The Pandemic
And the connection between Science, Technology, and Humanism.
When we talk about pandemics in the context of science, technology, and humanism, everything goes back to geographical explorations that unified the entire world. It led to a worldwide exchange of people, animals, plants, and diseases. While most of the things can be seen as a good consequence, the last one has been hitting us hard, leading to several pandemics that humanity has been through as it is tough to contain a highly contagious disease to a place. From then to now, an infection can travel continents apart within a matter of hours with prowess that we have achieved in our transport technology. And we already have people like Elon Musk talking about interplanetary rocket systems for long-distance travel on Earth, letting you go “anywhere on Earth in under an hour.”
Humanity has been to several pandemics, with some of them erasing a significant chunk of the population. And speaking in terms of probabilities, there are substantial chances of pandemics being the reason to lead the end of humanity as a single gene mutation of a highly contagious virus has the potential to wipe off the entire humanity. And if nature isn’t in a mood for letting such deadly mutation happen, we have made ourselves capable enough to accomplish that. The concept of bioweapons has already been in the news recently, especially in the form of conspiracy theories linking it to the COVID-19 outbreak. It can turn out to be an absolute catastrophe if not monitored closely as already there have been some deliberate attempts to demolish a country or region with such tools during the world war.
A few months ago, if we asked an average person about dangers that humanity face, we would generally come across overpopulation, global warming, nuclear war, terrorism, etc., as the major problems, and the possibility of a pandemic seemed like a distant possibility. It is because we tend to worry about issues whose impact we have perceived already, not the impending ones. In a Ted Talk released in 2015, Bill Gates can be found saying,
If anything kills 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.
And here we are already approaching two million deaths within a year with the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing one of the deadliest pandemics of all time. Despite being on the brink of advancements in science and technology, the entire world is speaking in uncertain terms for its cure. And living in an age of instant gratification, how did we let this happen?
Speaking on the Ebola outbreak in the above-mentioned talk, Bill Gates says,
The problem wasn’t that there was a system that didn’t work well enough; the problem was that we didn’t have any such system at all.
I guess in the post-pandemic world some talk would repeat the same lines while talking about the COVID-19 outbreak. Since we have been aware of the devastating consequences of such an impending threat, it’s our fault that we have not been prepared. Unfortunately, we forget about tragedies very soon if we don’t come across them often. Recent interviews of renowned microbiologists reveal the drying up of research funding post the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak while the immense amount of military funding has been mostly on the rise. So, it is our ignorance as a human community that we are paying for now.
Thus, the current COVID-19 Pandemic should be an eye-opener for the entire human community to realize and ponder about our real concerns and invest our resources to prevent any future global catastrophe.
