BENGALURU: And now a ‘Fairy’ will replace the bee to pollinate flowers. No, I am not reading out from the Grimms Fairy Tales and this certainly is not one with a grand finale of, “and they lived happily ever after” before a restful sleep.
I read from my colleague’s recent science column that scientists have devised a 5mm ‘Fairy’ – a robotic bee that would pollinate flowers because of the “decline in natural pollinators.” I read the news item many times to make sure that I had read it right and was not hallucinating yet again. I was horrified at this reality of human misadventure and doom. My mind zipped ahead on a time machine and I envisioned robots as humans driving cars, doing chores, cooking, having children, growing robotic plants and having fairies pollinate them.
I pinched myself to make sure that this was not one of the many nightmares journalists have while chasing stories from diverse domains, pretending to be experts and losing sleep over their copies. The other day I was chasing one such story on AI and there was a sense of instant déja vu reading about the Fairy. From a journalist, I suddenly morphed into a psychic (journalists are adept chameleons), who found herself in the middle of Armageddon.
I was surrounded by an army of these gigantic ‘Fairies’ chasing a lone real flower (not the robotic one) in my hands and like Cervantes’ Don Quixote I began mounting my attack against them. I woke up from this wretched nightmare with a voice choked and a dry throat. I quickly wrapped the newspaper to keep the Fairy out of sight.
Real humans believe that 60 million years ago dinosaurs had the ultimate bad day when an asteroid impact erased them from the face of the real earth. But the bees have been there from time immemorial. To see them turn into ‘Fairy’ is a horror story. I can’t wish it away like sci-fi. I want to tell the bees and the butterflies, the flowers and their nectar to stay on and survive human tyranny and greed. I will turn into a believer if a mystery wand could revive this earth’s flora and fauna as they were when it all started under a pristine blue sky and pristine blue seas.
The hardest truth is that real humans invented the technology and real humans will have to pay the price of the destruction unleashed by their invention. Throw the gadgets, your technology. But where? Which landfill? Which last sea that can withstand the oil spill, the plastic and scrap dump and still breathe along with its beautiful and abundant marine life that’s choking on the real human invention?
There will be no real historians to write about the end of real humans. No, the phoenix will not rise from the ashes of real humans and soar again in the sky of fairies and pretend flowers and pretend nectar. Hope does not need an asteroid to render it extinct. A ‘Fairy’ can do the job!