August 15, 2015
Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
Ecclesiastes 1:4
(…) among you stands one whom you don't know.
John 1:26
For Lu.
It means that the planet Earth suffers negligible effects due to whatever kind of human action, because of the material insignificance of the human population as compared to the physical constitution of the planet. In terms of mass: the Earth's mass is 6,000 billion gigatonnes and the mass of the current human population is 7 billion × 70 kg, that is, 0.5 gigaton (1 gigaton = 1 billion tonnes). What can 0,5 against 6,000 billion, by whatever means, including the use of nuclear artifacts? The planet is not the least bit, therefore. Other interesting comparative numerical figures are in the article Global warming: human action?, where I challenge the significance of human action with respect to global warming, and suggest that the latter is most probably related to non human natural causes.
The really important question is to save modern civilization, in other words, to save humanity.
How many times, in the past, entire civilizations disintegrated and disappeared? A countless number of projects of human societies disappeared, leaving behind only material vestiges that prove their existences. I exemplify (dates are only indicatives).
• Human society of Stonehenge in Great Britain (3000 BC)
• Prehistoric Egyptian empire in present Egypt (3000 BC)
• Mayan empire in Central America (1000 BC)
• Khmer empire at Angkor in Cambodia (X century)
• Incan empire in Peru (XIV century)
• Aztec empire in Mexico (XV century)
These civilizations disappeared or dispersed to originate new civilizations. What
are left are only vestiges of their extraordinary material realizations, deteriorated
by the inexorable work of time. The planet changed very little and suffered nothing
with the dramatic events — in its majority environment catastrophes
— that drove the destruction of these societies, which were flourishing and rich
in their apogees. The planet suffered or suffers nothing with such transformations.
“In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes”,
wrote Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), the French sage. One can modify slightly such an
aphorism to the specific context of the planet:
“In the planet Earth, nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything
changes”
The planet changes itself. The fragility of the human civilizations that inhabited the
planet since prehistoric ages is enormous when compared to the solidity of the planet.
Thus, we do not need to worry about the planet because the planet will remain. We do
need to worry about the human civilization. This suffered drastic transformations in the past
and is at serious risk in the present.
A new civilization is in the process of gestation. The noise and the brightness of the dominant human civilization make it difficult to notice such a process. We shall not doubt that it is occurring. One perceives at times glimpses of the new that is evolving, but we cannot identify it with clarity. It is certain that the gestation is in plain progress because “to save the human civilization” means in reality “to create a new human civilization”. The latter will not repeat the errors of the one that is going away, but it will have its own, which will eventually take it to an end. And history will repeat itself until the end of time, which I shall not dare to speculate about.