Heat pollution and Earthquakes – Why the world needs to have broader conversations about climate change

According to NASA website, “Global warming is the long-term heating of Earth’s surface observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900) due to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere.”

NASA’s definition of global warming is misleading for a very specific reason. It is placing the primary responsibility of global warming on fossil fuel burning. While it is true that releasing trapped carbon in fossils back into the atmosphere has led to the greenhouse effect and increase in Earth’s surface temperature, global warming has to be understood from a much larger perspective.

From the smallest microorganisms to the blue whales, every living being generates and emits heat from its body. We consume food, break it down for providing us energy and release that energy as heat into our surroundings when we do our activities. In order to understand Earth’s surface temperature, we have to first select areas in all geographic locations, measure heat generated by every organism except humans in those areas and extrapolate the results to find out the total heat generated by all animals except humans over a specific period of time. There is a good reason to exclude humans from this exercise.

Except the animals that live in packs, all other animals try to keep distance from their own kind and from other animals except during breeding time. Being territorial about food is one reason and the other reason is, as population density increases, heat released from their bodies become amplified. Understanding body heat is easy. In a room cooled by A/c, the room will be moderately cold when there are more number of people and as more people leave the room the remaining people will start feeling colder. Also, greater population density results in faster spreading of diseases. Predator-prey relationships and diseases are two major ways how nature enforces population control on animals. So measuring the population of each animal and the amount of heat released from the body of each animal would give a good account of how much heat animals contribute towards Earth’s surface temperature. This is another reason why population control in nature is important because population control will ensure heat released from the body of animals will not significantly add to Earth’s surface temperature.

We have not only broken all laws of nature we have done lot more things that are mind boggling and incomprehensible. Earth is 70% water and 30% land of which 10-15% land is habitable. 8 billion and growing human population is jostling to live in this small percentage of land. Our perpetually increasing population density is amplifying all our body heat and to add to this, any disease could manifest into an epidemic and pandemic in no time. But it is not just our body heat that is contributing to Earth’s surface temperature. Every single creation of ours, from the smallest light bulbs to mobile phones to the largest aircrafts and rockets are burning fuel and generating heat. We are not just polluting Earth with heat generated from carbon emission, we are also creating heat from sound, light, breeding different types of cattle and poultry for our dietary needs and many more types of pollution and every type of pollution is generating copious amounts of heat all of which adds to Earth’s surface temperature. Simply put, the most significant and largest pollutant we are creating is heat.

To add to all of this, we are cutting down trees and destroying forests. Trees absorb harmful rays from the Sun and when they are gone, those harmful rays also end up heating Earth. So there are two ways in which Earth is getting heated now. Earth is getting bombarded by more harmful rays from the Sun and by the increase in Earth’s surface temperature and we are contributing significantly in both.

When we speak about climate change we have to take all of these into account. In our rich history, there is a great example of climate change if our population decreased suddenly and consequently, forest grows back. The Spanish Inquisition in the Americas in the 16th century eradicated 90% of the local population due to wars, famines and epidemics and forests grew back in the millions of hectares of human settlement areas. Research points to a global temperature drop in the 17th century which adversely affected Europe resulting in famine and epidemics and this is being correlated with what had happened in the Americas a century earlier.

All conversations about climate change largely revolve around carbon emission and the need for carbon neutrality. This is not just a very narrow way of looking at global warming but also a misleading one as well. Our exploding population and everything we are creating are all adding to global warming. Population control is no longer the solution. If human species has to survive, human depopulation is the only way. Most of us will have to die for some of us to survive. Otherwise, receding forests and increasing human population will increase Earth’s temperature to a point where Earth will become uninhabitable. But, long before it goes that bad, something else will happen. There is a natural disaster that will happen if Earth gets heated up like it is getting now – Earthquakes. Oceans when heated up will cause underwater earthquakes resulting in tsunami. There are ancient tribes that believe the world has been destroyed completely 3 times in the past and the 4th one is imminent which will be caused by cataclysmic earthquakes.

We need broader conversations about climate change caused by all the heat created by us and the consequences leading to global awareness programs with the clear message that Earth is already overloaded with us and can take no more of us. Without this, all conversations are useless.

Concerns about COVID testing and vaccines

Its been a year and a half since the pandemic began and ironically, information about the COVID-19 virus, the tests done to identify infected people and the vaccines is becoming more hazy and confusing with time. First, about the virus. There is a whole lot of noise and fear being driven into people through the media about the virus mutating and taking more deadlier forms. As a contagious virus spreads it does mutate and this is not new to the COVID-19 virus. The fear is being amplified with the information that the vaccine currently rolled out will not be effective against the new mutated forms of the virus and more doses of vaccine will be required. A virus, no matter how many times it mutates will have a specific genetic marker. Coronavirus is a family of viruses that includes the COVID-19 virus. They all have the same genetic marker which is why they are grouped under the coronavirus family. All of them cause respiratory diseases starting from common cold. If the genetic marker also changes during mutation then it will become an entirely new virus. Vaccines are developed specifically using these markers so logically it makes no sense in the claim that currently vaccinated people are vulnerable to mutated versions of the virus. Before getting into the testing part, it is important to understand some basics of nature and human anatomy. Our body is not built in a way to prevent microorganisms from entering it. Rather, it allows entry so that the immune system can keep getting more information, evolve and become more robust in protecting us. This is evolutionary and is the same in all animals. The analogy to this can be seen in the antivirus systems we have created to protect our computers. Even computer viruses have specific markers like the genetic markers viruses in nature have. The first antivirus software was created by collecting all the prevalent computer viruses and finding out their markers. Antivirus software have to be updated daily with the information of existing viruses and markers of new viruses. What we do not have in nature is the concept of firewall which prevents all information from entering and exiting a computer and can be fine tuned to allow only certain information to pass through. So when a microorganism enters our body, the immune system immediately goes into alert mode. Depending on how adversely the organism can affect us which we call virulence in the case of viruses, the body signals in the form of fever to indicate that the immune system is at work. There is no need to take tablets for fever. We take paracetamol tablets so that we can move around. When the same happens to animals, they immediately isolate themselves because it is considered by default in nature that any disease could potentially become contagious. The immune system works entirely using blood and the body directs a major part of blood in fighting the organism. So it is important to not burden our body with digestion of food which also requires a large quantity of blood. This is why animals stop eating when they are sick. It is also important to keep ourselves protected but at the same time we get enough sunlight and air. We are being told to do all these now if we are infected with the COVID-19 virus when we should have been doing these every time we fall sick. Most of the time, we fall sick because of seasonal changes. As our body adapts to changes in our environment we become more prone to be attacked by microorganisms. This is why there is autumn between the transition from summer to winter and spring between the transition from winter to summer. But in tropical regions, there is no winter season instead those regions have rainy season.  There is no autumn and spring seasons either. Rains continue for 6 months and as rain decreases, summer slowly starts. These climatic differences in different parts of the world has tremendous impact on people’s health. Most of north India has entered into summer season which will peak in June whereas summer peaks in April-May in south India and starts moving towards monsoon by June. Entire country is transitioning with climate changes now and there will obviously be spike in diseases. I have been wondering what the COVID-19 lab tests are all about and what exactly are they checking for to identify if someone is COVID +ve. Turns out the symptoms are fever, headache and sore throat. These are the symptoms of common cold and flu which affects large number of people during periods of above mentioned climate changes. There are no COVID specific symptoms and hence no COVID specific tests.  I was initially under the impression that the differentiator for COVID-19 virus would be respiratory issues when hospitals in Delhi got inundated with people for testing last year and Delhi government had to ask people to isolate themselves for flu like symptoms and only get themselves tested if they lose their sense of smell. But it seems that all viruses in the coronavirus family can potentially cause respiratory issues. The virus passes through our nostrils and gets lodged in the wind pipe. If a weak immune system is not able to eliminate the virus it will eventually travel into the lungs. Any microorganism that enters an internal organ can cause serious and life threatening situations. In my neighborhood a family had common flu and cold. They isolated themselves and informed the government health center. People came from hospital, tested them and marked them as COVID +ve. They recovered within a week’s time. Everyone who has cold and flu symptoms are probably getting marked as COVID +ve which is why we are seeing huge spike in the number of infected people and high recovery rate. The numbers will reduce considerably if only people with cold and flu symptoms and respiratory issues are tagged as COVID +ve. Even more bizarre is the case with asymptomatic cases. Just because one person came into contact with another who was identified as COVID +ve, that person need not be asked to isolate without showing any COVID specific symptoms. Even if the virus has entered that person’s body, there is no way to check if the person’s immune system has developed antibodies for the virus. Antibody testing cannot be completely relied upon. Showing symptoms of fever and cold after a few days could also be because of a common cold infection or another health issue and not necessarily because of COVID infection. Because people have different immunity levels, the effect of a virus could be vastly different between people. Now to the COVID vaccines. First question is, if pharma companies could take so much effort and come up with vaccines in a year’s time, why not use technology to create masks which will prevent the virus from passing from one person to another? Simply because there is way too much money to be made with vaccines. None of the vaccines for any diseases does anything spectacular. Vaccines are now made by stripping out the genetic markers of the viruses from their DNA. Injecting the genetic marker into the body will apparently help the immune system in understanding the genetic code of the virus and build immunity for it without having to dissect the entire virus to understand its genetic code. What is weird though is the instruction to continue staying at home, using hand sanitizers and maintaining social distancing even after COVID vaccination. We have taken vaccinations in the past and used to have body pain and fever for a day or two after which we used to resume our normal lives. Scientists don’t yet know if we can still transmit the virus to others after we have been vaccinated. Scientists cannot simply ask people to do things when they themselves are not sure about what they are asking for. Yes, this is a contagious virus but with more than 99% recovery rate. What they are asking for would have been understandable if it was similar to small pox virus. So if vaccination is just a training program for our immune system to understand and fight a new microorganism why are we being given two vaccination shots and possibly more in the future? From the recovery rate it is obvious that COVID-19 is a very mild virus when compared to the small pox virus, yet we have all had only one vaccination dose for small pox. It is a well known fact that the current vaccines are not adequately tested. Phase-3 trials have not been satisfactorily completed. We are a population of over 7 billion and sampling size for testing the vaccines was in 100s or a few 1000s. Strength of immune system and their response to diseases varies widely from person to person. A 2nd and 3rd dose will reinforce immune response is what they are claiming based on testing the vaccine on a very minor part of the population. This is very abstract and there is no way to confirm their observation after rolling out the vaccines for large scale vaccination. There is no clarity on the time duration between 2 doses of the vaccines and it is being changed randomly now. Moreover, increasing cases of mortality after the first and both shots of the COVID vaccines are getting reported which included a well known south Indian film actor. There are more such deaths reported by individuals on Twitter which won’t appear on mainstream media. There are also several reports of serious side effects of vaccines getting reported from European countries. Did those people die purely because of COVID virus or did they have comorbidities? Did they get infected by the virus externally after vaccination? This means the vaccine is playing a part in reducing our immune prowess. Or did the genetic marker introduced into their body through the vaccine grow into a full virus and overwhelm their immune system? Both scenarios are equally terrifying. Even more scary is the fact that vaccine manufacturers are not able to say if there will be long term adverse effects of the vaccines on us. In the light of so much information, it is my responsibility to ask questions about the virus and the efficacy of the vaccines. My purpose of writing this is to stop all the panic that is going on now and make people understand to go to hospitals only when the viral infection persists for some days and they start developing respiratory issues. We are being told to vaccinate in a way that our immune system is incapable of eliminating the COVID virus on its own. As the recovery rate shows, that is clearly not the case.  I believe current COVID vaccines are less effective and more detrimental to our health now. I am not against vaccination but my question is why vaccine for a viral infection with more than 99% recovery rate? Isn’t a medicine enough? We treat common cold mostly naturally and with tablets then why vaccine for COVID-19 when both viruses are from the same family of virus with very similar virulence? If vaccines are required for every disease then why haven’t vaccines been developed for common cold and flu yet? It is important for us to avoid forming large crowds, maintain hygiene and social distancing at all times. During yearly migration of birds, they flock together in large numbers and that is when their mortality rate increases due to contagious diseases. We celebrate festivals with massive congregations like Kumbh Mela in India every year in complete ignorance that an epidemic can break out any time in nature without any warnings. The most important issue is with our population size which continues to grow unabated. As population size of any species increases its mortality rate also increases. Humans are the only species that pass on diseases genetically which adds to the possibility of more diseases arising among us. Staying healthy is the key to having a strong immune system. It is the only way to survive in nature that is extremely hostile to all living beings, something we are blissfully ignorant about.

Reasons for India’s COVID part deux – Failed governance, irrational people & complete ignorance about nature

The second wave of COVID-19 pandemic is upon India with greater ferocity. The pandemic started in late 2019, had spread from China to Europe and had just touched the shores of the USA. The Government of India was warned and was well aware of the impending crisis but it dithered in closing down international borders. The result was an epidemic like situation which resulted in harsh lockdown of people and millions suffered in the aftermath with unemployment and hunger.

This time around, the reason for the lockdown is even more ridiculous. Restrictions were eased, life seemed to be getting back to normal and the government even boasted that India had beaten back the virus without any supporting evidence. Festivals were allowed to be organized and state assembly elections were announced by the Election Commission. There was massive congregation for Kumbh Mela festival and huge election rallies in 5 states. It is peak summer across most of India at this time and people are vulnerable to falling sick. People tend to eat less food and sleep less when weather becomes hot which results in reduced immunity. So it is no surprise that COVID-19 has reared up its ugly head again.

Lockdowns are essentially government’s way of saying it is incapable of handling an escalating situation, abdicating responsibility and passing the buck on to the people. In simple terms, diseases are conflicts between higher order and lower order organisms in nature and along with the food chain is how nature keeps the population of every living being under control. Microorganisms are constantly mutating and evolving in nature. A disease of any magnitude could break out any time in nature. We have always been living on this ticking time bomb. Even if the government does not understand this, it is its responsibility to constantly improve and ramp up the health infrastructure of the country. In India, in most of the states, education and health are on the lowest side of the government’s priority list. So will the government be ever prepared for a pandemic? This governance failure is passed on to people and people are made to suffer. Locking people up inside their homes has the detrimental effect of lowering their immunity level and making them vulnerable to more diseases but the government is shortsighted enough to focus on winning a battle now and not being able to see a war coming in the future.

Kerala government is coming up with weird rules as it began a state wide lockdown yesterday. Unlike during the last year’s lockdown, when supermarkets were allowed to function, this time supermarkets have been closed down. Supermarkets are the best places to manage crowds and enforce social distancing. Now, people are rushing to the local stores where crowd control and social distancing is impossible. Opening supermarket stores will distribute the people among the supermarkets and local shops and reduce the possibility of transmission. In a nearby local store, two customers were apparently squabbling over one remaining packet of bread. I wrote to the district collector to consider opening supermarkets and received no response. Now, the government has come up with a website portal for generating e-pass for emergency travel within respective cities and towns. The instructions state that even for medical emergencies, people have to apply for the e-pass, wait for approval, then print it and carry with them. The irony here is, the government seems to be expecting everyone who has internet access at home to also own printers. Printing is usually done at local internet browsing centers which are all shut down now. Upon enquiry, I was told two things. 1) To call the local councilor and he/she will make all arrangements 2) A self written affidavit is enough for medical emergencies. They are expecting someone to sit and write an affidavit or call the councilor and wait when their father/mother/sibling needs emergency medical care. This is the level of incompetence and complete lack of rationale that plagues India’s civil administration.

The virulence of COVID-19 virus is of very small magnitude when compared to the virus that caused small pox. Millions have died because of small pox and my granny used to say that wailing could be heard from every other house because death was everywhere. When a foreign substance of any form enters our body, our immune system immediately mobilizes itself to fight and destroy it. Our body is a sophisticated system and our immune system is designed in such a way as to aggressively restore the balance of the body when something causes an imbalance. The first step is to isolate the foreign substance and prevent it from multiplying and spreading through the blood. Once this is done, the immune system will eliminate the foreign substance. In the case of COVID-19, the first step is failing so the immune system tries more aggressively to attack the virus. This is resulting in the immune system losing focus from other diseases people are suffering from and the subsequent complications led to most number of deaths in the first wave.

After the second wave has started, I am hearing about younger people and people without comorbidities getting
affected. There seems to be only one reason for this. Rapid urbanization has revamped people’s food habits and lifestyle completely which has alienated people even further from nature. Our immune system stays efficient only when it comes into contact with different types of microorganisms constantly, fights them and adapts itself to new diseases. This is all about information, so the greater information our immune system has about microorganisms the better it will be able to protect us. When a boxer quits fighting he invariably gains weight and becomes sluggish. The same happens with the immune system when we spend our entire time holed up in A/c rooms and travel in A/c vehicles. Then, when our junk food and “eating-at-whatever-time” lifestyle leads to diseases like cholesterol, diabetes, high BP and cardiac issues, the immune system is in no state to fight them. On top of all this, when a new virus attacks us for which the immune system needs time to fight, we can only expect the worse to happen to us.

The entire Indian system is at fault for this second wave. The Election Commission should not have gone ahead with the state assembly elections without a clear green signal from the medical fraternity. Even when the elections were declared, no political party showed any inclination to oppose the decision knowing fully well that election rallies are inevitable in the electoral process in India which always leads to massive uncontrolled crowds. Every political party is hungry to win elections and grab people’s power no matter what the situation is. Even the Supreme Court did not choose to step in, cancel the elections and order incumbent state governments to continue as caretaker governments. We, the people did not bother either. We knew what happened last year yet we chose to go for election rallies and on election day to vote in large numbers. Add to this, Indians are addicted to festivals and festivities. Even pandemics don’t matter because Gods will protect us.

The disaster the world is witnessing now has been in the making from the time of India’s independence from colonial rule. India is a democracy only by it’s Constitution. “Rule” is still the word used instead of “govern”, especially by the media. India is “ruled” by central & respective state governments. People’s representatives become people’s rulers & become inaccessible & unaccountable after they win elections. Corruption has become an incurable disease. Religions driven by blind belief take precedence over law & order. Orders passed by courts are imposed by civil administration which is controlled by the government so courts do not have the power to punish lapses in governance. So warnings of a second wave of the pandemic were conveniently ignored for conducting elections & festivals and the entire country is suffering again. Calls for Modi to resign are insensible because replacing leaders without reforming the system is not going to change anything.

Finally, what is incomprehensible is the fear of death among people which the media is amplifying and driving into everybody’s minds. Death is a natural conclusion to life in the entire universe. Our Sun will burn out and die in a few billion years. The Universe itself is supposed to come to an end. Millions of animals and human beings are dying every day because of a variety of reasons. Diseases are one way of population control in nature. This may not be to everybody’s taste but this is how nature works. I say this knowing fully well that my parents and I could also get infected with COVID-19. Nature follows the golden rule of “Survival of the fittest”. Only the strongest will survive in nature. We moved away from nature and forgot the golden rule and to keep ourselves healthy at all times. I hope this pandemic will be a reminder for everyone to return to nature, understand nature better and improve our lifestyle drastically. Our lives hinge on abiding and living by nature’s rules and flouting them will only lead to our own destruction.

Human destruction of nature – a historical and religious angle

I was on my regular morning walk yesterday looking to photograph anything interesting happening in nature when I suddenly heard a short whirring sound which sounded familiar. I looked around and saw a huge mounted electric transformer on the side. It was the deathly sound of a bird getting electrocuted. Because of overhead transmission cables and transformers kept in the open, house crows keep getting electrocuted all the time.

The crow that was with the one that died was in total shock and was making different kinds of sounds. Helplessly I stood there for a while wondering why do we create and construct things that we know will harm animals but do not care. So many different types of birds die every day because of our fishing nets alone. Why do we have scant respect for nature and animals?

When we look back at our history, we start from the point where we were afraid of everything we did not understand. We do not know when and why but we started worshipping natural elements like fire, rain, thunder and lightning and animals by creating Gods for them. The most probable reason is lack of scientific understanding of natural elements and the higher sensory abilities of animals. This is what became known as paganism. Though we started cultivation and raising livestock with time, in the name of worshipping all the Gods, we conserved and protected nature.

But pagan cultures developed deep flaws with time. To understand and relate to Gods, we started reducing Gods into human forms which resulted in idol worship. Emperors and Kings started calling themselves as Gods on Earth who could communicate with the Gods that were being worshipped. All of these eventually led to the evolution of monotheism, the concept of one God. Monotheism, introduced by Christianity became dominant with the advent of Islam and spread all over the world. As the world gradually moved away from pagan culture, it has had a significant impact on our perception of nature and wild animals.

Then, there is this critically important part in the Bible.

Genesis 1:26-28

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion (7287) over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it (3533): and have dominion (7287) over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.

First of all, the first 5 days of creation as explained in the Bible does not have scientific merit. The Earth and everything we see about it has evolved over billions of years. Then, God says Let “us” make man in “our” image, after “our” likeness. So “God” apparently is made of blood, muscle and bone and looks just like us. Note the usage us and our. So it was not just one God. There were others who were equally powerful as the God and powerful enough to create us. This is a question mark over the concept of one God espoused by Christianity.

Then comes the most important part of giving us the control (dominion) over the planet and all other living beings. To have such control, we needed to possess far greater intelligence than all other living beings on Earth. We have to notice here that we have been given the ability to control only the living beings, not the ability to control nature and natural elements. This could be the reason why we cannot understand natural disasters in advance and cannot escape from them. To understand nature through animals may be the reason why we were given control over them. It may have been left to our interpretation and could be the decisive factor in determining the survival or extinction of our species. We cannot destroy nature and other living beings and survive on the planet. We were given intelligence so that we can understand this as we evolve. This is why by destroying nature and wild animals we are setting the premise for our own extinction.

While I do not intend to state that the Bible is the reason why we are destroying nature and killing off wild animals, the shift from pagan culture to monotheistic belief has definitely had it’s influence on how we see and treat nature. With the tremendous growth we have achieved in science and technology especially in the last few decades, we need to urgently start looking at nature through the lens of logic, commonsense and rationale and understand ancient texts from the scientific perspective.

If love cannot exist without hate, it’s better to not love at all

 

A social media post about an Impala (deer) sacrificing it’s own life to save the lives of it’s fawns from a cheetah attack had gone viral some time back. The post had gone on to describe how the mother deer was looking at it’s fawns longingly and lovingly and was defiant at the same time as two cheetahs were attacking it simultaneously and that the photographer had become mentally disturbed after taking the award winning photograph. Though the post and it’s contents were debunked and rubbished by the photographer, the post had received millions of likes and shares by then.

Well, love does sell well, isn’t it?

The story did fool me when I saw it but then I saw through the loopholes in the narrative soon enough. Females of any animal species are assertive from the time they are born. In mammals, they consume more of their mother’s milk and in other animals they eat more of the food their parents bring. This is because they are preparing themselves to procreate and need to be healthy to have healthy offspring. In the picture the mother Impala seems to be standing without trying to escape at all. Animals protect their offspring by goading the attackers away from them. This would also give them to chance to save themselves and females would try to save themselves as much as they can so that they can have more offspring. Most probably this was a male Impala from the way it was refusing to back down. So the photograph and the story in the post are as different as chalk and cheese.

But there’s more. Animals mate, have offspring, raise them, protect them and teach them survival skills but never love them. Nature’s rule mandates that no unhealthy and injured offspring of any living being is able to survive. Animals have the ability to understand which of their offspring are healthy and which are not. The unhealthy ones should die which is why there are no genetic diseases in nature. Animals are known to abandon, starve to death and even eat such offspring in their infancy. They simply nurture their offspring without any emotions. The offspring have to or are forced to leave their parents once the nurturing period is over.

To put it simply, there is nothing called love in nature.

So where does it come from? Apparently Lucifer was demonized and banished from the House of Gods for disobeying them and giving intelligence and imparting knowledge to us. Could be true or a fantasy story but if it ever happened, it wouldn’t be because Lucifer made us wiser. Must be because we were taught to love. A right eye has a left eye, a right hand has a left hand, a day has a night and love has hate. Can’t say if we learnt to love or hate first. What we have managed to do is to reduce all our higher intelligence and knowledge into hatred for our own kind. More than every other reason, hatred must be reason why the Gods unleashed the cataclysmic floods to destroy us (story of Noah’s Ark) and didn’t want any humans to survive.

Because there is no love in nature there is no hatred as well. Animals develop survival strategies through constant evolution because of nature’s predator-prey relationship to keep the population of all animals under control. Animals fight over territory domination, mating rights, protecting their offspring, etc but there is no hatred involved. Animals teach their offspring to survive in nature and not to hate a fellow or another being. Even when a male lion kills the cubs of a pride after taking control from another male lion it is only for mating rights which also helps to keep control over lion’s population.

In a movie, the male protagonist who is a police officer investigating a series of murders says there is nothing more extraordinary than a human being killing a fellow human being. This is true because only we can kill a fellow human in the rage of love or hate. When a spurned lover throws acid on the face of the woman he claims to love, does he have love or hate for her? The journey from love->obsession->hatred happens unknowingly. While he will continue living in the thought that he did it out of love, he may never realize that rejection had flipped his love to hate.

It’s a miracle that we have survived for thousands of years in spite of living with so much hate. From hatred within families to hatred for people from different geographies to the Church’s hatred for free thinking women during the Dark Ages to antisemitism to the current Islamophobia, humanity has been immersed in hate for a very long time.

So where’s the love?

Gobbled up by ‘I, me, myself’. Animals think in the same manner but only for their survival so that they can procreate and maintain their dominance in nature. Our population has grown so enormous, there is no need to worry about survival anymore. Love is all for myself now. When some among us spreads hatred, the majority of us sits quietly thinking “I am not doing anything so let me mind my own business”. When hatred comes knocking on our doors some day it will be too late to escape from being drowned by it.

While we lose sleep over a virus, the hatred that we have created has become a black hole that is consuming us. Not a pandemic, not a natural disaster and not a mass extinction event is required to wipe us out. Hatred is enough. While we are all told to love and not to hate, love and hate are two sides of the same coin. If love cannot exist without hate, we will have to relinquish love to get rid of hate. And no, there is no shame in being like animals.

Economics in the time of pandemic

 

The world is going to take stock of it’s economic situation soon. The economic system we have created requires us to work to keep it moving. Only when people work will goods and services get created and the movement of which will allow money to flow and propel the economy forward. What will happen when a vehicle that was travelling at it’s full speed is brought down to complete halt in a couple of seconds? That was how lock down was implemented. But this time away from the life we have been living is very crucial for us. COVID-19 has opened many doors and windows for us to introspect on our lives and the world we have created.

First of all, this entire saga of the pandemic is totally our creation. No, this is not about the conspiracy theory of the virus getting leaked out of the virology lab at Wuhan. Its not about our health and immune system either. The fault lies with the medical insurance ecosystem we have created. The busy urban life and the taxing corporate world yanks away all our time and what we are given in return is money. When we started exchanging money for our time, we unknowingly gave away our health as well. On one side is the pressure to work more for more money which gives better social status. On the other side is the medical field taking rapid strides ahead with technology and telling us that healthcare has become so advanced and better. Health is wealth has subtly become wealth is health. The plethora of insurance companies and their policies have ensured that we do not have to bother about prevention being better than cure. So falling sick has been normalized for the working class, even cool to say “I worked so hard that I fell sick” and it is expected that older people in the family will fall sick. What has become alarming is how parents and grandparents falling and breaking their bones in their old age has also become normal. The amount of money getting spent and the effort on the family to take care of them is minuscule compared to their slow recovery and the physical pain and mental anguish they have to undergo at their age.

We are living in an alternate reality based on the concept of wealth in which insurance policies make us believe that when there is money all health issues can be treated, thereby implicitly and subtly pushing us towards diseases and getting us used to being sick. This is regardless of the facts that insurance cards are valid only in select hospitals and medical care centers, getting cashless insurance benefit during treatment is even tougher, only a certain list of diseases are covered by insurance policies, insurance companies either do not have policies for the older people or their insurance premiums cost much higher and most importantly, in spite of all the insurance cover, plenty of money is still required in hand because other expenses far exceed medical bills and getting insurance companies to pay out the insurance amounts is a lengthy and painful process. Only if everyone started to calculate the time and effort required for the entire insurance drama in terms of money.

There is a certain aura of invincibility we have created around ourselves in the belief that if we have wealth we will get access to advance healthcare and so we can fall sick and recover time and again. Diseases do not happen by accident or coincidence. Every being in nature is in the process of continuous evolution and at the heart of it is cell mutation. Microorganisms too evolve through cell mutation. The beauty of nature lies in the subtle fact that evolution is not synchronized among all the living beings. When they come in contact with one another in such an environment, biological conflicts arise. These conflicts are what we call as diseases. This is how a virus with a new mutation has caused a pandemic in our population. We will eventually evolve and adapt to the virus but not all of us will. This is where the rule of survival of the fittest becomes relevant and is one of the ways in which nature controls the population of each living being in it.

Now, two incidents to ponder over.

Even the faintest of thoughts about this would have had been ridiculed away as insanity at any other point in time. Oil prices plummeted to below zero for the first time in it’s history. That the cost of a barrel of crude oil finally settled at $-37 is incomprehensible. Twitter was so overwhelmed with tweets about it and it took me a while to figure out what had happened. Something that had become the most precious item for the entire world has become the butt of jokes in a day, the best being we are going to get paid now for using oil. To think that the entire Middle East region became what it is now because of the same oil. The higher we go before jumping into water the deeper we go inside water. Law of averages catches up with everyone and everything.

A few days back, this report from the Indian city of Agra about a truck ferrying milk falling over and a man collecting spilled milk on the road while some stray dogs were drinking milk some distance away created a lot of buzz on social media. Milk, a type of food being the common factor here, what separated the man and the stray dogs was money. When he could get the milk without having to pay money, he did what the dogs were doing. Simply put, we have reduced ourselves to the point where the only factor that separates us from animals now is money. With our higher intelligence, communication skills and ability to do critical thinking all we could achieve was to create our world based on money and wealth.

I hope COVID-19 will drive some sense back into people’s minds. The same disease that afflicts us can affect healthcare professionals too. Doctors and nurses can die, hospitals can get overwhelmed and all the insurance policies become useless when a pandemic hits us. Nothing much has changed from the medieval times of small pox and bubonic plague. Religious places of worship have been shut. The Gods seem to be helpless to protect us and we are not even able to pray to them at their places of worship. The foundation of society that has been built over thousands of years is being shaken. Why should people go to religious places anymore when we know that we can pray from our homes? When the Gods people went to pray to in religious places couldn’t stop them from dying, what’s the point in going there again?

Having no vaccine or medicines for COVID-19 is the primary reason why panic has spread among us and complete lock downs in countries had to be implemented as knee jerk reaction. Animals get attacked by scores of microorganisms every day. They don’t lock down their entire communities because they have discipline, something we have lost because of our arrogance of having superior intelligence. Animals know instinctively to self isolate themselves to prevent the disease from spreading. This makes food unavailable to them which is necessary because the entire resources of the body can be used for fighting the disease and does not have to be used to digest food. Crocodiles and turtles have survived an extinction event and many ice ages through millions of years of their existence. How many viral and bacterial invasions would they have survived?

The answers to diseases do not lie in vaccines, medicines, money, insurance policies and places of worship. Only the one that nurtures and sustains the planet can help us survive. Only in nature can our immune system evolve continuously to fight diseases. To understand this we have to first stop attacking and destroying nature and that will happen only when we stop looking at the economic value of nature’s resources. Till then more pandemics, lock downs and economic disasters like the present one will follow and if we still don’t learn, there is a mass extinction event waiting at the end of the road.

A draconian lock down of human population is not the way to counter a new virus

 

I have had a very tentative immune system right from my school going days. I would get fever every now and then without any major diseases invading my body. Getting derided at home for having low immunity and my food habits or rather lack of it all through my growing up years was quite a handful to deal with. But eventually I realized that I wasn’t low on immunity, my body was simply more sensitive to foreign substances entering my body and was reacting more quickly.

I invariably get attacked by virus during every climate change in a year. I realized at some point in time that the sooner I get attacked during the climate change the sooner my immunity adjusts to the change and the better I can enjoy the rest of the season. The usual symptoms I get of a virus attack are body aches and back spams. After a bout of stomach bug in 2016 when I was in Bangalore, I was feeling a bit confident of surviving another virus attack for the next few months when it happened one fine day. There was no advance warning. My body temperature just shot through the roof. I was barely able to walk. I called my landlord who was staying in the apartment above mine and he took me to a clinic run by a government doctor close by. I was staying alone and couldn’t take the risk of eating food from restaurants so I had no option but to cook in that condition. 7 days of antibiotics made no difference. I was shivering when I went to meet him. He took my blood for testing and asked me to meet him in the evening. He looked at the report and said everything looks fine. I looked at the report and found my white blood corpuscles (WBC) count double of what it normally should be. I almost fell out of the chair. When I pointed it out to him he too was shocked. Another 7 days of antibiotics ensued.

It took me 15 days of complete isolation and lock down to get back on my feet. I did not inform any of my friends in the city about my condition. All of them were busy with work, commuting in Bangalore is nothing less than hell and I didn’t want to risk infecting them. In the hindsight I should have had met a pathologist and found out what had infected me. I don’t know what would have had happened if my landlord, a man in his 60s had got infected. I don’t even know if the new antibiotics helped kill the virus or my immune system was able to adapt to the virus and overpower its virulence in 2 weeks.

A COVID-19 attack in the first few days does not sound so potent like the one that attacked me. It apparently takes 7-8 days after getting infected to confirm that it is a COVID-19 attack. When ingested, it is said to get lodged in either the lungs or the intestines and the ones that go into the lungs are turning out to be more fatal. Normally, the immune system’s first level of defense controls the spread of the virus and then the second line of defense steps up and overcomes the virus. But apparently the immune system’s first line of defense is not able to control COVID-19 which drives the immune system haywire and in turn pushes it to become more aggressive in its combat against the virus. Children, elderly people and the ones who are already suffering from other diseases are the most vulnerable to succumb to the virus because of their immune system getting overwhelmed by the COVID-19 attack and collapsing. This behavior is similar to the condition of HIV where the immune system collapses and the prevalent diseases result in the death of the patients.

This is where a complete lock down of countries is increasingly looking devoid of sense and is setting off panic in various ways. The knee jerk reaction comes primarily from the unavailability of vaccines and medicines to counter the virus. COVID-19 has its origins in China and has been carried all over the world by people who have been travelling. Governments of other countries have bungled massively in not being proactive to the threat of the virus and did neither start screening of incoming people from abroad nor lock down international borders when the outbreak was first reported. This has allowed infected people to return to their homelands and mingle with the local population. The state and national governments are passing on their ineptness in handling the situation to the people and have locked up the largely healthy population in fear of losing control over the spread of the virus.

What the governments and all of us need to realize and accept is that nothing in nature can be controlled by us. It is not possible to disinfect the entire landmass of the planet and eradicate the virus. Even if we are kept in lock down for 10 years, COVID-19 could mutate in that time and could still be around or a new virus could have emerged when we try to return to normal life. The only logical way of handling the situation is to lock down children, the elderly and the ones already suffering from other diseases whose immune system is not strong enough to counter the virus and let the virus pass through the rest of the population.

The lock down has been enforced under the assumption that the effect of the virus would be the same all over the world. This is similar to how cholesterol and blood sugar levels are supposed to have the same baseline values all over the world. Vast differences in geography and climate changes have had extremely varying differences in lifestyle and food habits. For example, in my home state of Kerala, coconut oil is used more than other types of oils and consumption of coconut oil leads to a slightly higher level of cholesterol but at the same time coconut oil has been found to be more healthy than other oils. Summer season is upon the tropical regions and COVID-19 which has thrived in the winters of China, Europe and North America could lose much of its virulence in the tropical summer heat. Indian diet consists of many types of spices. Regular consumption of ginger, pepper and turmeric supposedly help to create more antibodies and boosts up our immune system. Consequently the effect of COVID-19 on the people of different geographies could be vastly different. In India, with full isolation and healthcare, the immune system of healthy people is overcoming the virus and they are recovering.

Moreover when a vaccine or a drug is found to cure people from COVID-19, how will the doctors know the dosage of the vaccine or the drug to prescribe without clearly understanding how the virus affects people in different geographies and different age groups? If the effect of the virus is more profound in colder conditions where people have comparatively lesser immunity than people in tropical regions, the dosage of vaccine or medicines would have to be greater and more frequent. All of these can be analyzed and understood only by letting the virus pass through the healthy part of the population in every country. Only then can the effect of the virus be truly understood at each stage as our immune system engages with it. Locking up healthy people and sanitizing them could become detrimental to the point where even their immunity gets lowered and they could also become vulnerable to the virus.

In a country like India where its economy is largely dependent on the unorganized sector, panic is setting into the lower strata of society especially the daily wage workers, most of whom have migrated to cities and other states from their native villages and towns in search of work. Though state governments are trying to help them with food, accommodation and healthcare, the call for sudden lock down and its impact is driving them back to their native lands out of fear that without jobs hunger will kill them before the virus. It is commonsense that no government can feed such massive population for the entire duration of the lock down. Even on war footing this is impossible. This has in turn led to large scale congregation of people all over the country when the whole purpose of the lock down was to keep people away from one another.

One suicide has been reported from Kerala due to withdrawal symptoms created by the unavailability of alcohol. Withdrawal symptoms do not arise simply because of sudden stoppage of alcohol consumption. Alcohol is an essential part of socializing all over the world and more so in India especially at the lower strata of the society. Consuming alcohol is the main form of entertainment during socializing in Kerala especially for daily wage workers. More than entertainment alcohol helps them to forget about their omnipresent economic woes. A sudden change in living conditions where their economic and mental situation has crumbled because of lack of work and the unavailability of alcohol can become too much to handle for their fragile minds.

The Indian government has imposed the 21 day lock down without delving into any of the above factors. There is no clarity even on why the lock down is for 21 days. In the supermarket store near my home, the entire shelf of noodles has been cleared off. Who is panic buying and binge eating noodles when everybody is locked up inside their houses? Are so many people ignorant about cooking? Why didn’t they think that this is a good opportunity to learn to cook? I survived a severe virus attack and 15 days of self imposed isolation only because I knew how to cook. The economic, physical and mental effects of the lock down is going to be far more pronounced than the effects of the virus and the road to recovery is going to be slow, winding and painful.

The disastrous impact of meat consumption on human behavior and climate change

The awareness of adverse human impact on nature has only started to grow in earnest in recent times. Many of us were even in denial about human imprints on climate changes till not so long ago. What we are still not completely aware is that our activities are adversely affecting nature in a multitude of ways, each activity is adding to the cumulative effect on nature and the blow back on us will be unimaginable in magnitude.

When we talk about climate changes and how the food we eat is affecting it, most of the general population would still laugh it off. What can cultivation and raising livestock do to climate? We have been doing both for thousands of years. Why has it become a problem now?

This is where our education system is so superficial and our knowledge of this planet and its history is so poor. There is ample proof to show that the Earth has gone through 5 mass extinction events till now. The last one was 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs got wiped out. Wasn’t that caused by a comet or asteroid? Well, yes, but earth’s atmosphere and climate had changed considerably by then. Giant herbivores had devoured tons of vegetation and tore through the forests while letting out huge amounts of methane gas from their bellies causing high levels of green house effects. Because of the huge population of herbivores, carnivore numbers had also exploded. Nature, atmosphere and climatic conditions had deteriorated to the tipping point and the asteroid impact was just the shove that triggered the extinction event.

So what has all of that got to do with us? The extinction event wiped out the most dominant species in nature, the dinosaurs that were the primary culprit for the imbalance. When nature cleanses itself, it wipes out what made it dirty. This time its us who is creating instability in nature. When it comes to our food habits and especially with livestock and their meat, we need to first understand how nature’s food chain works. The animals that reproduce in large numbers have high mortality rates and greater number of predators. The ones that do not have predators, known as apex predators reproduce in comparatively low numbers. Predators prey mostly on the ones that are injured or have diseases which in turn ensures that no genetic diseases exist in nature. This predator-prey relationship ensures that no animal’s population grows beyond control or spreads diseases and creates imbalance in nature. We, supposedly the most intelligent beings started protecting our livestock from wild animals effectively disabling nature from controlling their population. This has reached the tipping point where it is no longer possible to discern whether demand or supply of meat is driving the economics of livestock. Now cattle livestock consumes large amounts of vegetation and release methane gas which has contributed significantly to the green house effects we are experiencing.

I have always looked at our alarming increase in meat consumption with the fear of repercussions from nature. I was always a very reluctant meat eater from childhood and I finally quit 20 years back. Digesting meat was always a problem for my stomach and it was too difficult to accept that I could eat animal meat and still be an animal lover. Friends tried to dissuade me by giving me many reasons such as where else will my body get enough proteins other than from meat? My logic has been simple. If herbivores exist in nature, they are getting all the proteins, vitamins and carbohydrates they need from nature. I do not have to walk the long road of first ingesting their meat and then putting my body through the arduous task of digesting the meat and extracting proteins from it when I can get it directly from vegetables, pulses and grains.

Many years back, when I was staying at my ancestral home, a duck flew out of a nowhere and landed inside my house compound wall. We decided to keep her and find a male duck (drake) for her. My dad and I went to the town slaughter house and saw a group of ducks and drakes in an enclosure. The enclosure was right outside where the ducks were taken to be killed. We pointed to a drake and the people at the slaughter house thought we wanted its meat and took it to the slaughter stone. Before any of us could react the drake put its neck on the stone by itself. I was shell shocked for a split second before I screamed no. It was clearly able to see the fate of other ducks in the enclosure but the fact that it knew what its fate was going to be and was even prepared for it was too much for me handle. And we claim only we have a mind and intelligence.

Animals live in very different ranges of wavelengths and frequencies when it comes to light, sound and electromagnetic waves. Many of them have also adapted to understand the ranges we exist in. Only we haven’t been able to tune in to their ranges. Cats are known to see spirits which is why ancient Egyptians considered them as guardians of the netherworld and Bastet was worshiped as the cat Goddess. So it is no surprise that animals know about death and probably better than us. This is where it gets interesting. Whenever we get into a stressful situation, be it an accident or a fight, energy due to trauma accumulates in the muscles that bears the maximum impact. I have heard about pigs getting bludgeoned to death with hammers in slaughter houses. Even if an animal was butchered in an instant, traumatic energy would still accumulate in its body muscles. When we consume meat from butchered animals, we ingest their trauma as well which in turn does two things. It affects the energy chakras in our body and our genetic structure.

Genes are essentially of two types, the encoded ones we receive from our parents, relatives and ancestors and the ones that get encoded with the information from our own experiences. So how do we know that ingesting meat is affecting us genetically? If we look at human history, our evolution into the societal life has surprisingly made us more aggressive and violent beings, not just towards other beings but to our own kind. All over the world we have been raising more livestock, devouring more of their meat and fighting more with each another. Even after creating the mushroom cloud with the atom bombs during the second World War, we are not done with our squabbling and killing spree. We have aggressively pursued industrialization and building a money based society along with finding innovative ways to weaponize every new technology to harm each other and we have done everything without even having scant respect for nature. We created plastic but never cared to check whether it is degradable in nature before commercializing it.

I am aware that though I may not be able to prove the correlation between meat consumption and human behavior what I do know is about the impact of non-consumption of meat on us. The Brahmin community in India were originally the collectors and recorders of knowledge. Interestingly, they decided to relinquish eating meat some time during their evolution. I am not sure what triggered this change. Maybe at the onset of Kali Yuga, idol worship started, temples started getting built and Brahmins expanded their dominance in society from being advisers to Kings to temple priests by taking ownership of ancient Indian texts. But it still doesn’t explain why relinquishing meat was necessary to imbibe the knowledge of the texts but what we do know is that a vegetarian diet has made them benign humans. The hymns, chants and bells in the temples are all intended to synchronize our souls with the highest cosmic energy and thereby find harmony with nature. Now that Brahmins have also expanded into other professions, I know and have heard of many of them who changed to meat diet and started showing clear signs of aggressive behavior. This could be one important reason why the Brahmin community chose to seek knowledge and serve in temples and not take up other professions. Maybe there are undiscovered secrets that could explain how consumption of meat interferes with the assimilation of knowledge and anatomical explanations for how consumption of meat creates aggressive behavior and has made us destructive towards our own kind and towards nature.

From our cave dwelling times when meat was an essential source of food, even though we learnt to cultivate food, our propensity towards meat consumption has only increased with time. Here is another interesting example. Christianity and Islam were both born in the desert lands of the Middle East where cultivation is impossible and meat is essential for survival. The Christian and Muslim communities in India are not migrants from the Middle East. Christians are descendants of the first Hindu converts and Muslims are both descendants of converts and descendants of Muslims who came from outside and bred with the women in India. There is no dearth of cultivated food in India then why do both communities still follow the food habits of their brethren in the Middle East of consuming large quantities of meat? Meat consumption has become part of the culture of all communities and it is reflecting on how the communities are at loggerheads with one another.

There needs to be more research done and more awareness created about how meat consumption has become one of the many self destruction buttons we have created. I believe aligning ourselves with nature is the only way to save our species from total annihilation. Every single step of ours is creating an adverse impact on nature and climate change is just one of them.

Learning to control the elements is the only way left to negate human effects on climate change

The fact that climate change and its potentially disastrous consequences if left unresolved has been a hot topic of debate for quite some time now. Even school going children have greater awareness to this threat to our planet and our survival. On March 15, they took matters into their own hands. Tens of thousands of them around the world skipped their classes and took to streets to demand greater action to control pollution and save the environment from their governments and world bodies.

Why has the focus on climate change increased? One reason is because scientists and researchers have comprehended that the 6th mass extinction event is underway on our planet. The trademark identification of such an event are the increasing cases of complete extinction of many species of animals because of the overpopulation of one or certain number of species.

Population explosion of humanity and industrialization, especially in the last 100 years has exponentially increased green house effects. But what many people do not know is that this is not the first instance of our planet experiencing the drastic and adverse effects of green house effects. Herbivore dinosaurs had chomped their way through massive forests and expelled humongous amounts of methane gas from their belly after digestion creating massive greenhouse effect.

I had attended a seminar on wetland conservation at the Agricultural University in my hometown a few weeks back. One of the speakers was a researcher on greenhouse effect and he did an excellent presentation on the topic. But I realized that one critical factor was missing from his presentation. If our planet is in the midst of the 6th mass extinction, it means complete destruction of our planet and all its beings has happened five times before. Each time nature has been reset and life has taken roots again. The last time it happened dinosaurs became extinct. But interestingly, crocodiles, cockroaches and turtles survived. So if it happens again, can we survive and what will it take for us to survive? I asked the speaker these questions and he admitted that he had never considered those aspects in his research.

Interestingly, I found the answer to my question on social media the next day itself.

The arrival of the Spanish Inquisition in Central America in the 16th century and the subsequent destruction of the thriving civilization of the Incas resulted in the Amazon forest reclaiming its lost land to people. The unintended effect of this reforestation was the drastic drop in temperature in Europe in the 17th century and large number of people dying because of unbearably cold conditions. We keep adapting to small increases in temperature and changes in weather conditions without realizing that the overall impact of the changes is considerable. Only when the changes are reversed by nature will we know what its effects will be on us.

The floods in Kerala and the destruction it caused is a fresh reminder of what can happen to us when nature resets itself. Kerala has traditionally been a rainfall abundant region because of its proximity to the Indian ocean and Western Ghats. I have learned in school that after Cherapunji, it is Kerala that receives the most rainfall during monsoon season every year. In spite of this known fact, people encroached into low lying areas to build their houses.

While rainfall in Kerala has decreased considerably in the last decade or so, it never meant it would never rain like before. When it did rain, water had nowhere to go. So where water could flow it swept away everything in its path and where it couldn’t flow it got stuck causing massive floods. There was also an enduring image circulating on social media of a bridge filled with plastic bottles and containers, which the water had deposited back on to land.

So mass extinction and resetting of nature has been an ongoing phenomenon on our planet. We can blame human overpopulation and wanton industrialization for climate changes now but that has always been the problem with dominant species as the dinosaur case illustrates. We are the only species on the planet that destroys nature’s ecosystem to create our own. No animal cuts trees to make its own shelter.

Animals adapt to what is available in nature. The reason could be that we were created to rule over nature and not protect it as the quote from Bible suggests. In Genesis 1:26, God says, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to RULE over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.”

The question now is how to control our effect on climate change. I believe we are a little too late to think about it. A few billion of us have to die off to restore parity in nature. But there is a catch here. The few billion of us have to die without disturbing the nature, which is impossible without a natural calamity on a massive scale or a man made disaster like a nuclear war. There is an analogous situation happening right now. Flickr, the online photo sharing community has created a new rule which restricts its free users to upload and retain only 1000 photos on its website. The difference here is, nature cannot tell us the size of the human population it can manage. The onus is on us to find it out, reduce our population accordingly and keep it below the threshold number.

Sounds ridiculous right? We cannot wipe off our own population that too on such a massive scale. What we can do is control our population growth and not increase our negative impact on nature anymore. One purpose all species procreate is to stay dominant in nature. We do not need to procreate like other species anymore. All of us do not have to leave our own unique genetic imprint on our population.

There is something more left for us to do though. Humans have been trying to understand nature from the dawn of our existence. Exponential technological advances we have made has helped us to investigate and understand every aspect of nature closely. Even then, we are restricting our research to simply collecting data about nature. The more we learn about something it is natural that we also learn how to control and manipulate it. This is how the field of medicine has grown and how we have learnt to treat diseases.

But surprisingly, other than cloud seeding to create artificial rain, we have not been able to control weather and climate changes. There are places in our country like Kerala which receive abundant rainfall and other areas which suffer from extreme drought every year. All government departments and research institutions watch this unfold every year helplessly. None of them have even wondered if it would be possible to distribute rain clouds or rainwater to all parts of the country uniformly.

There is a story in ancient Indian texts about the young Hanuman who leapt into the sky to catch the rising sun to play with it. Indra, the God of lightning and thunder, in his apprehension threw the Vajrayuda (thunderbolt) at Hanuman who got struck by it and fell back to earth unconscious. Maruti, the God of wind who was Hanuman’s biological father got enraged and pulled out all the air flowing on earth and relented only after Hanuman’s health was restored. The takeaway from this story for me is that air flow on our planet can be controlled. Ancient Indian texts are treasure troves of extremely advanced technology and interpreting them correctly can answer and solve most of the problems we are facing now.

There are primarily three obstacles we are facing for space exploration and one of them is creating and controlling weather conditions suitable for us on other planets. The key to this lies in greater understanding and controlling weather and climatic changes on our own planet. The fact that children are speaking about climate changes reflects poorly on their parents and exposes the ignorance they have on the subject. People have to start talking about solving social problems and these discussions have to start from educational institutions. The research that the speaker did on the greenhouse effect creates no value because all the effort he put in does nothing to help humanity. What is the objective of doing research on any subject if it is not helping in the survival and evolution of our species?