Towards a Zero Life world

The last 100 years have been dramatic for the human civilization. We have multiplied at an incredible rate to fill the planet and have taken technology to dizzying heights. Technology is no longer simple mechanical tools , we can now harness electrical waveforms and lasers. While this was happening our climate has changed and we have started a mass extinction movement of all other lifeforms in this planet. Biodiversity crisis is real but it is also hardly noticed by the majority. If such a huge event is happening why is that we are not feeling it in the day to day life.

In our homes nothing has changed. In our office nothing has changed. The reason for this indifference is that we had already reduced the biodiversity around us to a negligible amount.

The elimination of biodiversity is also a journey of independence from natural world.

When you can’t see the destination, the path can be in any direction. Human beings as a whole are in a similar state. Nobody knows what we are aiming to achieve. When rich people set goals for the planet then those goals will only be shrouded in commodification of the planet.

After all why would “supreme” humans like to be dependents on the sixth sense lacking animals, insects, plants etc. ?

Being alone on the planet and surviving means we are independent of other life forms which gives us the power to do things as we wish. This lack of dependence on other lifeforms is also a prerequisite for exerting dominance over everything. That “everything” now includes fellow humans as well. This urge for independence from everything is so overwhelming, that it guides us in most actions of our life.

How does this urge playout in the real world where interdependence is the basis of the natural world ? As much as a kid is dependent on parents, the kid is also dependent on a plant which grows and produces fruit. Since we have taken control over a plant’s growth , we can now rather replace the plant with the human intermediary, the farmer. With this concept of a human intermediary we now view everything only with a human perspective. In other words, plant is not important rather agriculture and farmer is important.

Agriculture is back breaking work and there is no question about it but we should understand that it is the plant that matters. Humans don’t create food , they are just assisting the plant in producing the fruit. Since we have taken complete control over a plant’s life we silently ignore the role of the plant and glorify the farmer alone.

Independence from natural world :

To understand our journey of independence from natural world , we have to go back in the timeline.

We humans started off in forests as one of the life forms among the other millions of lifeforms that existed. As our power started multiplying because of technology , we slowly started to remove other life forms away from us. When we lived in jungle the biodiversity was abundant. I would like to refer this as “Biodiversity bubble” which comprises of all the life forms within a fixed radius. So as forest dwellers  ,our biodiversity bubble was huge comprising of thousands and thousands of different life forms.

Then came the settlements which were inside forests but the little patches we claimed as our own were devoid of predators and other physically harmful things to us. As these little settlements evolved to villages, that patch of land was no longer habitable for the majority of lifeforms from the forest. Now our biodiversity bubble had started to shrink.

Forest settlements of tribal people are meant to be place where people and nature mix but is it true ? Now even in remote settlements one can find only dish TVs and mobile phones.

Once agriculture was invented the biodiversity just outside the village in the name of forests were no longer needed for our survival , as we can grow our own food using a few plant species. The animals which were earlier part of the forests and were considered as food suddenly became pests. For example a Wild boar which was hunted for food and considered as a lifeline for a community is now a pest because it ate few of our crops. All this meant that our “biodiversity bubble” was shrinking continuously.

As we progressed further with agriculture and produced more food , we had people who can do things which are not related to growing or finding food. This is an important step in the journey towards independence from natural world as it meant that a person can live without interacting with the land and other lifeforms.

“This meant that he or she can sit in a room and still live.”

This disconnect meant that the world had become a room with boundaries. A person can live and die in a room as long he is provided food from outside. The entire world is necessary to make that plate of food but since it is someone else’s job , the plate of food is just a formality. From the view point of the person the world is not needed , just the plate is needed.

Since sustenance was taken for granted and came from outside , the room became the world that the person relates to. In this new found world , Man is the King and he does not need to share it with anyone. In this stage we reach the next level of degradation of biodiversity bubble. In this room , man no longer tolerates even simple lifeforms like ants, spiders etc. Either all these lifeforms are deemed harmful or classified into aesthetically degrading.

When humans began living in closed quarters some of the natural world neighbors followed. While we initially didn’t bother about these lifeforms, things have changed drastically as villages became cities. Nowadays homes are filled with killing chemicals in the name of pest control. When is the last time you saw a moth near a tubelight in your home? Even when I was growing up I could notice lots of them but off late , nothing !

At this junction, we have to take note that man is gone from removing dangerous predators around him to eliminating the other placid lifeforms around him. We now have pest control services to “clean” your home. This is only a prelude of the next step which is eliminating the life forms which are invisible.

As technology advanced , our knowledge base extended to the microscopic world. As we looked deeper through microscopes we saw algae, single celled organisms etc. and when we looked even deeper we saw bacteria , viruses etc. This new knowledge took us to the next step, elimination of the microscopic world or in modern terminology, “sanitizing”. All that was needed is a push from product makers to brand microbes are bad and tell that you or your child is in danger. With our sanitizing spree we are removing even organisms that we can’t even see in our biodiversity bubble.

This a bottle I have with me for the last 1 year since the reality of Covid-19 landed upon us. Quite frankly the bottle is hardly used as you can see the level after one year. There are some harmful germs out there and I am not denying it but living in a sanitized world is not a solution to it.

With most of the lifeforms eliminated from our immediate vicinity what do we do next ? Eliminate our own species from our vicinity. From large interconnected families , we are now reduced to nuclear families or loners. While technology enabled us to live in large groups initially, too much technology enabled us to survive on our own individually.

We live in a city of a million people but we survive alone.

As we are able to survive individually more and more of us can now opt for a life where we do not have to meet anyone else. In a country like India we are only in the stage where transition from large families to nuclear families is taking place but in more advanced economies shift to a lonely culture has already taken place.

This situation is very real in countries such as Japan and Korea. So the question is what happens next when we have eliminated everybody around us ? What do the loners do , they go online ! In a dramatic shift from a living and breathing world , we have now reached a situation where a person can now live two lives – “one in the real world and the other as a online avatar whether in social media or in games”. These games are so immersive and addictive that people are now attached to it 24/7. The endless possibilities that a online avatar provides is always a means to escape the real world. After all where can you fly, where can you roleplay, where can you die and comeback alive ?

The first time I got exposed to Virtual reality was in a fully immersive theme park ride quite some years back. I was amazed by technology and I was equally amazed by how easily my senses could be duped to give me a sensation of flying. If I can sit in a room and fly then why would I bother to walk in real world ?

Even though this trend is in it’s nascent stage , it will be the future. When you couple online freedom with virtual reality, it will start looking like a person can “live more” in a virtual world than in the real world.

What is so fascinating is that even for doing all this , food is still needed . We have to feed the physical body and keep it in working condition to live in the online virtual world. This seems to be  the endpoint in the journey towards “zero life” but maybe it is not. Based on whatever we have done till now I can say one thing about food, that too will be automated and brought to our door if not our mouth.

Already we have automation in agriculture, we have lab grown meat , automated delivery to our doorsteps etc. So hypothetically if you have money you can order all the food you need for your lifetime and schedule it daily , so that you can live your life online.

In your virtual world you can fly across the universe, live life as a God, flirt 
with imaginary beings and do just about everything else you can imagine. 

By the way it is not just your imagination that you can live in , you can live the life of all the people’s imagination potential. All that limits your life is now the human body that degrades overtime and has the irritable limitation to be fed daily and ejected daily.

Now if the online world has so much potential and since it promises endless life should we even live our life in a human body or is it only logical that we live our life in a machine which can be endlessly replaced or in a virtual world which cannot be shutdown? When we start pondering over these ideas and make that leap we would have truly and surely replaced all the life around us and brought the biodiversity bubble around us to zero.

If the role of a plant is producing oxygen and starch from sun and minerals , then all we need is a machine which does that. If we can make a machine that mimics a plant then do we need all these other life on earth ? Aren’t they taking too much space when thousands of poor people are suffering without homes ??!!

Call it science fiction or call it a thought of an alarmist or a pessimist, the truth is that we have eliminated much of the biodiversity around us in the name of survival and cleanliness.

The thoughts of a common man are always guided and boxed within his/her capacities and the available information .

As attention seekers we will always have a few people who will experiment with new stuff and all it takes is for some industry to catchup on a trend and make online life a mass phenomenon.

Will we really find true independence in the online world ? It all depends on what a person expects. In search for that imaginary utopia we will venture everywhere and in that journey we will lay waste to this world and all it’s inhabitants including majority of humans. The real question is do we really want this kind of independence or is it something a few crack heads at the top want ? Do you want to live with the planet or live draining the planet?

The real answer is that we do not have choice as we are slaves of the time we live in.