HUMANS, THE HIGHEST LIFE FORM. SERIOUSLY!

Apartment Block in Huangzhou, China, housing 11,000 to 22,000 people

Most creatures on this planet spend their lives fighting for survival, but there is one exception - humans.  We consider ourselves to be superior to all the others based on our ability to reason, communicate, invent and have dominion over the rest.  However, in direct contradiction to all this cleverness, is our determination to drive ourselves to extinction.  It is worth noting that no other creature on the planet shares this death wish.  We are supposed to be blessed with foresight, but to all appearances, we aren't using it as we breed ourselves out of existence.

While we turn a global blind eye to population and ignore exponential equations and extrapolation, clever, socially isolated scientists and billionaires are working on ways to send humans to colonize Mars and even further afield.  Firstly, would you really want to live on a barren red planet?  Secondly, there's no place like home and, thirdly, those scientists and billionaires aren't planning on taking a whole lot of people with them.  Can you imagine eight billion people fitting into, say, five to ten space vehicles?  No, you can't.  The resources required to achieve it, let alone in time, simply don't exist.  For such a huge population, the idea is simply unfeasible.

So, let's grow up and stop blaming the burning of fossil fuels, et al, for climate change, shall we?  Those fossils fuels are being burned to sustain the energy needs, industry and travel needs of eight billion people.  The number of cows farting out methane is also based on the number of them being bred to feed the non-vegetarian humans of this world.  Let's also consider the rocket launches, and their associated fuel use, to send satellites into space to feed our addiction to mobile phones and the internet.  Aren't you just a little bit amazed that when a news bulletin shows you images of people in war torn parts of Africa (also courtesy of satellites), where the fleeing residents and rebels are equipped with mobile phones even though they are, apparently, poor?

I also see, via news reports, young, healthy, properly clothed (that is, not in rags) African men overloaded in boats crossing the Mediterranean to escape to a better life.  Some boats include women and children, of course, and some are genuine refugees, but access to the internet in these countries has, I believe, given the people in these poorer countries, an idealized view of life in Europe and elsewhere.  Europe is buckling under the deluge of them.  It is one thing to help immigrants, it is quite another to create economic chaos in your own country so that your own people will need to flee it to get work in the long run.

At base, this comes down to massive overpopulation as well.  Of course, there is a struggle to survive in many African countries.  It's because it is overpopulated and there is also massive corruption.  The overseers of such countries may appear on the media in their tailor-made suits or military uniforms loaded with braid and masses of medals, but no one is actually doing much of anything and that is why they are always having coups, which keep Medecins Sans Frontiers busier than a department store on Christmas Eve.  Coups also just take power from one bunch of corrupt politicians and gives it to another.

Now, getting people to breed less in Africa is a very big ask and I don't really need to spell out why.  China and India really need to get their acts together and address their population issues, by which I mean, they need to make a plan to stabilize their populations.  It will require rigorous education programs, incentives and financial disincentives.   All countries should do the same thing before it gets to the very unpleasant situation of people killing each other for food.

If you don't see that happening in the next thirty to forty years, remember that you are supposedly the species at the top of the evolutionary scale and you have foresight.  I have had people abuse me on Facebook when I have responded to posts regarding population.  I have been moderate and have only suggested people think about where the world population is heading, suggesting couples do not exceed three children.  No one wants a one child only policy, such as the one that failed in China.  I have had women telling me off, saying they can have as many children as they want, it's not my business.  Well, yes, it is my business.  It's everybody's.  They don't live on another planet, and I share this one with them.  The worry is that these people, who do not think of the world they are creating for their offspring, are the ones creating more just like them.

I'm not a dictator, I can only suggest that people think.  It is circumstances that will eventually dictate to us as a species.  Do you think that, if you were invited on one of those rockets taking a very few to a space colony, that there wouldn't be a hierarchy?  It sure won't be Utopia and no one is going to let you breed more than the oxygen supply will support.

I know this is a contentious post but I'm just SO tired of hearing about fossil fuels being the reason for climate change.  The latter is the follow on, the result, of sustaining a population that really can't afford to grow bigger until it finds a more efficient way to produce energy.  Even if we do, do you want to end up living in a high rise such as the one shown on Facebook the other day in Huangzhou, that houses up to twenty-two thousand people?  Do you want the whole world to be as crowded as China and India?

Do you want to crowd the planet so much that other species become extinct? Oh, sorry, that's already happening.  Do you want to beauty of this exceptional planet to be sacrificed for our not very exceptional and transient species?  I'm just grateful I've been able to live here while there is still magnificence left.  If you dream of living in a totally artificial environment to the one that you evolved to fit, go for it, but please leave this Earth intact.

END

SEVEN DAYS A WEEK.

 

Image credit: Pinterest - author unknown (emulating Charles Schulz).

As I come to terms with my recent retirement, one day at a time, searching for meaning and losing track of what day it is, I came to wonder why a week is seven days.  I did a little research, although I had an inkling that the Torah and then the Bible may have had something to do with it.

It seems that our seven-day week arose in Mesopotamia some four thousand years ago.  I quote from: Chronicles of chronology: The power of seven,” Economist, 2001-12-20: - 

"The Sumerians … worshipped seven gods whom they could see in the sky. Reverently, they named the days of their week for these seven heavenly bodies … For the Sumerians themselves, seven was a very special number. They conceived of a seven-branched Tree of Life, and of seven heavens … In spite of all that, Ur’s seventh day was not holy. On the contrary, it represented danger and darkness. It was risky to do anything at such a time. So it became a day of rest. Ever since the time when Abraham trekked westward from Ur, Mesopotamian influences had helped to form Hebrew traditions."

 My guess is that the Sumerians concept of time influenced the Hebrew Bible's creation story, and the Christian Bible.  No other religions' creation stories limit it to seven days, or six, if you will, plus a day of rest.

Anyone acquainted with the Christian bible knows about its version of the creation:  it starts with, "In the beginning", and goes on to say that God took six days to make the heavens and the Earth, and on the seventh he rested.  It doesn't say why God decided to create the universe and, apparently, he didn't have a beginning, which implies that time only started to exist when God took up the hobby of Creation.

With time, however, civilizations imposed the names of their own gods on days of the week, once seven days became the norm.  I could go into how each day of the week came to get its name in English, French or German, etc., but basically, they can all be traced back to gods, Roman, German, Norse and so on.

It is interesting that other segments of time, such as a month and a year, were not defined by the religious aspect but by the natural movement of the Earth's rotation around the Sun and the moon's rotation around the Earth.  That's what makes the number seven, a unnatural choice for a segment of time.  But woe to those in history who have tried to change it by making the 'week' longer, from the Egyptians to Napoleon.  They did not have long term success.  The seven-day week is, to my knowledge, now globally accepted and religion doesn't come into it.  Well, it does, in that different religions have different days of rest, but still incorporated into the seven-day allotment.

What I was also contemplating about the week, was the different feelings each day of the week elicits in us.  Each day has a different vibe for each of us for personal reasons and based on life experience.  I think that we all have favourite, and not so favourite, days.  This is, no doubt, because of the pattern of life, work and recreation that the seven-day segment of time creates.  I also feel that we pace ourselves according to this arbitrary slice of time.  Songs are dedicated to certain days of the week and the emotional effect they produce in us.

Monday has a bad reputation simply because it's the start of the working week, but it does motivate us.  We glimpse the shining lights of Saturday and Sunday in the distance and work towards them.  "Rainy Days and Mondays (always get me down)", by the Carpenters pretty much sums up most people's attitude to the poor benighted day.

Tuesday manages to keep its head under the radar of being typecast as we settle into the working week and put at least one day behind us.  Wednesday, I have only recently discovered, is known as Hump Day.  We've reached the top of the hill at mid-working-week and can now coast downhill.  Thursday we're almost at the finishing line but not quite.  There is a restrained sense of optimism about it, but by Friday, the horse has broken into a canter, and nothing will hold it back.

Friday has always been, Thank God It's Friday, even if you aren't religious.  It's like a fever that's broken after the 'flu.  It's time for whoopee.  

As a child, I loved Sundays.  Saturday was the weekend too, of course, but Sunday seemed special somehow.  Dad would drag me off to church on that day regularly, but it was our time together.  My mother was a Church of England but, basically, just Christian.  Dad, on the other hand, was the product of a devout Irish Catholic mother who died before I was born.  Dad was, simply, the nicest man on the planet in my estimation, and that remains my opinion to this day.

Once home, he would read the Sunday paper and would give me the comics section from the middle.  I would read this as I lay sprawled on the living room floor from the age of five.  Sunday would roll on in its salubrious and unhurried way and Dad would usually end up mowing the lawn, then napping on the sofa.  We would usually watch a matinee on television after lunch in winter.  In summer we might go to the beach.  My mother was a fabulous entertainer and, often, Sundays included guests to a barbeque that Dad cooked on the patio accompanied by salads, baked potatoes in their jackets and ratatouille cooked by Mum.  All this would be eaten overlooking the beautiful bay of Pittwater north of Sydney.

These were the happiest days of my life, and so I rate Sundays as my best day of the week.  They were also filled, eventually, with sadness as I had to return to my hated boarding school on Monday for the week until Friday and, for me, these days were a torment until I left school.  I no longer attend church on Sunday.  Nature is my church, and I haven't found one with as much God in it as the small one at Mona Vale, on the northern beaches of Sydney that Dad and I attended together.

It's now hard enough for me not working weekdays let alone trying to remember what day it is.  A rhythm has been removed from my life that I found quite satisfactory.  It's good when things have a beginning, a middle and an end.  It gives one an anchor, a map and a destination.  Time may not be tangible, but it sure feels like it, forgive the pun.  Perhaps that's an interesting thing to note about human nature; we can take something abstract and give it form.

I'm now trying to find something to fill the form.  I had a pattern to my life but now I need a passion to work on.  When I find it, I'm going to apply my pattern to it again so I can get my rhythm back.

Wish me luck.

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