 165 million years. We have been here for less than a fraction of that time.
However, the picture is not all bleak. A case can yet be made for the future if we realize that the graph of overall violence over the years has gradually gone down albeit ours is still far away from being a safe and peaceful World. Threats from nature might loom over us but the bigger threats to us being our own selves, we must think in kinder and simpler terms towards our fellow humans.
To hold back our diverse religions and prop up our united humanity. To antagonize less and empathize more. To being offended less and impressed more. To destroy less and create more. To more free art and lesser silencing. To more facts and lesser harmful fiction. To hoping more and hurting less. To preserve our past but focus about preserving our future more. To assume less and think more. To silencing voices less and question more. To debunk violent and harmful belief systems and value scientific thinking and rationale. To lesser nationalism and more humanism. To live and let live.
So before I’m accused of being another sentimental dreamer, I must remind you again that after all, I’m not the only one. Or at least, that is the story I tell myself every day when I wake up.
What story do you tell yourself?
Image Credits -
1- https://twitter.com/kurz_gesagt/status/1039861056192040965
2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#/media/File:CMB_Timeline300_no_WMAP.jpg
3- https://www.fromthegrapevine.com/nature/starlings-create-breathtaking-formations-over-israeli-valley
6- https://nautil.us/issue/17/big-bangs/the-greatest-animal-war
