Wisdom, knowledge and mankind’s survival

Luiz Leitao

Stephen Hawking has said man must seek another planet to live on, once we’re destroying Earth at a rather high rate.

Bleaching coral reefs, whole ecosystems threatened by environmental disasters. It was recently reported that in Nigeria oil has been leaking for 50 years, two billion litres altogether in the period, which makes the Gulf of México tragedy appear a minor trouble.

Brazilian State oil company Petrobras has almost half a dozen oil platforms under risk - P-33 and, at least another four, according to Sindipetro, the oil workers syndicate -, and in this condition it still considers itself capable of sucking oil seven kilometres below the sea level!

Again in the Gulf, another sea platform, owned by Mariner Energy, was reported ablaze in the beginning of September, but we must not forget about minor disasters, although more frequent – when not continuous -, which point out our high capacity of self-destruction. And to think there are people concerned about nuclear arsenals...

All this tell us how Hawking is right, but the great briton physicist knows by far better than us the obstacles for mankind to find another “home”.

How many people could arrive, say, at the recently discovered planetary system HD 10180, with maybe seven planets, at a mere 127 light-years from Earth?

A space ship travelling at 98% of light speed would take over 130 years to get there, and most basic physics teaches that mass increases with speed, and effect we don’t feel because flying at almost one thousand kilometres per hour on a jet plane is nothing compared to the three hundred thousand kilometres per second velocity at which light travels.

But let’s concede an exception to the impossible, in a loom of the most fertile imagination, and make believe it is possible to find a shortcut through space-time by means of some quantum craze and we manage to reach HD 10180’s planet number three.

We shall certainly take into account Professor Hawking’s warning about the risk of a close encounter with aliens.

But... well, every intelligent being generated from sexual reproduction is likely to cast its personality in the very same way we humans do it: influenced by parents, siblings, and, surely, the circumstances, the external environment.

Indeed, perhaps extraterrestrials should be aware of coming across some terrestrial...

No, Earth’s degeneration is not likely to extinguish almost seven billion humans; most probably some catastrophe will stop the species’ ever growing chaos, reducing substantially the number of these so-called thinking animals.

Darwin’s Species’ Evolution Theory foresees this adapting capacity, yet at the cost of a hard apprentice to humanity.

But acquiring knowledge is actually costly, and wisdom, painful.

Knowledge reveals causes; wisdom obliges weighing consequences. The conclusion is that it remains to mankind as much of the first as it lacks of the latter.

Luiz Leitao is journalist in Brazil

luizmleitao@gmail.com