The Fart of a Fly

The Fart of a Fly

The Fart of a Fly

I first arrived on your planet when it was night at the location of my first orbit. What amazed me was the vast number of lights everywhere below me, visible from space. It seemed that the whole planet was occupied, ablaze with those lights. As I came closer, I could see that humans were the source of all the lights and that you dominate almost the whole planet. This in itself was strange to me because on my planet and on every other planet I have visited, there is a balance between the different kinds of life forms. Some species lived in harmony, others were rather hostile; some were predators, some were prey. In all the planets, all these different kinds of life had reached equilibrium, a balance between them that anyone could see was a proper and wonderful thing.

This time around, my assignment is to find out the source or reason for the disequilibrium on your planet. I looked back into your records and found that you’ve been around in one form or another more than a million years and only 200 years ago there were no more than 1 billion of you. That perhaps was a time of equilibrium. But 100 years later the population had increased by 60% to 1.6 billion. This was alarming in itself. And I see your population in just the next 100 years jumped to 6.1 billion. As if that were not irresponsible enough, by December 2017, you added another 1.5 billion humans—1.5 billion in 17 years!

What, I wondered, can you be thinking of, letting your numbers get so out of balance with nature, and with the other life forms obviously suffering. You must know that one day the planet’s equilibrium will have to be restored one way or another. It is only a matter of time. But what are you doing? You are doing your best to prepare for more increases in your population numbers when you should be thinking of containing those numbers. What is the point of filling the planet with your species?

I feel very sad for the other creatures on your planet. They complain bitterly, of course, but have no human voice, and so there is no one to hear their plight. But they tell me how humans have taken away their living space by cutting down forests and polluting or blocking rivers and polluting the sea as well. They do not feel safe anywhere anymore.

In passing, I must say that some of the technology that you have developed I find very useful. Thanks to your mobile devices, I can quickly browse through their contents and learn very much. Don’t be alarmed; I am not the only one who can read you; all those you call service providers and software makers do this. Any technician can analyze the data on your cell phone as you walk past and can tell almost everything about you in a few seconds.

I was browsing through some of this today. I saw, and as you must also see, that nearly all that you share in your cell phones is so trivial that it is obviously a futile waste of your time and prevents you enjoying yourselves by interacting with one another face to face, the way every other animal does all the time on your planet. I find that so strange.

As I was saying, I was looking through some of this and came across a curious exchange of messages between some scientists that was not so trivial, an exchange that illustrates how intense has the quest for more food supplies for your overcrowded planet become. One scientist talked about the fact that clams emit methane gas, a characteristic that they share with cattle in the field and humans. Methane is one of what you call greenhouse gases because it contributes to warming your atmosphere—in other words, to climate change. The scientist had read that all the clams in the Baltic Sea produce as much methane as 20,000 cattle. He said this would be a problem if people farm more clams to help their food security because the clams’ methane would make the planet even warmer.

The other scientist was surprised to hear that clams made methane but he said that they have no doubt been doing that for millions of years. He said there are nearly 1.5 billion cattle on the planet, farmed to feed humans, and not to worry about the clams’ possible additions, which would be very minor. But realizing that since the planet, his and your planet, is so far from equilibrium, he said that in future every source of methane will have to be closely watched, and that before long, even the fart of a fly will have to be taken into account for its greenhouse gas emissions. You are living on the edge. He added that the overall problem was there are simply too many humans and you all want more of everything. I thought back to all those lights I saw as I was approaching your planet in the dark.

Another of your scientists once reminded you of how much you rely on such technology. He wrote that if you take away electrical power from a tribe of Australian aborigines, little or nothing will happen. If you take it away from residents of California, millions will die, and in your present, it could be taken away by a single keystroke on a computer. You humans have come to rely more and more on technology to keep you alive. That technology extends not only to industry but to food supplies as well. You are getting to the limits of freshwater, fisheries and available land; you are running out of some vital fertilizers. When your crops fail they fail on a big scale and starvation is always on the horizon in some parts of the world. The more you rely on technology the more you are at risk of catastrophe, strange as it might seem at first. You feel safe in your hi-tech cocoons, but when the battery dies or the electricity stops…

Coming from far away myself, I appreciate how the more enlightened among you compare your planet to a spaceship. Your spaceship is simply the planet as it rushes through space, with its limited supplies and ways of regenerating some of them. But there is more to it. Increasingly you are living in and surrounded by technology and there is almost nowhere to go anymore without that technology. The spaceship might fly safely for years but one day, technology being what it is, the spaceship will malfunction and many if not all of you will perish.

I think the oceans more than anything else have been taking care of you. That makes sense doesn’t it? They are bigger than anything else—more than twice as big as all the land put together and unlike the lands they are continuous around the planet, one big ‘machine.’ I decided to see how they could do that. We have no such oceans on my planet, only small seas surrounded by land; the lands are continuous, not the seas.

Not that I am the first to realize the utmost importance of your oceans. Sylvia Earle, one of your prominent marine biologists, once wrote that "Even if you never have the chance to see or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, every bite you consume. Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea.”

So I am right about your oceans, only instead of ‘equilibrium,’ you use the term ‘homeostasis,’ which means keeping an organism in a stable condition. Oceans have a big role in keeping your whole planet stable. They maintain your livable temperature, for example, soaking up and releasing heat, by their sheer size—nearly 2 billion square kilometers with an average depth of about 3 kilometers.

As for why the oceans would take care of you, a popular theory was that your whole planet—oceans, land and air—was a gigantic organism itself called Gaia. The man who came up with the idea of Gaia (James Lovelock) went on a long ocean survey looking at one aspect of this equilibrium: how one element, sulfur, stayed in balance between land and sea—so much was washed into the sea and yet while that seemed to be a one-way street, sulfur was not accumulating in the sea. The expedition found it is mainly bubbled up from the sea as a gas and comes back to earth in rain. The gas is made by tiny and large (seaweed) algae in the sea. Lovelock said this was Gaia’s way of ensuring a proper balance between sulfur on land and sulfur in the sea.

He said that human activities were sapping Gaia’s strength through, for example, causing the disappearance of other species. You can now add to that the problem of global warming, as the excess heat in the air, caused by your technologies, is becoming too great for the oceans to dissipate. These things, said Lovelock, were gradually damaging Gaia’s life-support systems. Poor Gaia.

He didn’t really mean that Gaia was alive; your planet operates as if that were so, but more like a robot, or that space ship with its life-support systems.

Two hundred years ago, when your population was around one billion, an Englishman who was a cleric, economist and demographer warned that some form of population control was necessary to prevent the numbers of people becoming too great for the planet to supply with food. Now there are 7.5 billion of you, living on the edge.

What kind of planet have you made that you even think about the consequences of the fart of a fly?