To Be or Not To Be - And Then What? / Nidhi Reddy
How is it that despite being the most intelligent creatures on this planet, we’ve become the most ignorant? We make new scientific findings all the time, yet a huge chunk of our population is completely unaware of the peril we’ve placed our world in.
Our existence is a contradiction. We’ve succumbed to technology without realizing that by trying to make our lives easier we’re making our existence shorter. In Biology class we learn about the sigmoid curve of population growth: Lag phase, Log phase, and Death phase. And the example we use is a colony of bacteria, which, after growing exponentially during the log phase, eventually runs out of resources and enters the death phase. What we don’t mention is that the human race has been in its log phase for the past three centuries. Meaning that pretty soon we will enter the death phase unless we find a way to survive in outer space. Coal reserves are expected to run out in a couple centuries, and oil reserves in a couple decades. This isn’t even taking into consideration the extra strain that will be put on coal after the end of oil.
And, as though we haven’t taken enough from our own planet, the human race has commenced taking their greed to outer space. We shamelessly attempt to claim ownership of extra-planetary bodies: we drill flagpoles into moons and buy and name stars at will; we assume that ‘can’ means ‘should’.
However, some people wonder why they should bother accepting the blame for the hole in the atmosphere or humanity’s gargantuan carbon footprint or our exploitation of the only Earth we may ever know because the inevitability of the world’s end is now common knowledge.
Statistics show that the temperature of the Earth is not only increasing due to the depletion of ozone, but also because our sun is growing larger, hotter and more luminous each and every day. The average human being breathes about 617 grams of oxygen every 24 hours. For every second of these 24 hours, the sun is consuming 600,000,000 tons of hydrogen and in the estimated 7 billion years, after swelling into a red giant 150 percent its current size, will die. In its last stage of stellar evolution it will engulf the planets closest to it, possibly even the Earth, and even if we’re lucky enough to escape its grasp, what used to be a burning ball of fire will be a nothing more than a white dwarf, leaving us in eternal cold. Without the sun’s light, without its warmth, life on Earth will simply seize to exist.
But the ineffable truth is that whether it is because of our own doing or because of this ticking bomb of a Sun we wheel around, our world will come to an end. The second you leave this trance you’ll go to school or finish some homework and be forced to juxtaposition the two. It’ll become evident how trivial the things we do everyday actually are, especially when compared to issues on such a universal scale. And that realization is enough to make you feel either hopeless or guilty and leads to another realization: We are the only known species that is consciously capable of outliving the very place that created us. And although this may initially seem like an incredible privilege, it is not yet clear if this is a responsibility humankind is ready for.