A blink in world’s time…

If our earth was a day old, we humans have appeared in this last 1/4th of its second… think about that for a minute… 4 billion years old earth, human species has been there for only 70,000 years… That fraction is less than a blink of our eye…

To make it even more mind boggling, if the 70,000 year old human species history was compressed within 1 day or 24 hours, then in the last 30 minutes (200 years), we have multiplied ourselves 7 times in count… Rivalling the spread of any viral illness we know of…

We believe that the natural instinct of every living organism is survival and continuation… by that measure humans have by any yardstick been extremely successful… We have increased our count by overcoming natural calamities, we have domesticated our food production and other animals… We now even harvest food inorganically or unnaturally – be it from plants or animals… We have harnessed and control energy sources that essentially fuel solar systems… we have become the apex organism… our dominance in terms of being the supreme one is so complete that we are now able to influence change over almost every aspect of the very environment that sustains our life… No other animal has been able to do this… We have only imagined up gods to be able to do this and we are aiming for and achieving those powers…

Our intellect powers us even further into the realms of space… our minds into artificial intelligence and our bodies towards immortality…

But what directs this drive? Why are we doing what we are doing?

In the blind use of our mental capacities, we are not only moving at a crazy speed but are in fact constantly accelerating without control… Not in arithmetic progression but geometric… the steam engine that fired up in the 1800’s is today a nuclear powered rocket, not just moving but accelerating perpetually, escaping gravity, with no one controlling it…

It should scare us… really scare us, if we understand what is happening… take the example of money… Money by itself is an imaginary concept… And 90% of the money – the medium of exchange in the world; does not exist in reality… it is just a form of credit that has rotated in the books of the banks… say you go and deposit a 100 in the bank… the bank gives that 100 as a loan to a person who is wanting to build a factory… that industrialist than gives that 100 to a contractor to build the factory who then deposits the 100 back into the bank… the bank now has in essence 200 in deposit… but the only money that exist is the first 100 you deposited… imagine this 10 times over… the bank having a deposit of 1000 all fuelled by your initial 100… and a belief in all those promises of factories that they will eventually return the loans of 900 that have been given… that is the world economy today… based on premise of promise of future growth – 9 times over… And it has to happen and grow continuously or its doomsday…

And what happens when forget stopping of growth, there is just a slow down in that growth… or even a feeling of a slow down… anyone remember 2008… it was a reality check over our unbridled credit system… and you know what has been the solution – the US government printed trillion more paper notes to pump into the banking system to give it the “liquidity” to sustain… essentially when the withdrawal symptoms of the drug hit the abuser, the doctor tripled the dose of the drug to let the hallucination go on further…

We actually do not realise that we are riding a tiger which is not in our control… The scientists, technologists, experts in silicon valley and laboratories – emboldened by their success so far, believe that the climate change we are causing, the natural resources we are depleting, the biodiversity we are pushing to extinction… nothing will affect us… for we will find ways to surmount those changes and adapt to the situations to suit human sustenance… after all, we have done that successfully in the last 200 years…

But is our race towards material pursuits making us more happy? Are we finding joy in multiplying our kind? Is that our purpose? Do we even need a purpose?

What if there is no actual purpose to our life? What if after death there is nothing and we are really just organic compounds who are doomed to vanish on our death? What if the universe also one day will collapse and there is nothing at all left? What if there is no certainty to anything nor any theory that will ever be correct always… what if there is no actual singularity?

However, today as humans we are aiming for more happiness (which we are failing miserably – suicide rates are not falling, social media is causing chase of fake lives and consequent depressions, comparisons and unrealistic expectations are driving higher stress and anxiety levels and breaking of human relations causing extreme psychological distress), immortality (where we are extending our life spans, bioengineering our off springs, adding inorganic parts to our body and maybe at some stage adding our consciousness to artificial intelligence and probably living through a computer) and divinity (attempting to manipulate lives and ecosystems to our needs)…

But we do not know why? Do we really want this? Do we understand the consequences?

Nature is blind in evolution and harsh and callous in its approach… it makes no favours nor has any agenda… survival of the fittest is really the norm and the ones that adapt, they survive and proliferate… but there is also one thing about it which we do not appreciate… it happens mostly over a long period of time… yes, a rare asteroid may hit us out of the blue… but that happens over once in million years… galaxies evolve over a billion years… a life organism takes millennia’s to change its nature… but we as humans are in a hurry and are effecting change by our “intelligent design” at a rate that does not allow adaptability of our own self…

Think of it like this… man bald with age… but they generally don’t go bald suddenly… first they consciously observe their hair thinning out… they get distressed, they despair… the sensitive kinds try to prolong the patch of hair over their heads… over the years though, a bald patch still appears… the despair is now resentment and eventually acceptance… and by the time the bald patch has formed completely, the man is generally at ease with their new look… not necessarily happy… They still remember how they used to have that nice wavy full set of hair… but in normal day to day life they have adapted to their new appearance… that is natural evolution…

Now imagine another man suddenly going through chemotherapy assuming that it will prolong his existence… but without knowing its various side effects… apart from other dreadful things, the sudden loss of the person’s hair would be so shocking and surprising that it would be more difficult for the person to recover… this is human development…

In this craziness, there is another selfish human trait that is coming out strongly… we have become 7 billion… yet in developed countries the government encourages citizens to have children… people of specific religions encourage their followers to have more kids… for people from other countries or religion would not really be the same as that of its citizens / or sharing the same myths… It’s not enough for us as humans to grow… Its much more narrower now…

Culture, religion, countries… all the human made systems which give a sense of certainty, comfort and sustenance have only narrowed down our visions and created unsurmountable barriers between humans themselves… it is no wonder that more than our own self made ecological disasters, we worry about annihilation from each other…

We are at core so blindingly selfish that every attempt of ours is only driven from a perspective of our furtherance… we are so belligerent and audacious in our beliefs… so pompous in our self worth… that even when we think of taking care or the ecology, environment, other animals, other humans, etc… it is all because we believe we will have issues otherwise…

Don’t get me wrong… yes, there is the occasional voice of our conscience which speaks about being vegan… that rare verse of a religious book that speaks about non-violence and renunciation… that shimmer of a spiritual thought that speaks about finding happiness within ourselves, acceptance of our body as is and for what it really is and slowing down and introspecting… But all those voices… our human consciousness… is nothing more than a mob wife…

A mob wife is a beautiful, selfless woman married to a man of poor character who is expected to do nothing but smile, take care of the kids and household and tend to her husband, while never ever acknowledging the abusive, sinful, greedy, selfish world she married into…

That is what our consciousness at humanity level is to our human species… she is that wife of our gangster creed… even if she raises a voice once in a while, we never let her to be strong enough to change our abusive, sinful, greedy and selfish ways… and all that we expect her to do, is to come with us to bed and let us enjoy the ephemeral joys of our world… and sleep with ease.

Are we ready though to accept the implications of our actions? Will we be able to digest the impacts that are not even aware of?

We want capitalism… But we still run for socialism in our weak times… Like teenage kids, we never actually grow up and want to find blame on others… Like trailing spouses who find solace in scorning their other half for their condition, we too want to blame someone else for our dereliction… Just look at innumerable recent human aggravated ecological disasters… yet we work towards controlling or adapting to natural phenomenas… Not make changes in our pursuit of growth… Think, who will the bald man blame for the chemotherapy? Who can god blame but himself? Don’t we already hear today noises of current or just upcoming human generation blaming their fathers and grandfathers for the ecological mess we leave them as inheritance… And will our argument that the comforts and security of life we have provided them that eventually caused that catastrophe be valid – what if future humans don’t like the direction we have taken and it is no more reversible… Will our conscience be able to live with the guilt of a monumental disaster – for now everything we are able to do is at cosmic scale given the powers we possess…

With such frailty of our pysche… Are we ready to play god? We are really stupid if we even believe for a moment in ourselves for this…

Just stare for 1 minute… just 1 minute… keep your eyes open and look at everything around you… and imagine, that if and when you blink, the world in front of you will change completely… it will not be the same at all… you will also be something and someone else… the world will be something that you cannot imagine… with things you cannot understand… something you may not really want… and moving at a dizzying speed that you cannot control… Spiralling out of your imagination…

That is something what we have done to our world…. in a blink of world’s time!