Being Human

Darwin investigated, in his life’s work, how life on earth evolved. In our sense of time, many years back, when the first humans walked on this planet, little did they know that they would be sitting on top of the food chain so soon. Homo sapiens, the dexterous species with opposing thumbs and brains that can think beyond visible and audible reality, we became the kings of the planet quite soon.

In the few thousand years of history of the great human kind, of which probably only a couple of thousand years of history are roughly documented, the progress has been at massive pace. Our ingenuity in understanding nature and rapidly exploiting resources on the planet is truly remarkable. We have moved from the Stone Age to the Space age in about 8000 odd years. The last few centuries in fact have been way more rapid. We became men of science. Physics, which started out as a means of understanding our world came into application and we built machines. We experimented with metals and elements and magnets and found electricity. We saw radio waves in our machines and built massive information and communication networks. We started flying around the globe, and onto the moon. It has been an absolutely crazy ride.

This is true progress, isn’t it?

Our race is the supreme one. Even if the earth decides to shake us off we will survive. We are men of science. We will find newer planets to live on. Just like Professor Brand said in Interstellar, ‘We will not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

Being Human, isn’t this it?

I am not quite human in that sense. I am quite anti-human rather. When the world sees progress, I see infection. It is as if the planet got infected with this species called humans after it was created by some cosmic event. Agent Smith in Matrix expresses this in a brilliant manner. He says to Morpheus ‘I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.’ Not a single untrue word in that. But we still hail Morpheus and Neo to win the battle of the species. We are choosing our race to win of course.

We are animals after all, just the most evil of them. We use our developed brains and create an illusion of the world we live in. We have a parallel reality that keeps us together and on top of the food chain. In our parallel reality we have jobs, money, governments, taxes, philosophy, society and many other things which do not exist in the actual sense of the world. What is money but paper? - A mere concept that cannot be eaten for survival or planted for growing food. It is thanks to our great imagination that our world today runs on these otherwise useless things. We in fact now have moved beyond paper and run our lives on digital bank accounts. This is as imaginary as it can get.

We produce a million cars a year, a few billion garments, a few hundred billion newspapers and a few thousand billion kilos of burnt carbon. We decorate houses in India with tulips from the Netherlands and wear clothes in America made by kids in India. Diamonds from Africa are mined and given to the rest of the world to signify love while kids in Africa kill each other with weapons bought by this diamond money. We eat Oats grown in Australia because advertisements say they keep you healthy. We sit all day long in our air conditioned offices and type away on keyboards to make money which we spend on keeping our sedentary lives healthy by eating these Oats. We build factories to produce chemical fertilizers to feed our plants so that they give more food and let these factories discharge their effluents into our rivers. We also make Water purifiers then to clean this water before we consume it. Because these water purifiers contain many tiny electrical components and UV tubes, on their end of life we dispose them off somewhere on earth. This leads to the soil becoming less fertile and so we make chemical fertilizers. This does look like some kind of a cycle and vicious would be a very mild adjective to describe it.

This little imaginary world of ours is actually killing us. We are running behind making money which in reality is alive only till we are all together in this imagination. Owning 30 pairs of shoes, just because you can, is not sane because in reality you need only one pair to protect your feet. Eating caviar in Mumbai is insane because you are killing a sturgeon fish in Russia to eat its salty raw eggs thousands of miles away. Drinking Scotch in Australia is insane because you are creating a product millions of miles away and telling yourself to savour it because the advertisements show that successful people sip on single malts. An alien sitting on the moon, looking at our planet would be laughing his ass off right now. Or he may be scared. What if this deadly infection spreads in the universe?

When the tuberculosis bacterium was first discovered, it was not too difficult to kill. We invented antibiotics that did the job very well. But overtime, the bacteria evolved and became resistant to our drugs. We then made more drugs and stronger drugs and the bacteria evolved further. Humans are going through an exactly the same phase of evolution. Every time a natural calamity comes or there is fear of extinction, we put all our resources into survival. We do not die. We invent new technology to keep us alive. We evolve. We are in our bubble, feeling right on top of this world, but in the larger scheme of the universe, we are merely a deadly virus which consumes off its host planet and moves on to the next. We also feel very proud of us while we do that. We feel proud that the human race will always progress and someday colonize other planets. It is in our genetic make up to feel good about multiplying and consuming. It is also what is taught to us as we grow up. We work all our lives trying to give ourselves worldly pleasures which involve consuming the planet’s resources and we are genetically greedy so it is never enough.

That alien will surely try to kill us, eradicate us like we do to bacteria and rodents. In my opinion he would be right in doing so. He is trying to keep his house clean. He probably belongs to some other star system nearby and has identified that in the next 500 years this human race will be onto Mars and probably identifying more planets to colonize. He may be like us too. He may have a highly noble image of himself in his mind where he is thinking of preservation of his species by eradication of humans. His species would probably be like us humans just way more advanced and larger in scale, eating up bigger planets and galaxies. Maybe it is all destined to be eaten up by hungry directionless nincompoops who think they have inherited the universe.

It does seem truly depressing. But the nature of us humans is that way, like it or not. Is there a way we can get out of this vicious cycle? I believe there is. But for that we have to fight our most basic urges of wanting more. There has to be satisfaction in owning what we do and knowing what we know. So do we stop all progress as we call it today? I think we need to revisit our definition of progress. Progress should not mean having great industry or great cities, but it rather should be measured by how much we do to preserve the planet we live on. At any point, if a natural resource is being depleted, we need to measure our progress against how efficiently are we refilling it. It is about achieving that balance between earth and ourselves. Having a fantastic city should not mean a city where everyone owns cars. It should rather mean a city where no one has to own a car. Prosperity in the family should not mean having the money to buy fruits imported from a distant country, but rather to have the ability to grow fruits in their own backyard and hand pick them for daily meals. It should not be about how many air miles you have on your card but rather how many steps you have on your pedometer. The money in your account should be of any value only if it is put to use to help localize resources for consumption and not the other way around. This in my mind would be true progress, a progress where we sustain our civilization for a far longer time on this planet, and sustain the planet far beyond our existence. Our species would be remembered for being amiable, symbiotic and in a deep rooted cosmic connection with this universe. Being one with the universe would then have a literal connotation. That alien sitting on our moon watching us would tell the other living beings in the universe how amazing this green and blue planet in the solar system is. And that would be when I would be truly proud of being human.