There has always been a time in the history of this great caravan of humanity when sinister strikes the ignorant and the innocent alike. A time when the reality of today is perplexing and intimidating our very way of life. A myriad of emotions settles in our hearts as the disease plants its foothold globally. The Spanish Flu, the H1N1 outbreak, the Ebola virus and more recently the Nipah virus, all begot qualms in the startled population but none as much as the threat of unknown we face now while attempting to contain the novel Coronavirus or the Covid-19’s excruciating will to be omnipresent. 

Having given up the control of our workplaces, restaurants, and beaches while we attempt to shelve the remainder of our lives in the disinfected cocoons of our homes, it may feel like humanity has consented to the overlordship of the Covid-19 virus. A characterization agreed to be a case of a bad PR disaster by the faltering leadership in many regions of the world while in actuality, it is an effort to create a sanctum for the existence of our posterity.

Social-distancing and adopting cautionary advisory tips issued by WHO and respective health ministries are, in fact, a rebel-move against the virus which has confronted us with not only a major public health crisis but also with an unsettling economic condition. 

This moment calls for resilience, discipline and empathy, a combination of qualities befitting the brave soldiers of humanity – the healthcare workers, the delivery and sanitation personnel, and other stakeholders actively engaged in the containment of the pandemic. The entire world needs to emulate their psyche to “flatten the curve.” A task which is absolutely necessary to ration the burden on our health infrastructure.

The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.

John F. Kennedy

Reflecting on this thought, we must know that in this situation that our actions today shall cast a direct impact on every man’s “Right to Life.”

The Nuclear Security Summit was conferred with its spirit of existence in the year 2010 by the US President – Barack Obama, as a part of his vision & efforts to “secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world in four years.”

One of the substantial corroborative of this summit suggesting its extent of influence is the current safety of the world’s nuclear arsenal despite being subjected to extreme dangers posed by the surging terrorism in strategic areas.

The ensuing dialogue in the Summit indicated the “acknowledgement” of the milestones yet to be undertaken in the area of nuclear deterrence unanimously by the participating nations. At times it seems that such “acknowledgement” made by the countries along with the claims to have succeeded in reducing the world’s nuclear enriched quantum acts as a shadow for those, who amidst developing and maintaining their own “football” & undertaking ambitious “nuclear warhead development” programmes, are sacrificing the outcomes of common goals for the enterprise of regaining the greatness of their own race. The atrocity of which outlies indefinitely the contributions of the former.

Whilst certain nations were staging upfront their agenda to unify under the aegis of “one world” to work towards the persistent threats, a gaping difference embarked the beginning of  diplomacy of perspectives & question of ideology held back Russian Federation & Iran from participating in the Summit. Meanwhile Moscow affirmed its concern with regard to securing nuclear materials and combating nuclear terrorism, Pakistani Prime Minister called off his trip to the Summit following terrorist attacks in the country.

Nuclear deterrence and suggestive disarmament measures are happy ideas to be placed before the worldians to portray unification and peace. Whereas the real thinking lies in the fact that what would an armament deterring world inflect in the pages of history yet to be created? Some countries would enter into secret nuclear development and trade agreements, forming unnatural alliances, all of them misleading one another with regard to their common goal, creating conditions conducive for the mushroom cloud carnage to commence. On the other hand, prima facie knowledge about possession of nuclear weaponry would incite a fear of mass destruction & extinction of identity among any of the rogue nations misguided by their conscience and would dramatically reduce the susceptibility of humanity to war.

To live like a human has many implications. When we live, it is all about the expectations we strive to fulfill, the unrequited love we attempt to gain, the bubble of honour we try to inflate and the way we tread to achieve all of this. But at the end of all this, when the long suppressed soul finds its utterance after freeing itself from the shackles of  Time and sojourns through eternity, it all sums up to 6 feet of earth on the imposterous ground.

On reading the idea of a comet striking our planet Earth or even a remote possibility of it elucidates the “Holy Sh*t!” response from every person. Besides, the writer Ian O’Neill is already well versed with this hype!

As the article narrates the dramatic discovery history of “Planet X” rather as a matter of fact the entire innuendo, I have serious admiration for these astronomers who are striving to track down “evidence for a massive wanting world” in the infinity of Space.

As a matter of fact, the existence of a “Kuiper belt” and a few haphazard objects orbiting around our Sun ‘x’ or ‘y’ light-years away won’t be of any interest to the daily working guys. But the news of them falling apart from their natural course of orbit to distort the life on earth, would send the crowds into a frenzy.

As O’Neill describes the failing hypothesis of  Doomsday which was supposed to take place on Dec. 21, 2012, I cannot stop myself from thinking about what would have happened if it had occurred? (“2012”-Movie playing in my head!! XD) In real terms, I still remember that day of 2012. On the next day, all the news channel anchors felt the trauma of the Christmas holiday time they had wasted, sensitizing the viewers towards this ought-to-be massive occurrence. That too in such a fashion, on the so called “Doomsday,” the anchors prepared themselves mentally to die on the news sets  reporting the mass destruction LIVE for the last attempt to soar TRPs. The desperation was so evident that I believed (being the kind of kid I was) they would close their nostrils and die, to prove the truth of at least a fraction  of what they had said or portrayed.

Anyways, coming back to the profound work of scientific inquiry illustrated by O’Neill in the article, the theory following it has found all its pieces in their right place, suggesting a calculated conjecture perfectly believable to an extent but not explicitly true. I confer to the term “believable” rather than “true” because holding it “true” upfront would amount to losing hope in the perpetuity of human race in the coming millennials.

I completely agree with O’Neill when he remarks this period as one of the most interesting times of planetary discovery of solar system because the existence of this “Planet X” would determine the existence of our future generations on this “blue” planet; and if we succeed in figuring out the presence or absence of such a mass planet, no other inheritance of the future generations could match it.

I believe so because all of us want to leave our footprints in the sands of Time and all the generations until now have acted responsibly by conserving the culture, traditions or any other property (although in varied forms) bequeathed to them by their ancestors. It would be disheartening not only to see the entire humanity vanish but also to witness the consumption of our Earth by the flames of a million times larger carnage.

Be Real. Be Innovative. Go Rein…
Stay tuned for more…

Picture Credit: Discovery News