Mayday, planet Earth in danger!

Immoderate overconsumption: Mayday, planet Earth in danger! How is that? Is it necessary to excel in the theory of predictability and to master all its parameters to affirm that this unbridled overconsumption underlying the obsession with our exclusive well-being and our small comfort inexorably leads us towards a fatal future? Let us try and see what it is all about.

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Immoderate overconsumption: Mayday, planet Earth in danger!

Even if all the indicators and threats to the perpetuation of our species turn red and flash desperately to warn us of an imminent end, humans seem to have developed a chronic blindness that prevents them from assessing the dangers in which they have been entangled for decades.

Is it necessary to excel in the theory of predictability and to master all its parameters to affirm that this unbridled overconsumption underlying the obsession with our exclusive well-being and our small comfort inexorably leads us towards a fatal extinction much sooner than Mother Nature had planned?

Embarked on a giant liner that he has brazenly built for himself at the expense of all the other animal species that share this small pebble lost in the Universe called planet Earth, with the sole concern of enjoying cruises that look like superior happiness, Man navigates in an ocean on which many dangers float.

Thanks to increasingly precise and efficient technologies, it has been able to bypass and avoid a series of icebergs that have caused severe damage without sinking (Chornobyl, Fukushima, hurricanes Harvey, Irma, José, or Maria, etc.).

The paradox of his supposed intelligence superior to that of the other animal species is that he arrogates to himself the right to mistreat on land, in the seas and the air; instead of serving as lessons to take a step back and humility, it gives him, on the contrary, the impression of being even more incredible, unsinkable and invincible in the face of all the hazards spread on his path by a mother nature who does not like her rules too much be jostled by his creatures.

Although various onboard instruments tell him that he is heading straight for a fatal iceberg that will send him to the bottom of the abyss if he does not reduce his cruising speed, which is swallowing up more fuel and vital reserves, he refuses to slow down and moderate his primal instincts, eager for overconsumption.

He, the superior creature of the Universe, will no doubt imagine him knowing how to find a way to escape the ultimate catastrophe when the danger is more significant. Besides, has not the heavens ever abandoned him to any sad fate since messengers conveyed to him the good word of it to reassure him of their blessing and guarantee him his protection?

At what interval is this iceberg fatal to humanity, which the heavens had not foreseen? A few decades, at most, announce the most pessimistic!

A few hundred for the optimists. But where is the difference, in terms of cosmic duration, for which the history of our millennia of evolution, punctuated by many wars and conquests of the strongest over the lands of the weakest, represents little more than the equivalent of a few ridiculous microseconds on the time scale of the Universe? With the origin of the cosmic broth of the Big Bang, during which our destiny was played out billions of years ago. It shows the urgency of collective awareness and solutions that imply firm and imminent commitments on the part of each producer and each consumer in the four corners of the five continents, the only guarantees to perpetuate this miracle of Life that took billions of years to make, before giving birth to its favourite creature on a tiny point of a cosmic geometry that extends over billions of light years!

Such an emergency requires every planet-wide inhabitant to become immediately aware of the need to encourage moderate consumption, the antithesis of recent shopping trips. Against a backdrop of almost general overexcitement, fanned by a series of Black Fridays tempting for the consumer, the consumer is increasingly pushed to insane overconsumption beyond his control.

Boosted, like an unconscious zombie, by seductive displays displayed without restraint or any sobriety on the net, on TV and in the supermarket as the end-of-year celebrations approach!

These immoderate and quasi-instinctive behaviours are far from reassuring about any temperance of the appetites, increasingly voracious, of the “homo-consumer” Influenced by an even more greedy grip of a “homo-products” blinded by easy gains and profits that have stripped his soul of any responsible vision of the irreversible damage that his insatiable thirst for possession causes to the planet and, as an inevitable corollary, the threats to the very survival of humanity.

These agitated, incessant, and thoughtless races against time to find the best deal, the best object at a low price, and the latest cheap technological toy have transformed man into a voracious consumer.

He does not bother with reflection to meditate and take an informed look to gauge the scope of these quasi-instinctive and spontaneous gestures of buying anything and everything, as long as it smells the right deal, the deal not to be missed to save more and consume more later; A kind of infernal spiral and the vicious circle that hardly let escape the person, that is to say, all of us, who rushes into it, without having in mind before the final gesture of going to the checkout that each purchase, each purchase, each slight deviation in consumption that exceeds the bare necessities of Life is one more blow to natural reserves that are being depleted at full speed.

Who is to blame? The consumer or the producer? How can we end this vicious circle of people wanting to live better and better? The producer must produce more, and the consumer must consume more.

There is no miracle recipe in the hands of a single or a group of individuals, not even that of a country, even if it is called the United States (Donald Trump aside). It is a collective involvement with which every inhabitant of the planet must feel concerned, except those forgotten lands where famine is still raging while others are working to get the planet Mars and the Moon!

But isn’t it too late, given these consumption models based on incessant advertisements and enticing appeals made by all communication networks?

Advertisements that push you to buy even what you don’t need or very little. It’s all well and good to live in an era of high technology that gives height and grandeur to the majority of the planet’s inhabitants, but you still have to know how to control its harmful effects by reducing all kinds of waste that no one seems to take the right measure of and sense the dangers they imply for humanity’s fate!

This press sets the example, unfortunately in the majority, much more focused on the monasteries of the people than on the warning signals launched by enlightened scientists, like the warnings issued by Stephen Hawking, who predicted the end of our species in less than a century, while insisting on the fact that the only chance of survival left to man is to consider,  From now on, the conquest of the stars, hoping to find a planet where there is oxygen to breathe, water to drink, plants and animals to consume, and tutti quanti, if by chance.

Stephen Hawking does not perish during the journey, and he manages to avoid all kinds of traps that will stand in the way of his cosmic journey: radiation that is harmful to his biological cells, a lack of gravity that will weaken his bones, comets that wander between the stars, etc. In addition, the challenge is to amass sufficient food in its space cabins to undertake journeys that will take tens or even hundreds of years!

Even if such warning signals come from a renowned physicist, raising some objections to betting our chances of survival on stellar colonies is useful! Without rushing into the infinite cosmos, let’s limit the analysis of such an objective to Proxima Centauri, our neighbouring star, about four light-years away from our sun. The most beneficial scenario for humans would be for this neighbour to host a planet identical to our beautiful blue one! Unfortunately, a simple analytical examination reveals that it would be not just one but a series of miracles if she could save us! First, Proxima Centauri is a star whose spectrum and luminescence intensity are not analogous to our sun’s. As a result, it is doubtful that identical photosynthesis would occur on any planet to evolve the same type of biology as on Earth.

An identical photosynthesis would, therefore, be a 1st miracle! Secondly, even if there were a planet in the habitable zone (the one we know is to be ruled out because its period of revolution is only 11 days), there would have to be a lot of water flowing through it, oh 2nd miracle! that the dimensions are such that the same gravity factor reigns on its surface, oh 3rd miracle! And that this habitable planet for man is populated by edible animals and plants, oh, 4th miracle! That man is always the favourite creature of the heavens to allow him to reign as he does on Earth, oh 5th miracle, etc.

The fate of the man who targets Proxima Centauri is therefore based on a series of miracles, each one as improbable as the next, to bet the survival of the species on the conquest of the nearest interstellar space, not to mention the fact that the accelerations that such journeys would require would subject interstellar travellers to dynamic forces so intense that they would make them grind!

The other solar systems are so far away (12 to 20 light-years for the closest) that listing the impossibilities linked to any colonization project is useless.

Given this impossible journey to other stars, the only escape route for homo-sapiens is preserving this typical Home called Earth! And this begins with the banishment of the motto “after us the deluge”, which has become a general rule in all countries, civilized or not, and in which a chronic, at the very least frightening, irresponsible consumption reigns!

Life must indeed exist and abound elsewhere in the Universe, but it is proof of Man’s eternal navel-gazing to believe that this Life must resemble in every way the one that appeared on Earth and that Mother Nature would stop functioning and give birth to other “favourite” creatures if Man disappeared from the planet!

In any case, homo-sapiens will undoubtedly remain in the history of the millions of animal species that have populated the planet since Life appeared there as the only creature to have precipitated its extinction. A mass suicide carried out in complete unconsciousness, what an achievement!

What conscience can a species that manufactures nuclear weapons with Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un at their helm boast?

What conscience can a species that sells weapons to fierce Saudis to kill harmless Yemenis boast?

What conscience can a species boast of when it attends with almost general indifference to these harragas sinking at sea, caring only for its safety, comfort and survival?

What conscience can humanity boast of that denies freedom to the Catalan, Corsican or Kabyle peoples on the pretext that they must align themselves with borders erected by others to safeguard the interests of a ruling minority, often colonialist? We would spend the evening there if we wanted to draw up a complete list of the kamikaze deviations of humanity!

Let’s not talk about conscience when a clan of gerontocratic criminals stays in power by sacrificing 40 million Algerians on the altar of abject gluttony from the clans to the top! For this FLiN-tox family, the survival of humanity does not trouble them! After them, the super cosmic deluge! What poor donkeys!

Decidedly, the world and men have gone mad to bind, as Johnny declaimed so well to Marie! Crazy, to the point of looking for survival elsewhere than in this coquettish pebble lost in infinite space instead of preserving it from all kinds of unconsciousness to ensure its bloodlines!

Not to mention Artificial Intelligence, which is racing minds and promising us an uncontrollable acceleration of our extinction, we will certainly come back to this.

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Kacem Madani

in Le Matin DZ

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