A moment of our time – part 11

Revisiting part 11 of my “A moment of our time”.

A normal moment for you might be completely alien for another inhabitant of planet Earth. Let’s assume some extremes. You get in your car and drive to the office. Very normal you might think but not to some fisherman living a subsistence lifestyle half way across the world who has just cast his net. Both moments are a loading on the planet’s finite resources. Could the fisherman ever achieve your lifestyle without depleting Earth’s resources even further? No it’s not possible unless we start ripping up the sea and ocean floors by unsustainably mining them. So for humans to have a limited number of sustainable moments there must be a limit to the number of humans. Below is part 11. The actual human population has increased since I wrote the piece. As I have probably mentioned already by 80,000,000 in the 366 days of 2020, the equivalent of 10 Switzerlands in merely a year.

“So, where am I going with this book? Good question. I am trying to describe in the limitations of human language what happens from one of our moments to the next. To me this is very important and for you it should be too. Why is that you may ask? It is because at the start of 2019 there are 7,600,000,000+ human individuals like you and I alive today. So many that we have gone beyond the carrying capacity of this planet to support us. There are all these biological units and all that matters to them from one moment to the next are the people, places and circumstances around them. Are they making choices based on what all the other biological units are doing? Probably not. Are the politicians, the supposed leaders of our societies, thinking about the consequences of all the actions of all the people they represent in terms of say the next ten years or the next fifty years? Probably not. Everything may seem fine in your little bubble and the passing of each moment of your life but the changes happening in the background are changing the world on which we live. It may not affect you in the next few moments or in all the moments of your life but at some point even if it does not affect you then it will affect one of your descendants. These changes may bring humanity to an end. Would that be a bad thing? Only for the humans. Earth has survived perfectly well for thousands of millions of years before we split from our last closest cousin some seven million years ago. Again these are all human terms. As I mentioned we count the rotations around the sun as a way of referencing the passing of time. Some individuals still have sacred rituals related to that very ordinary roughly circular motion about the sun. Earth and the universe does not care and the planet will bury us just like it has buried the most famous of life forms that we can think of, the dinosaurs.”