2 : Mimic-Reality

The Earth has been affected by 10.000 years of constant deforestation and 200 years of intensive pollution. 19th century science developed into 20th century technique, producing a self-destroying scenario where architects (which for centuries created beautiful universes) are not leading in the environment anymore. We have been replaced by technocrats and engineers, who ignore the nature of things. For decades, theoretical discussions show a detachment from Habitat. Architects became fashion designers, often in giant urban proportions, building anti-sustainable contraptions in the name of sustainability. Glass towers in deserts like Dubai are seen as a success and promoted in magazines, wasting energy, resources, becoming a sad example of what not to do. Marshall McLuhan anticipated that the speed of electronic information was catapulting perception, conscience and knowledge, while Jacques-Yves Cousteau warned us that the oceans are dying. Virtual reality is deactivating children's reading, writing and interpreting capabilities (which are non-biological). In many cases, when applied to the real word, the so called search engines annihilate students' association and logical analysis capacities. Social networks kidnapped their mind. Our conscience understands what we see on screen as real, when we actually process mirrored images. For your subconscious, however, what you see in the Internet (as this) is unreliable, because it is unreal: there is no paper, no materiality, things you will never touch. Somehow we got trapped in between, we are confined in mimic information. Data collected in several published scientific researches indicate that most vertebrate and invertebrate species would approach mass extinction within decades. There are 8 million life forms on Earth: according to some sources, 150 to 200 species disappear every day, not only insects. A hundred years ago one million blue whales lived in the oceans: there are less than 1.500 left. Five billion carbon dioxide tonnes are put into the atmosphere every year, even if most of it is re-absorbed falling to the land in a few years and part of it (unknown) is released to outer space... We are polluting the Earth. Every year an area of tropical and boreal forests equal to the whole surface of the United Kingdom is destroyed ¹ . Unlike the previous five known extinctions (the last one, 65 million years ago), this time could be man-made. It is not about Global Warming or Climate Change, which has not and will never be scientifically proved (it must be ovserved hundreds of times during thousand of years to reach the status of "proved"). In the last decades anyone who dares to question data becomes criminalised, called a "denier" and so. That is not science, but religion! The discussion is irrelevant: we are destroying the planet with polution and the consequence is Habitat Loss.

I am bored about pseudo science. We are reaching a point where the excess of predictions and solutions do not add sensible idea to the real threat: pollution. A full ice free Arctic "within the next two or three years" was announced dramatically for at least 20 years. Yes, "once the sun rays are not reflected by the white ice but absorbed by the dark ocean surface, the most severe positive feedback will not allow the ice-cap to recover". This was very scaring, it might occur one day, but it did not occur. That's different. And more: "Between 1 and 1.5 degrees will be added to the average temperature, within months." This means more than 2 additional degrees in the continents, far from the coast, where the majority of agriculture of the planet is produced. But again, it did not occur. In some documents, world food organizations estimated that about 30% of the crops in the world would collapse in... 1970. Corporative facts (not mine) indicate, since the fifties that "within the next two or three decades" our industrial civilisation will collapse. It is possible, indeed, but improbable. Even with good intentions, it looks like fatalist propaganda. We really do not know.

The Sun dictates the temperature on Earth. Beyond its influence, which is indeed the most important warming factor, researchers found more than 60 positive feedbacks that affect temperatures in relation with the normal Greenhouse effect. However, the impact of those elements tends to be very small. Some of them, like the permafrost methane release in the Arctic, is regularly happening. Methane is a greenhouse gas hundred times more powerful than carbon dioxide. We have pointed above the most important positive feedback effect, generally validated by a large amount of scientific literature from the last three decades: the ice-free Arctic. This, has been punctuated, might add to the atmosphere more than one degree of "average global" temperature. We already mentioned the useless fact of defining some "average" and "global" temperature when the Earth is so vast and complex that there are many simultaneous factors involved in athmospheric events, in any moment taken.

This is acting as a catalyst of many more global climate effects, like the warming of deep ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, or changing of air circulating patterns, called Jet Stream. The interaction between the two Earth's cups, covered by ice and the central areas of the sphere produce air currents, sort of inhale-exhale daily cycles forming a barrier between the extremely cold poles and the template latitudes on the surface of the planet. Researchers state that if both the Arctic and the Antarctic melt -the former seemed to be in the path but recovered since 2022, the latter apparently started the process but also stopped in 2022, and if it happens it might take centuries- if both melt, the Earth might stop 'breathing'; the Jet Stream is apparently unstable, allowing this 'divisor line' to penetrate with vortex streams further south towards the US and Russia in winter, and further north towards the Arctic in Summer, warming a vast region that has been detached and frozen for millennia.

Whether human's destiny is (or has been) to live in a sort of dissociation reality where the image of the world we create reflects our wishes and particular interpretation, but something basically unreal and far from facts, or whether what happened (non-stop habitat destruction) had more to do with a sort of biological, instinct proto cerebellum type of animal mind, or with an unstoppable impulsive reaction, we will never know. In particular, I am not interested in that debate. The only thing that seems to be real is: our life span, as individuals and also as a society, is limited, we tend to survive in the short term and not to change unless we are forced to, and we do have a collective intelligence or -putting differently- a collective mind that tends to survive (to guarantee food and roof), but we destroy the environment in the process.

Our planet is not ending. However, we should start alerting and instructing our children about pollution right now, instead of inducing them to play with plastic toys and digital games that built a mimic reality far away from our disappearing Habitat.

¹ Margaret Thatcher, Speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Global Environment, November 8, 1989 From: Margaret Thatcher foundation.

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Background photo: planet Mars, dust storm, PIA15959, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), courtesy of NASA