The Power to Save Ourselves
Hubris, obstinacy & the rise of the Extinction Proofing industry!
“My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn’t have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines … It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.”
“And we very well might be gone,” Hammond said, huffing.
“Yes,” Malcolm said. “We might.”
“So what are you saying? We shouldn’t care about the environment?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then what?”
Malcolm coughed, and stared into the distance. “Let’s be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven’t got the power to destroy the planet — or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”
The above diatribe by Ian Malcolm (the mathematician and Chaos Theory expert) aimed at John Hammond (the megalomaniacal and wealthy owner of Jurassic Park) in Michael Crichton’s book* by the same name came to mind as we clocked the third anniversary last week of the time when the entire world, country by country, came to a standstill. It was the time when we were truly tested on our ability to save ourselves.
(*Jurassic Park was published in 1990; hence the line ‘A hundred years ago we didn’t have cars …’ needs to be read in that context.)
Lockdown, while not a new word, became our new reality. Suddenly, we all felt extremely vulnerable. It was as if we were all living in a post-apocalyptic world. Except that what we experienced was furthest from the popular notion of what an apocalypse looks like. There were no raging fires, no swirling oceans, no giant waves, no breakneck winds, no animals howling or birds squawking themselves hoarse. There were no upturned cars. No derailed trains. No planes running aground. None of that happened. Instead, we witnessed some of the clearest days and skies. We breathed fresh air. We came to know what deafening silence meant. Some lucky ones amongst us also saw some wildlife roaming the streets of our cities and towns.
And yet, for the first time we were truly faced with the prospect of perishing thanks to an unnatural, unknown force. We found ourselves fumbling in the dark, in broad daylight. We didn’t know what lay in store for us from one moment to the next.
Publicly, governments and leaders made bombastic pronouncements of having identified the culprit, of having cracked the code to destroying it, of having developed the cure to heal us while millions died either due to the virus or due to the cataclysmic effects of the debilitating lockdowns.
Privately, we all made promises to ourselves to mend our ways so that we wouldn’t inflict such calamities on ourselves going forward. We adopted new habits and we adapted to a new way of living. Predicting how things and behaviours would evolve became an international pastime. Everyone - yours truly included – put out their hypotheses of how, and how much, the pandemic would fundamentally change all aspects of our lives and living the way we always knew it.
If there was one universal truth that prevailed, it was that the developed and developing worlds found themselves in the same boat of helplessness, and for a brief period of time there was a sense of empathy that cut across geographical, religious, education, income, colour, orientation and other such manmade barriers. It was as if the world was moving together as one. It was mankind / humanity sans frontiers, the way the Almighty may have intended it to be at the time of Creation.
But then, utopia is a utopian concept.
Sure enough man’s base instincts of ego and one-upmanship came to the fore and overpowered the momentary lapse in our collective behaviour. We didn’t waste time, so much so that we didn’t give the pandemic enough importance for enough amount of time. It didn’t take long for us to disturb the peace. Mankind has always been in a state of perennial hurry and perpetual conflict. Take away conflict and mankind would feel lost. And man doesn’t like the feeling of being lost and suffering from a loss of control. So we had to take control of the situation of hand.
Yes, speed in finding a cure was the need of the hour when faced with an unknown destructive virus. But rather than go with the spirit and sentiment of One World, the efforts to finding a cure for the virus became a competitive race between the Big Pharma players egged on by their performance, or the lack of it, in the stock markets. This then took a turn for the worse with the host countries of the Big Pharma companies playing God in distributing the spoils of the war, aka the vaccine. While the vaccine wars were on, some of the real ones also raised their ugly heads. Neighbouring countries started bickering and renewed their attempts at usurping boundaries. New global power alignments started taking shape.
Not to be left far behind, at an individual level, we all went back to our old ways, maybe only a bit worse than before. We started going about our daily lives with hitherto unseen levels of action. Just the way addicts who have been on the mend relapse into their vice with even greater vengeance, so too did all of us kickstart ourselves from where we had left off and were in a race of catching up with our old pre-pandemic selves.
While the jury was / is still out on whether Covid was a manmade or a natural happening, there were enough and more natural disasters that befell upon an already weary world. The climate / environment / sustainability experts among us promptly jumped in to paint a picture of how we are systematically destroying the Earth. Our penchant to attach too much importance to ourselves rendered us delusional (or John Hammond-ish) enough to think that we were destroying this precious thing called the Earth with our wayward ways. That there is no Planet B and that we have to take care of this one planet that we have been fortunate to have been inhabitants of. We all need our respective Ian Malcolm’s to bring us to back to Earth (oh the irony!). It is not the Earth we are destroying. It is we who are digging a bottomless hole for ourselves.
Going by Ian Malcolm’s theory, all the climatic and environmental hazards that we are faced with is Earth’s way of taking care of itself. Frequent wildfires, earthquakes, volcanoes erupting, epidemics, pandemics, floods, storms, etc are nothing but the earth’s way of purging itself every once in a while. It is the Earth’s survival instinct.
The frequency of the purging seems to have gone up of late, but that is possibly because of the sheer numbers we are multiplying in. Our growth in headcount (7 billion to 8 billion in 12 years) will put even the most hiring-happy tech firms to shame. When you go from 7 billion to 8 billion headcount in a dozen years, you consume more than you give, you destroy more than you build and you waste more than you can handle. Eventually, something’s got to give.
While humanity has been busy procreating like there’s no tomorrow, the sad reality is that since 1970 approximately 60% of mammals, fish, birds and reptiles have been wiped out because of it. ‘If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania’, says Mike Barrett, Executive Director of Science and Conservation at WWF. He continues, ‘That is the scale of what we have done. This is far more than just being about losing the wonders of nature, desperately sad though that is. This is actually now jeopardising the future of people. Nature is not a ‘nice to have’ – it is our life-support system.’
Some studies estimate that if the current trajectory continues then close to one million species run the risk of extinction in the next few decades. Yes, you read that right - one million species! Imagine the havoc that will be the world when these numbers become a reality. But we refuse to learn. Little realising that while we tell ourselves there is no Planet B, the Earth is also telling us that there is no Mankind version 2.0 and that we need to go easy on ourselves.
One of the reasons for our obstinacy as far as our vulnerability is concerned perhaps comes from us being at the top of the food chain. We suffer from the hubris of our invincibility. Being apex predators, we also come congenitally equipped with the survival instinct of one. Like many other things that we have put in fast forward mode, especially since the pandemic, a lot many of us also accelerated our prep for the end of the world. Prepping for the End Of The World is a business. Yes, it is a business - and a booming one at that. Companies like Vivos (builders of luxury underground apartments, converted from Cold War missile silos and storage facilities into “miniature Club Med resorts) and Rising S (builders of luxury bunkers that run up to $9.6 million for the “Aristocrat” model — which comes with a private bowling alley, swimming pool, “bullet-resistant” doors and a “motor cave exit,” so you can sneak out for errands like Batman) are seeing unprecedented levels of requests.
The video above will give you a very good idea of what these “bunkers” look like. These are meant to be the havens of the rich and famous when The Event strikes.
The Event, as Douglas Rushkoff author of “Survival Of The Richest – Escape Fantasies Of Tech Billionaires” states in The Guardian, “is a euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.”
It’s quite fascinating to read about how the uber rich treat the world as their oyster – literally. New Zealand is a favoured destination for building the impenetrable luxury bunkers for the likes of Peter Thiel and Larry Page to name a few. Those who prefer staying in their own countries have gone about buying obscene amounts of property in their homeland to build these underground luxury condos on their own property. As this article from the New York Post states, “Ultra-elite shelters like The Oppidum in the Czech Republic— billed as “the largest billionaire bunker in the world”— include amenities like simulated natural sunlight, a wine vault, and a place to hide all your stuff that’s “impregnable” to hostile outsiders.” These bunkers, in a way, are like the Biblical Noah’s Ark - except that they are limited only to the species called Homo sapiens.
Even the middle class is not too far behind in the survival sweepstakes. As Evan Osnos states in The New Yorker, “… survivalism has been edging deeper into mainstream culture. In 2012, National Geographic Channel launched “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S.H.T.F. (when the “shit hits the fan”). The première drew more than four million viewers, and, by the end of the first season, it was the most popular show in the channel’s history. A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k).”
At last count there were approximately 4 million Americans who qualify as Doomsday Preppers. There’ll probably be millions more spread across various parts of the world.(Doomsday prepping seems to be a developed country phenomenon. Unfortunately for the vast majority residing in developing countries, doomsday prepping is a daily reality where being resilient and street smart are their in-built, and often only, survival kits. And an innate belief that, as Noah Cross says in Chinatown, ‘… at the right time and the right place they’re capable of anything.’)
One cannot escape the looming presence of AI even in the “end of the world” scenario forecasting. David Wallace-Wells writes in his weekly newsletter for The New York Times that Sam Altman, the guy whose company, Open AI, gave us the tech flavour of the season - Chat GPT - joked in 2015 that “A.I. will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” A year later, in a New Yorker profile, Altman was less ironic about the bleakness of his worldview. “I prep for survival,” he acknowledged — meaning eventualities like a laboratory-designed superbug, nuclear war and an A.I. that attacks us. “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end,” he said. “I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
So what does all of this say about us?
That a black swan event like the pandemic throws us off, albeit temporarily.
That our innate survival instinct coupled with advances in science and technology ensure that we limit the damage.
That we will always find solutions and cures.
That we have reached a stage where we have ensured that we are Extinction Proof. Survival of the fittest may no longer be as true as it once was. But survival of the richest definitely is.
So while the good professor from Jurassic Park is right about Earth taking care of itself and man will never have the power to save or destroy it, the same could now be said about mankind - that there is no force now that has the power to destroy it.
We will continue to survive … not just survive, but thrive. And thrive we will even when faced with the end of the world, upon which we might just find ourselves saying, to quote the title of a song by R.E.M., ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it … and I feel fine!’
Be braver. Be kinder.
In line with the topic of today’s post, I thought it fitting to review a short satirical documentary series on Netflix that traces the evolution of mankind through stiff upper lip British humour at its scathing best.
An altogether new genre called mockumentary is what Cunk On Earth is. Tackling the heavy subject of evolution of mankind from Stone Age onwards to current times, Diane Morgan as Philomena Cunk does a howlarious job of making light of the topic at hand, pulling off ridiculous lines and interviews that will have you laugh out loudly, even more so when you see her keeping a straight face through it all. The series is a History of the World meets any David Attenborough documentary, all peppered with stiff upper lip Brit humour. It’s a short 5 part series with each episode less than 30 mins long. The constant illogical referencing to the pop song ‘Pump Up The Jam’ will have you in splits. Cunk On Earth won’t take too much of your time, but it will give you enough laughs to last a while.
Cunk On Earth | Netflix | Mockumentary | 5 episodes
