Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The Earth's concerns

It does my little heart good to be validated by a Nobel Laureate. Of course the author of this piece has written it much differently and put in a lot more effort than I have but we are getting to the same point.


The only harm that humans can do is to humans and other living creatures. But the Earth is a Survivor. (Unless of course it is possible to explode half the planet using one of those N-bombs, in which case, it will spiral out of its orbit and merge into the Sun).

When I wrote my old article, a friend commented that its not fair to think of saving the planet for a million years. Human time scale is only for a 1000 years or so. So if we can save the earth and its creatures for that time, some good might come out of it.

Being a great believer in the human will power, I know we are not going to save it for the next 10 years much less a 1000. Therefore is it not good to know that what ever harm we do today, atleast good ol' Earth is still gonna be there when we come back as a newer and hopefully better batch of creatures a million years later (Oh yes! I believe in reincarnation when it suits me :-D )

Below is an excerpt from the article By George Will. Be sure to check out the little video on the second page of the article.

"The cover of The American Scholar quarterly carries an impertinent assertion: “The Earth Doesn’t Care if You Drive a Hybrid.” The essay inside is titled “What the Earth Knows.” What it knows, according to Robert B. Laughlin, co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics, is this: What humans do to, and ostensibly for, the earth does not matter in the long run, and the long run is what matters to the earth. We must, Laughlin says, think about the earth’s past in terms of geologic time.
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Damaging this old earth is, Laughlin says, “easier to imagine than it is to accomplish.” There have been mass volcanic explosions, meteor impacts, “and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict, and it’s still here. It’s a survivor.” [...]"

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