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30 September 2016

Are we going to run out of raw material to sustain life on earth?


Does it sound crazy?
When you talk about Reincarnation. People ask this question, how does the population of the world increase? If each person has a soul and the soul is recycled , the number of people alive should be same, isnt it? How are all the extra people being born?
I said they are being born like waves out of a sea, a sea has waves but it has enough raw material to make infinitely more number of waves than those at the surface, sometimes less waves sometimes more waves.

Then I thought why go for such a vague example? Just like earth actually - how is earth making more and more people ? Its the same earth but there are so many more people than there were before.  Earth does not get any more matter than it already has ( Earth gets energy from the Sun, but  Sun also does not get any more energy than it already has ) Its the same amount of raw material all along.
Shocking realisation - Earth is finite!!

What we consumed as animals or as primitive men was minuscule, everything is recycled by earth by decay and death, so the raw material for making life/making more humans/animals looked  like it is infinite so far but  Now??
Look at the materials we have now and how much! look at the garbage dumps. We are locking up the raw material into things which cannot be used to make life for a really really long time. Is our uncontrolled materialism and consumption going to snuff us out? Are we threatening the capacity of earth to make life?  Are the signs like global warming and major disruption of climate a sign of this?
We cut away forests, killed and ate animals to extinction but we were so few it didnt matter ( or may be it did even then, 10,000 years ago lot of animals went extinct, it may have been because of humans ) but Today? We are consuming like crazy - Plastics, Chemicals which were never present on earth before. Just look at the western world, how we buy, how we consume. It is giving me chills.
I saw a skip full of thrown away furniture yesterday and it gave me the chills. Is this the biggest evil which we are refusing to see?


Image result for car dumpImage result for dumped furniture

the world as we know it may not be so for long ( Or the shit is going to hit the fan? )

I am really worried
We have had a generally stable 70 odd years ( for the urban Indians and westerners,  not if you are in Africa or middle east or for that matter anywhere outside my bubble :-( ) Our parents and us have seen a world in which things have steadily got better, technology got better, more money, prosperity, society got better, less crime more law n order( in spite of !what is the world coming to these days! laments) more freedom especially for women, more education etc etc

I am getting this bad nagging feeling that this is going to change n the next few years.
The chaos on this world is steadily increasing
The stupidities of the past 100 odd years are bearing fruit
The progress of the past years is demanding its price.
In fact much of the progress is not looking like progress at all.

The instability causing things
refugee crisis in Europe
Brexit
Race relation ships in the US grow worse
person like Donald Trump is a potential presidential candidate for the most powerful country on earth
Russia Ukrain Turkey
Steady growth of Isis
Radical Islam keeps getting a stronger grip in the wider world.
Left wingers going so far left as to give rise to right wingers.
Such things and much worse  have been happening all over the world last 60 years, then why are things in Europe/US more important. Frankly they are. So called World war does not mean it involves the world, it means the powerful Europe and America are part of it.

Mindless/heartless science
What was Sci-fi is becoming a reality.
Robots -  robot was used to kill a  guy by US police, albeit it was remote controlled robot
we all have our heads so much in virtual reality, everything is online and hackers are getting closer and closer
GMO - I love the idea of resurrecting dinosaurs but I dont like insect resistant potatoes or non seeding hybrids or humans who can live for ever X-(
GMO for food to prevent world hunger(??) why we waste away 1000 of kilos of food because it is ugly
Reality of the food /farming industry - Treating animals like objects, literally without imagining that there is life in them
Designer babies - gene selected babies, GMO people, rich people will have better genes than poor people, people will live for ever and not die?
Reality of the advertising industry - how much we have been fooled, from soap to mouth wash to eating cereals and avoiding fats to Teflon. Everything you know so far is probably a lie, told by advertisers in 1950s
Short-sighted science/ aimless science - we are spending more researching how to grow hair on bald heads than on curing Ebola.
World spending pattern, how blind we are. we spend so much on make-up and sports and movies. We dont give a shit about world hunger, we are only going to make GM wheat which will slim you down or something .
Difference in economic status between countries..

Most of it was always there in the world, world suffering is probably less now, in-spite of all these things but we never had the power to destroy ourselves and earth along with us before.
Population bomb - population of  of 7.4 billion, Nuclear bombs, Genetic engineering are scariest but thats not the most dangerous, , plain old meddling is good enough, hunt away animals to extinction just for food, cut away forests for food, consume like crazy. more than anything else.
Consumption is scaring me, for this long in the history of earth last 3 billions years or so, earth had enough raw material to sustain life. Are we doing to run out of basic raw material to sustain life? ( this is for another post.

Earth will survive, life will survive, I am genuinely scared about the fate of human race.