It was Saturday afternoon and we were sitting in the holding area of Orchard Central, when Ethan suddenly mentioned that human society has progressed a long way. We first started in stone age, moved on to the bronze age, innovated into the industrial age, leaped right after into the age of Information and we finally landed ourselves in the age of stupid.
“What the hell is that?” I was totally puzzled at first and asked him to explain himself.
“We humans are now in the process of slowly killing ourselves by destroying our environment and depleting natural resources, we all know it but we all choose to do nothing about it.” He explained concisely the summation of this age.
After giving it some thought, I concurred totally with what he said and replied “yeah that is totally true bro. The way I see it now there are only two options available for us. Option one, we achieve a quantum leap to drastically improve energy efficiency in our technology. Option two, we cull off a major part of our world’s human population changing it from its current standing figure of 6,697,254,041 to something drastically lesser. ”
In terms of ecology, our species is relatively high up in the food chain of our environment. Traditionally, the further up the food chain a species, the lesser its population as compared to those lower in the food chain (pictorially represented like a pyramid structure). However perhaps due to unpredicted but high impact occurrence like the discovery of agriculture and fire as a tool, the essence of the human as a species started to evolve somewhere in history. Humans thereafter managed to break free on the environmental constrains that had till then been successful at keep their numbers in check.
If we did an X-ray of our environment today and assuming that humans are finally at the top of the food chain, what we should observe is that while the traditional pyramid structure is still in place (though somewhat leaner now) there is now a exceedingly large flat chunk at the top (represented none other than the human population). Ecologically, this is highly unstable structure. We are in fact exerting a lot of pressure on our environment by imposing such a ecological structure on it.
Contemplating on these two options available and the inability to execute them, I could only sigh helplessly.
Option one while being pursued and evangelized by some minorities is not being progressing as fast as it should as the major bulk of us are spending our time with our eyes glued to our work, slogging really hard to pay bills, meet deadlines or acquire our first POT OF GOLD?!? (in the context of Singapore: that idiot that proposed the 5 Cs as a mark of success and went around spreading this message to the other idiots who bought that bullshit lock stock and barrel should be shot and killed!)
I had the opportunity last year to visit the Shan Dong province of China. Alena and her friends were in the hotel room I was residing in then. While they were busy playing some games using the stack of poker cards, I went and looked out the window. Alena noticing that I was studying the scenery outside could not help but bragged “Wei Fang is one of the most beautiful cities in Shan dong and Shan Dong is economically the strongest province in the whole of China.”
I wonder if she would have made the same statement had she saw the expression on my face instead of just my back view.
“Really?” I finally responded. “Look at the soot being emitted from all the surrounding factories as well as the piles of trash lying around beside streets. Why are the factory owners not taking steps to reduce the levels of soot emitted into the air. Don’t the mainland Chinese government have some regulations to control this.”
“Look you are the only person that is naive and innocent enough to ponder and waste your time thinking about all these useless issues. These people are big bosses. They have lots of money, they drive big car, live in big houses, who gives a shit about what they do to the environment as a result. So long as money keep coming in its good enough. Even if we are not the big bosses yet, here in China we just want to concern ourselves with making money so that we will become big bosses one day ourselves too.”
“Wow. Alena this idiot you brought from Singapore really has his heads in the clouds.” one of her girls comment and everyone broke out laughing.
“Ok then I rest my case. But just remember that all of you are women, you will bear kids one day and your kids will have their own kids. Somewhere along the way this environment of yours will become so screwed up, these kids might in fact come forth to this world deformed, with three limbs or four eyes. They will look like you still but they will be deformed.”
“shh..! don’t interrupt me from winning money. ”
Well, there goes option one.
The notion of choosing option two is totally out of the question unless of course you consider yourself a member in the same league as Osama Bin Laden, Hitler, Mussolini. However upon closer inspection, the existence of such a character might not even be necessary afterall. Just simply observe the trends lately, it seems most areas in the northern hemisphere has been experiencing natural disasters of late, with tons of destruction done to the existing infrastructure in those places. Seems like while mother nature has been very kind and accommodating to our non-sense till now, she is slowly but surely taking steps to cull off our population.