Featured Post

Kashmir conflict-revisited

In early1980s, walking through the lush green fields, on crisp spring and summer mornings, on my way from the student hostel to the chemis...

Friday, February 10, 2017

The blighted humanity


Generally, a year within a universal context would chronicle nothing on a cosmic clock, but for the dominant creatures traipsing the planet have repeatedly proven adept, ever since the cognitive revolution, at effecting despair and chaos even in nothingness. From the time when Homo sapiens diverged from their less cognitive cousins, they subjugated and destroyed every ecological system they visited upon and wreaked havoc on every other species and their own race; even bringing their own existence to near extinction innumerable times from the onset agricultural of societies through the age of artificial intelligence. The species remains inherently blighted with a knack of bringing itself close to despair every time its members profess to remember a near escape from the last near extinction. The year 2016 began with world poised with confidence and connectivity unlike ever before and despite ever present problems the humanity never looked depraved. Nevertheless, there existed parts in the world, that emitted cautionary signals; those paled in the larger context that never looked so hunky dory. The year couldn’t have started on a better note than the news about the detection of gravitational waves. That awe inspiring moment came on February 11, 2016. The world came to know about detection of gravitational waves that originated from the merger of two black holes, about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, about 1.3 billion years ago. That’s the time it took for those waves to lunge the planet earth. The event that was detected had happened even before sapiens had come into existence. The gravitational waves predicted in Einstein’s theory of general relativity were actually detected on September 14, 2015 at 5.51 (EST) and were announced only after peer review, an established scientific practice.
The merger of the two supermassive black holes that was revealed on the earth more than a billion years after it happened show cased the apogee of human advancement that would leave an illusory visitor from another universe baffled. That would also give an imprint of a trouble free civilization bereft of woes. That could have been too if the species had conquered its own checkered propensities to self-destruction. Three months prior to the momentous detection of gravitation waves that brought in a new epoch, an ominous announcement came from an unctuous self-described billionaire about his shot at to succeed Barack Obama as the US president. Donald Trump, something of a brash playboy given to diabolical hyperbole, had spent most of his immediate past years in a dodged and disingenuous effort to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama through so called birther theory. That Luciferian insinuation could attract unchallenged traction signaled troubled times ahead for those plagued with perception. Instead, the proclamation of his candidacy was met with an all-round derision and night-show hosts in a long time actually earned their wages at the cost of Donald Trump. They mocked him for everything from his the color of his hair to his comically grandiloquent and woefully inadequate vocabulary. Experts divined his longevity in the campaign from two weeks to six month before he would fold his tent and went back to his business. They are still mocking him but with a perceptible nervousness as he with his worsened but intact uncouthness has become the most powerful person on this planet. How did humanity come to such a pass?