The beginning of the end

It may all end one day. Life as we know it might not exist. No, I am not a doomsday prophet predicting another Armageddon. I am just a history buff noticing certain repeating patterns, which I shall try to present here.

Beginning of life

Life started on Earth in the form of microbes that came together despite the odds. With such coming together, life branched out into a diversity of forms, species, habitats, habits and looks. Amid such diversity and plurality came the earliest humans. The ones who learned to team up with each other in their quest for food and survival. Imagine the odds they were up against. There had been mass extinctions before and the dominant species of the time, the mighty dinosaurs, had been wiped out. What chance did this ape-like creature have?

 

Homo sapien prevails

Still, man prevailed. Whether it was the ice age or the warm age, humans showed remarkable resilience by following the rhythms of nature and trusting each other. Back in those days of nascent life, human beings were comrades-in-arms. Moving around in groups, they became hunter-gatherers, even hunting down dangerous animals twice their size by sheer teamwork. Among the different sub-species of human beings, Homo Sapiens prevailed upon the others, including the mighty Neanderthals – who they beat not with brute strength but with the power of their intellect.

Indeed, the last rivalry Sapiens faced was with the Neanderthals, who were bigger, stronger but not necessarily better. That is because Sapiens recognised their intelligence and used it to make tools, tame nature and eventually come up with inventions which gave them a better chance of survival. The Sapien brain withstood everything from disease causing virus and bacteria to tectonic shifts.

After having outdone the Neanderthals, we mastered the art of feeding ourselves and could finally live in one place, building houses, settlements, communities, societies and civilisations.

Homo Sapien was a success story founded on teamwork and intelligence.

 

Seeds of destruction

What would happen if we were to let go of these values? In the past, dominant species were decimated by cataclysms that led to mass extinctions. It is these mass extinctions that often closed one epoch and began the other. So far, humans have defied any attempt by nature to cut them to size. But what if nature planted the seeds of our destruction in our own minds, knowing full well that we would water them ourselves?

Our greed knows no bounds and we have managed to alter the climate of our planet, perhaps irrevocably. We still do not have a clear idea of the consequences of such a change and we are not about to stop the change either. We continue to cut down our forests and pollute our land, water and air. Already our winters are shorter, our summers longer and more intense. Our food is toxic and our appetites insatiable.

We are also ripping apart the values with which our African ancestors ensured our survival. Instead of working together as a team, we have numerous small groups based on religions, regions, castes, classes et al. These groups are constantly at war, for which we develop vicious weapons, unmindful of their effect on the whole planet.

Like dogs and other animals, we fight mindlessly for imagined territories – sometimes it could be about the different brand names of God, sometimes, about ideology.

In the recent past, at least a few world governments wanting to wield unquestioned power has reviled intelligence of all kinds. Intellectuals are being called out and persecuted. In our country, we have been particularly unforgiving towards intellectuals, going to the extent of killing them because they speak out.

Over the past decade or so, we have ripped apart the two values that ensured our survival – teamwork and intelligence.

If climate change does not kill us, the viruses we get exposed to as we clear vast swathes of forests will. If we somehow we escape the virus, we will kill each other over imagined slights.

In the end however, it seems nature will cut the dominant species to size, yet again.