DOOMSDAY AND BEYOND
My post World War-III assumptions look like a page taken out of a sci-fi story. I hope the learned and intelligent life form called mankind would never let my fantastic post world war assumption to become a reality.
Human beings are an aberration on the face of earth. Although there are many intelligent life forms like dolphins and elephants, but none could come nearer to humans in terms of IQs and other abilities that make us social animals. We have colonized the planet that even perhaps the dinosaurs were not able to do in the antiquity. Although it is widely agreed that the doom of dinosaurs were due to extra terrestrial events, however the doomsday of human beings will be due to our own irrational behaviors – more specifically our own human emotions.
Have we ever wondered what is the strongest and the weakest human emotions? Some may say, fear, greed, love, hatred, etc., but I have an assumption. Before I come to the strongest human emotion, which surprisingly would lead to our annihilation, let me come to the weakest human emotion.
Empathy is the weakest among human emotions. We know the unending hunger crisis and death of millions every year due to malnutrition, and because we don’t feel empathic to those who suffer, we, instead of helping them, spend money in buying weapons and engage in naked display of animalistic instinct to kill or get killed. There are numerous places where we can divert our war funding, like against hunger, diseases or illiteracy, but no; we don’t do that because we are not empathic. At most, we try to be sympathetic and show a fake display of concern, now and then.
Having come face to face with our hypocrisy, let us turn into the strongest human emotion, which I believe is the root cause of all conflicts. And, that is attachment. We are attach to our kind, and because of such irrational attachment, the world suffers in perpetual wars and conflicts. When conflict breaks out between two religious communities, say in one part of a country, conflicts erupt in other parts of the country between people of the same religious communities, who have co-existed peacefully for ages. The irrationality of the situation is that those who are killing in one part of the country has no direct relation with those now killing for the sake of their religion in the other parts of the country. Yet, they do such illogical actions, because they feel attached to their respective religion and because of that, they don’t hesitate to kill their neighbors of many years for those distant unknown people, just because they share the same religion.
A third world war will break out eventually. And this time, unlike the two previous wars, the fight would not be due to imperialism or between ‘evil’ and ‘good’ but due to dogmas – religious and political dogmas. And the root cause for the existence of such dogmas is the human emotion of attachment. Moreover, the third world war – I have no doubt – will be a nuclear war that would wipe out the majority of mankind, and the resultant damage to the biosphere. Nuclear clouds would shroud the earth for close to a century as the half life of radioactive weapons is typically close to a hundred years. This would create major problems for the survivors.
The radioactivity would force the survivors to dwell underground. For close to a century, they would be devoid of sunlight. The subsequent generations would evolutionarily have larger eyes and thin limbs, pale skin and enlarged head due to adaptive cavernicolous changes. There would be no impetus on how beautiful one looks. Survival would be more important than looking beautiful. The research of that time would solely be on space travel and plant propagation. Another important field of research would be to survive on liquid nutrition, derived chemically, as food production will virtually end. This would also lead to decay of the digestive system, as without conventional food, the need for the alimentary tract will become unnecessary. And probably, there would be an intermittent end of religion from the face of earth, until centuries later, when the population number will reach a certain mass and the need to control them would be felt that religion will make a comeback.
My post World War-III assumptions look like a page taken out of a sci-fi story. I hope the learned and intelligent life form called mankind would never let my fantastic post world war assumption to become a reality.