The Paradox
|Nature has no plan to wipe out the human race – she just wants to challenge us and push us to greater heights
By Dr Rajagopal Soondron
4000 exoplanets have been discovered so far; the criterion for any of them to be able to support life is that such planets must be below 1.7 the mass of planet earth, if not they would be gaseous and least rocky. Very few of those 4000 satisfy that criterion; of the 4 that do, Mars included, intelligent life seems to be present only on Mother Earth. This renders some scientists pessimistic about finding intelligent life somewhere else. Is our earth special? Is the blue marble a regional miracle — where Mother Nature is unique?
The universe was there long before anything. Then came the galaxies, the solar system and our earth; and Mother Nature came later, followed by life and the human race.
Surely there was a universal process which after billions of years initiated the emergence of Mother Nature, attended by biological evolution which moulds man according to the principle of the survival of the fittest.
Is our earth special? Is the blue marble a regional miracle — where Mother Nature is unique? Photo – blog.spiritualify.com
Hostile Universe
Just fancy, if we make a huge dent in our atmosphere the universe will rush in like a white shark and in no time devour all life on the blue planet. Remember our worry in the face of expanding ozone layer depletion? Is it possible that the development of the oxygen and air mantle around our planet is a localized miraculous phenomenon? The universe itself is so complex, with its ever fast process of expansion, its Hubble constant and cosmological constant, with its dark matter and energy pulling in opposite directions, giving us the impression that our original cradle were itself full of paradoxes, where the microscopic quantum particles meet macroscopic Einsteinian relativity. Out of this complex of opposite forces both Nature and man have emerged.
Logically we see that the universe has contributed the chemical elements like oxygen, hydrogen, iron, carbon and other elements, formed in the entrails of other dead stars, all of them going into the building of our anatomy; but always coupled with a certain form of energy — the nature of which we know very little about.
However, due to our ignorance and short-sightedness we believe that our world existed first and that the microscopic quantum world is just to be ignored. But the opposite is true. Now that the theory of quantum mechanics is a well established and respected one, we have to admit that out of this weird world of transposition and entanglement had come our own macroscopic classical world. Somewhere these two worlds had met and merged. Yet that perplexing quantum world has remained quite foreign to us humans, though a few people are convinced that it’s the fabric from which everything – including our consciousness — has emerged.
Yet we have the impression that Mother Nature, evolving during billions of years from a miracle act, does her best to protect life from the nefarious effects of the universal fury.
Let’s walk out into space. We would suffocate to death in no time; if we survive with oxygen then all the meteorites and debris in outer space will pierce us to death unless we have suitable protective suits; and finally the gamma and other harmful rays will be there to melt us down in no time. It looks as if the universe has no pity and love for us; all its rays and toxic ions are even eroding the outer space mantle of Mother Nature, our protector.
Malefic Nature?
Some of us may object to our tendency to look down on the universe as the only malefic force, because they can see that Mother Nature is no better sometimes – as she sends all sorts of catastrophes: famine, floods, droughts, diseases to decimate us.
But we humans have played a hide and seek game with these cataclysms – which always eliminate only a few of us, as if contributing to population control; while the universe will gladly annihilate humanity completely. Nature has no plan to wipe out the human race – she just wants to challenge us and push us to greater heights.
The universe, sensing that it cannot get at us as long as Mother Nature keeps spreading her protective mantle around us, has perhaps found a way to go round that obstacle. It has mysteriously sent a decoy to do its work in its place. If it cannot attack Nature externally, how about sending a villain to do that inside job? Man is that villain… all ready to undermine, to destroy, and to finish Mother Nature from below the mantle. Man uses his reason and logic to fortify his life, and he does it at the expense of Mother Nature through unchecked destruction and pollution. Man, a product of Mother Nature, has somehow inherited some malefic universal energy.
However, we must not be too harsh, for there are other humans who love Mother Nature, recognizing she has been the architect of our life and see in her a benefactor in spite of her sporadic fury. How we admire our sunrise and sunset. How we love our moonlight, our forests and trees, fauna and flora. And those nature admirers have pushed their idealism still further and seen the hand of a super Being who has ordained not only this local miracle of Mother nature, but acted as the very creator and guardian of that vicious gargantuan monster that the universe is.
The Universe
That universe born some 14.6 billion years ago after the Big Bang, which by now should be slowing down, is found to be doing just the opposite: it is instead expanding at an accelerated rate. Going where? No one knows.
If one cubic of space contains N ergs of energy, then after rapid expansion one would logically infer that the new cubic meter of space would contain less than N ergs of such energy. But it contains the same N. That would be the cosmological constant – dark energy being the one blamed to maintain that constant expansion. Where is that energy coming from? No one knows; yet we have been taught that energy cannot be created nor destroyed!
We humans find ourselves caught between our love of Nature and our tendency to exploit her to the limit for our own profit. Where does that ignorance or tendency of ours come from? Why did Nature allow such nuisance as our intelligence to evolve at all within her very entrails? Is it because this human malefic tendency is extra Nature, coming from the universe? Is our logic as cruel and cynical as that outer space; does our cold, rational left-sided brain belong to that universe and the emotional right-sided one the darling of Mother Nature? In general, do our cold, cruel and rational left brain and reason belong to the universal quantum mechanism – and our right brain to the emotional multi-dimensional Mother Nature? And the eternal conflict between those two is there for us humans to bear and witness helplessly?
Is it possible that hidden in our human fabric is the secret of the original universal quantum mysterious energy – that survived and contributed to the natural forces that fashioned us? And from that arose the paradoxes that teem within us?
But we have some other tendencies too – we have become idealist and we see beauty and veneration not only in Mother Nature but even in that vast universe. We love the latter — we see it as our real home, we yearn to become part of it, of finally merging our body and soul with the ultimate vastness and seemingly paradoxical energy that constitutes the universe. We love it – that very entity that would not hesitate to “spaghettify” us – as a black hole would.
We love that very space out there which is ready to annihilate us. How did we become anti- Nature and a lover of the universe – for it should have been the other way round? And we are the impotent observer of the conflict of these two forces – between the universe vehemently wanting its pound of flesh back and the localized Mother Nature wanting to shield her offspring from harm as long as possible.
Is this another paradox?
* Published in print edition on 24 January 2020
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