More taboos

Imagine that Noe missed the boat. No more humans on earth! No pollution, no global warming, no depletion of natural resources, no plastic. Would that be an improvement or do you think that something would be missing on earth? The time may have come to look inside us and face our taboos. Here is a list of some of them.

Maximum occupancy

If, some day, the stock market demonstrates such enthusiasm, we will expect a correction.

Our problems of pollution, plastic, global warming… have a common cause. Two centuries ago, we created machine to make life easier for the farmers. That was good but we abused it. We let the world’s population increase to the point that it was multiplied by 10. We were thinking as separate individuals instead of thinking as member of the human species. We have 1.4 billion hectares of arable soil on earth. They can support about 10 billion people if all of them are vegetarians. We have reached 8 billion and many of us are not vegetarian. Mother Nature has her own solution to this kind of problems. When there are too many preys, she increases the number of predators until they die of starvation and everybody gets back in line. Our predators are microbes, viruses, bacteria… We don’t talk about it because there is no easy solution. Nature is in control – not humans

Our concept of "Life" could use some improvements:

So far we assumed that life is limited to humans and anything smaller, such as cats, dogs and microbes. To attach life to something bigger than a human body goes against our nature. Do you think that the sun could be alive? The Gaia hypothesis is an attempt to get us out of our limitations. It assumes that planet earth is a living organism. There is no reason to assume that life in the vast universe is limited to our size. How can we look at the sky and decide that it is a cemetery? The solar system, the Milky Way and millions of other galaxies could also be "alive". A black hole could be, to the earth, what death is to man. There could be life in the light that we receive from our sun and a different life coming from other suns.

Love

Could Love be implemented in different ways at different levels? At a lower level it is limited to sexual attraction. We expect more, much more! We expect powerful feelings. Where can we find them? We start by searching for love is other people. There could be a better way. Instead of looking outside, we may have to look inside. Can love percolate in us from higher levels? What we are looking for may be part of the love for the world and the love for the universe. If we are successful this may be more than we can handle. We could be crushed by lightning while looking for electricity.

Our soil is getting depleted:

Our skeleton is renewed four times a year. That requires a lot of calcium. This calcium must come from our food and our food comes from the soil. Can we extract calcium from the soil indefinitely? We use fertilizers. That may not be enough. Calcium is only one of 90 nutrients that we need to stay in good health. Can our soil get depleted of nutrients like it is getting depleted of oil? You may think that you have the right to know but this is taboo.

Every death before 120 years is a premature death:

The human body is made to live between 120 and 140 years. Medicine and better hygiene have prolonged our life expectancy from 30 years to 80 years. This is great but the battle is not over. We are only halfway.

In the first half of the development of medicine, we could use our linear thinking: One group of symptoms, one illness, one virus, one vaccine. The second half may be different. Viruses try to survive by making variants to defeat the vaccines. Everything becomes more complicated. One assortment of causes could produce one assortment of consequences and the link between them could vary with each patient. This is more than what a linear thinking can handle.

Nuclear close calls:

We survived 16 close calls to nuclear annihilation. Is this nothing more than good luck?

A good example of a ‘nuclear close call’ is what happened in Goldsboro, North Carolina on 24th January 1961 where a B-52 stratofortress carrying 3 nuclear bombs broke up in mid-air. Many of the safety devices did not work. Only a single switch prevented the bomb from detonating. An atomic bomb exploding could have triggered retaliation and start WWIII. We were lucky. At least we thought that it was ‘luck’. What is puzzling is that ‘luck’ saved us from complete annihilation 16 times! It happened in 1956 - 1960 - 1961 (twice) - 1962 (twice) - 1965 - 1967 - 1969 - 1973 - 1979 - 1980 - 1983 – 1983 - 1991 - 1995.

Can we still rely on luck today? Does luck come with an expiration date? Do we have a monopoly or can luck move from one country to another? Would it be possible that some superior beings, up there, much more developed than us, are taking care of us like we take care of our cows and our chickens? Could they use planet earth as their farm?

There are many more taboos. Add your own in the comments.