CHENNAI: It’s ironical how we seem to have dedicated a day every year for problems that we don’t address on the other days of the year. For example, we have Women’s Day where we supposedly celebrate women and women empowerment, and let the evils of patriarchy take over on the rest of the 364 days of the year.
Similarly, there’s Earth Day: a self-made reminder that the planet we inhabit isn’t something we should be taking for granted. There are other byproducts of this variety of pseudo-celebration, such as Earth Hour, when we turn off all forms of electricity, and electrical appliances, so that we can time travel back to stone age, and pat ourselves on the back for getting rid of a privilege for exactly 1 hour in a year. By virtue of belonging to the top of the food chain, we have inherited a lot of privileges, and even created some ourselves.
In a nutshell, climate change is real, it has happened at this magnitude in the past, but never at this pace. We need to act faster than Earth does on Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. For this column, I am going to look at a farfetched possibility that is almost never a solution. What if we ran away from it?
‘Earth Clone.’ That’s my solution. Instead of trying to pretend to save our planet, why not actively look for other planets that we could possibly inhabit if ours goes to the docks? Being explorers of the unknown, our space enthusiastic scientists are already looking into that. The result of that was Kepler-186f, a planet the size of earth, and situated a convenient 490 light-years away. This is being looked into as a real possibility.
If we do, as a collective species, decide to migrate: how would we go about it? Would we take the other animals along with us, or would we stop pretending, and reveal our selfish inner selves? Am I being too cynical? The thought of migrating owing to destruction is almost biblical. A comment that I could’ve refrained from, but what’s the fun in that?
How would we build a spaceship that is large enough to carry, gratify, and keep alive 7 billion of us, plus the large amounts of flora and fauna? This is a decision that will take decades to make, in which case, the privilege will be of priority. Creationists will cite Darwin’s theory of evolution, and use that as a reference to support their claims that only the fittest should migrate. In this context, fittest refers to those who can procreate and keep the species alive.
The same ‘fittest’, who voluntarily might have just massacred every single supposedly unfit being on the planet; planet-wide genocide, the first of it’s kind. When it comes to co-existing in a heterogeneous society, or migrating to a planet that is our only chance of survival, privilege becomes so powerful that it can kill if you don’t recognize it. At the rate at which we’re going, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if privilege does, in fact, lead to planet-wide genocide; from caste privilege to gender privilege.
(When he isn’t writing, the creative producer with The Rascalas watches a lot of ‘cat videos’ on YouTube)