MORE THOUGHTS ON THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

 

    

The pandemic has wiped out most of the human race. Survival is not a problem.   Stores and facilities exist with adequate food and supplies, free for the taking, to accommodate the remaining population for a hundred years.

 

IF you are alone, the most dangerous entity on earth is another human.

 

So you look to find and join up with a group of humans who will not rape or kill you, as protection from other groups or individuals that might rape or kill you.

 

Then your group can kill and rape those humans they see as a threat, because that is who we are.

   

And it starts all over again.

HOMO-SAPIENS. 

 

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

 

I recently bought THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT; A book written by various authors that takes place during the aftermath of the world pandemic in Stephen King’s THE STAND.

 After the first couple of short stories, I decided to go back and reread THE STAND before completing THE END OF THE WORLD…

It has been years since I first read THE STAND, and I am so much older.  The story is still graphic, and grabs you from the start, but the under story, the story not written, the story that comes to my mind is how beautiful and natural this world would be without humans. 

In Alaska they kill the wolves to protect the moose so people can kill the moose. 

 

When I arrived in Maine in 1962 the state was not a major tourist attraction.   There was a Maine culture that was unique.   One third of the state was unpopulated – wilderness.   I ran the Allagash River, and for ten days never saw another human being. 

The population of Maine is growing.  Today, Maine is a popular tourist attraction and a cheap and safe place for retirement.   The old ‘Maine culture’ is pretty much gone. 

There are fifteen-hundred miles of snowmobile trails crisscrossing the most remote and once pristine regions of the state. 

 

The days are gone when you would walk silently through the newly fallen snow on wooden snowshoes, hear the chickadees in the trees, see a porcupine eating tree bark, and surprise deer out of its bed.

 

Now people, wearing crash helmets, ride snowmobiles at breakneck speed, screaming through the wilderness trails like Hell’s Angels on a cross-country run, seeing nothing on their way to the next lodge with steaks and a hot tub and a bar.   

The Allagash River now has guides and trips and tourists experiencing the wilderness that is no longer there. 

Earth's human population is increasing exponentially.   Resources are becoming scarce… 

 

Picture a world without humans.  Clean water.  Clean air…

  

the Ol'Buzzard

YOU CAN'T GO BACK TO MAYBERRY.

Stephen King’s book The Stand and even more recently Justin Cronin’s book Passage portray an apocalyptic world resulting from scientific research gone wrong. 

Just as cloning and genetic manipulation brought about the concept of Jurassic Park, a new genetic innovation has up the ante: it is called CRISPR-Cas9.

I looked online for a video that might explain CRISPR in simple, nontechnical language, but even those that claim to be a basic delved too much into DNA/RNA, genetic paring…

So instead I will make an effort to put this into a nontechnical-language explanation.

1.    We can picture DNA strands as a rope ladder.

2.    Two scientist have come up with a molecular robot that can cut the  ladder.   This robot is named CRISPR.  

3.    Diseases like Alzheimer, AIDS, Parkinson, Cancer and even certain heart diseases have an identifiable corrupted DNA signature.

4.    CRISPR can be programed to search and identify these corrupted strings of DNA and basically cut them out of the ladder.  

5.    Cas9 is an attachment to CRISPR and can reconnect the severed ladder ends by replacing the corrupted string with a non-corrupted string.

This is not Science fiction or something that may evolve in the future: it exists at present time and is now being tweaked in genetic experimental laboratories. 

This procedure is relative inexpensive, costing less than $300 before pharmaceuticals and hospitals would add their profit margin.  This procedure could make humans immune to all the diseases that now kill us off – basically extending our lifespan and keeping us health into old age.  Even possibly reversing the aging process

But, the procedure will need testing – human trials to be approved.

Also, like yin and yang, black and white, positive and negative – this procedure has some ethical issues.  

Using this simple procedure, you could easily genetically modify Hume beings.   It would be easy to insure an unborn baby was a male with black hair and green eye; but you could also adjust his adult height, bone density, muscle density, aggression, intelligence quota etc.   In other word you could manufacture a race with individuals designed for certain task. 

You can immediately picture Christians opposing this: humans playing God.   Christians have opposed every scientific achievement since its conception.   

Just as with stem cell research I expect this research will be delayed possibly into the next decade.  But, scientist have a history of continuing their research despite opposition – for the sake of science.  If they feel they can accomplish a scientific breakthrough they tend to forge ahead. 

At the very least, the future could be interesting.

the Ol’Buzzard