CORONA VIRUS AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY.

THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY IS NOT INTENDED TO BE FACETIOUS

Nevertheless, we have been given a warning as to the ever-present possibility of a species-threatening epidemic.

Corona Virus, though it could kill you and I at any time, and despite the massive world-wide precautions, is causing a very mild inconvenience to the human race. There are far more likely ways to die out there.

We humans have been buggering the planet for fifty thousand years. Well, perhaps not the planet, but parts thereof. In the case of Australia, for example, a little-known fact is that the first human settlers realised that the easiest, quickest way of getting a feed was to set fire to the place and pick up the dying, smouldering carcasses. This is shortly after slaughtering all the big indigenous creatures and running out of easy food. Forty thousand years of continent-wide conflagrations have resulted in the staggering impoverishment of fauna and flora we see today.

At the present time, and planet-wide, the last ten thousand years has seen the human race exterminate vast numbers of species, altering for ever the landscape, and no doubt, the climate. The last two hundred years has seen an acceleration of all the above desecration.

No-one is to blame. Neither the first of many different islanders who landed in Australia, nor any of the industrialists, farmers, or air-travelers of the planet today. It’s what we do. We bugger the place. You’d think the iconic koala of Australia would be a precious beast, having miraculously survived forty-thousand years of conflagrations as a food source; but no, it’s on the brink of extinction, outside of a zoo.

But surely we have learned, by now? Absolutely not. We will inevitably eat and shit ourselves out of a viable planet. At an accelerating rate. Good intentions, and we all have them, are insufficient. Laws are insufficient.

Only technology and industrial farming-practice has allowed food-production to keep pace with population-growth. This, of course, cannot last. One nasty bug can destroy a whole genetically-engineered grain crop. Then we wait whilst a resistant seed is invented.

The fact is that we have right now, in the year 2020, reached what the future will call the point of no return. Our effect on the air, the oceans, the tree-cover, and biodiversity is judged to be irreversible. Only scientists involved in the  current study of their earth-disciplines are aware of the true nature of the breakdown, and the vast and permanent changes in climate and ocean that will inevitably take place, to our detriment. Watch this space.

Regardless of the myriad causes of this situation, and we all know the basic problems; burning fossil fuel, clearing forests, polluting and over-fishing the oceans, et cetera, there is only one basic instigator: population.

Any weed species, and we are one, is capable of out-breeding its environment, to its own detriment and demise. Humanity is on the brink of doing just that. However, there is one drastic safety-valve: an endemic monoculture, of which we are a part, is most susceptible to disease. Having a nearly identical genetic code, every human on the planet is susceptible to the latest virus. That is, because we are such an international mob, all of us.

We are are right now experiencing a warning of the dangers of pandemics, and not before time. It has been suggested that this version of Corona Virus has been engineered in laboratories by humans against humans. It is easy to see great economic benefit to a country that has wiped-out its old and infirm; the work force is intact, the financial drain of the aged eliminated, housing is suddenly in great supply, hospitals cleared of geriatrics. An open field for young workers and entrepeneurs.

But supposing a virus appeared, and swept through the world community like Covid 19, but killed 90% of all humans……

Here, right now, is an example of a pandemic. Extrapolate the effect of 90% reduction of population; the remaining 10% may not be able to support itself. The collapse of farming itself would be catastrophic. You see the warning we are at present experiencing. There is little we could do in the face of a more virulent virus. Think of the engineered myxomatosis and calcivirus in rabbits, and what something similar could do to us.

I offer no solution. The only real solution is a reduction in population. China’s one-child policy was an amazing exercise of state control, hated, and with horrendous numbers of aborted females. We seem not to be able to limit population-growth: it must be forced upon us by outside agencies: disease, crop failure and starvation, economic breakdown, mass unemployment, and, of course war and nuclear disaster. No-one will volunteer not to have children; children just happen, or not.

So, how do we react to this Corona Virus warning? Isolation of individuals. How should we react to a virulent, 90% virus? The same, but in utter desperation, a case of live or die for all of us. And the effect? Who knows?