A long story, cut short

Almost 15 billion years ago, someone pressed a button and from what was a point of singularity, everything erupted and the universe was born. So the story goes. Of how there was only hydrogen around, which took a few knocks to form helium and from thereon raced to cook all the many elements we now read on the Periodic table!

In the process, matter condensed and exploded, alternately giving rise to the birth and death of stars and galaxies. In one such explosion some 5 billion years ago, the heavy elements formed were pulled into a nearby cloud of hydrogen gas and interstellar dust. There gravity got to work and created what is now our Sun. Around it swirled a disk of the same material, which eventually froze into small dust-size grains that formed clumps. These continued to collide and exchange material and finally with one more ignition of the sun was forced to settle into fixed orbits around the sun. That was 4600 million years ago.

The third such rock from the sun alone stood at the right place to nurture life. Planet Earth. But even that took its time. The right atmosphere and that essential ingredient, water, kept life waiting.

It was between 3800 and 2500 million years that life in the form of the bacteria first appeared. Some algae later, around 2000 million years ago saw the Cambrian explosion of a myriad of life, possibly due to abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere. From fish in the water to life on land took another few million years, then came reptiles and amphibians and the huge dinosaurs, and the flowering plants that came 130 m years ago. Finally about 65 million years ago a wayward asteroid hit saw the exit of the dino and the entrance of the burrowing mammals. The primate came 5 million years later. It was just yesterday, around 5 million years ago, the first hominid appeared.

Now, we have the ‘wise’ homo sapien who is so wise he has been doctoring and engineering anything he laid hands upon. Some marvelous inventions made life on earth a cool ride, while some spelled danger. Increasingly, he realized that he was changing the face of earth in ways that could affect his existence. Global warming. Water scarcity. Floods and droughts stare us in the face today.

What do we do? Is all hope lost? No. We can still limit the damage by cutting down our consumption, conserving and recycling resources, and managing them better. We better do it fast. Or else, the mercury will rise, freshwater will be gone, soils become unproductive, and life a survival of the fittest.

The third rock from the sun will still continue its jog around the sun, but there will be no homo sapiens or the many species we will have managed to extinguish.

Let us preserve the Earth and learn to live off it judiciously, not greedily. Our lives are tethered to its welfare.